X-Message-Number: 3802
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 03:09:36 +1030
From: Nexus User floeber <>
Subject: BRANCHING IDENTITY

BRANCHING IDENTITY                                                        

I have no brain - I do not think - I am  single celled . But I have
spawned a multi-cellular being whom I call "God" (and who calls itself 
"Humanity") to do my thinking for me. God is looking at me now through a
great metal tube. This tube has a sculptured piece of glass in one end -
it is shaped as the ideal amoeboid body, glistening as with an inner
light: God made it!  

Through this silica chip I can see the eye of God. God has one very tiny
eye and God is also very, very distant. Unlike me, God is also mortal:
Mortality is the price of complexity. God suffers from a fatal design flaw
called "ageing" - but She is working on it! 

I have lived a thousand million revolutions of the "Earth" about the "Sun"
- abstract concepts that mean nothing to me. It took me nearly all that
time to develop God. God has a brain that is even more amazing than a
newt"s - and didn't I think that was clever, discovering land; "The Voyage
of the Newt"!   

But I have only recently taught God to see me - my first instrument of
self-study - and to think for me (which as I have stated I am unable to do
for myself). I would have spawned and progammed this INtelligent
Genetically ENgineered Externally Utilisable System earlier, but the only
tools I had to work with were Time and Chance: With INGENEUS I could have
done it instantaneously...[Watch this space for INGENEUS II]...and now you
know why I call this beast "God" for short - what a mouthful! 

Too many mouthfuls - here we go again: I'm about to give birth -
ooowwwhoa....! Its always the same, just when I thought I was going to be
a mother it seems I'm my own daughter. "TWO - DAUGHTER - CELLS!". Did you
hear that? That was the voice of  God! (Such a loud voice for someone so
small and distant, I can never work that one out). But back to my
reproductive dilemma: If I am my own daughter, am I still me? And what
about my/our other daughter - or is she not my sister, my TWIN sister in
fact - I bet she's thinking  EXACTLY what I'm thinking: Yes I KNOW she's
thinking exactly what I'm thinking! She's thinking :-" What is my true
age, and what is HER true age. Are we not identical twins of each other
sharing the memories, experiences and heritage of a mega-millenium  - how
could minutes and hours  divide us: Are we not one?  Who is the copy and
who is  the counterfeit - I know who I am (but is this inner certainty
sufficient to establish identity)? Is memory sufficient as !  a criterion
to establish identity - what happens if two or more individuals  appear on
the scene with the SAME memories? Is physical identification a sufficient
criterion to establish identity? Not here - nor in "INVASION OF THE BODY
SNATCHERS", for that matter . Because in my/our case it would seem that
even if these were BOTH necessary criteria to establish identity they 
would still not be sufficient". 

Obviously, this is not a not a problem for God, not a practical problem,
anyway - God is nothing if not diverse. But it is a problem for we/ me and
so I have programmed God to  solve it. I will, however, try to clarify 
this  problem of amoebic identity by introducing a concept that would only
interest a mortal - time-travel! 

Imagine a human - "'A' human"! ...humanity is cells all  the way from MY
perspective - who travels backwards in time and meets herself at a much
younger age...Are these two individuals the same person? Yes? By what
criteria? How many of the original cells remain in the older individual?
(Have I and my sister not retained perfect bodily identity - the original
cell that we were  we replicated, the original  remains, but now two cells
instead of one). The two humans are genetically identical - but so are
human twins  developing from a single fertilized ovum, and so am I/we! The
two humans share some memories - their memories overlap, but even where
they overlap the memories of one are much fresher and more recent, and
infinitely more personally relevant: These two humans may have very
different values and opinions - but you say they are the same person?!
Then there is no doubt that I and my sister are THE SAME "person". But how
could you expect  amoebas to agree that these two!   different - such
different - individuals are the same person: one is perhaps twice the size
of the other, or more, and is physically different in other ways too, 
with different motivations and capabilities... Humans apply double
standards - one set of rules for themselves and another for amoebas!  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *    



The problem seems to stem from a change in the number of individuals. In
both cases the "individual" has multiplied, while fulfilling other
criteria that might be applied to establish identity. What criteria for
establishing identity can be applied equally to humans and amoebae? An 
amoeba resolves these paradoxes by using the concept of "branching
identity"...this concept accounts for the multiplication of an individual
where  memories are shared, but where futures and fates diverge. The
time-line of two individuals sharing branching-identity can be depicted as
a "Y", which illustrates their common "ancestry", as well as their
individual separateness.  

But how does this apply to the time-travelling human? The elder and the
younger share a common time-line ...but do they, can they, diverge? Is
this simply a paradox caused by the concept of time-travel - or does it
raise wider questions of identity? I think the paradoxes involved stem
mainly from the relationship between "identity" and "change" which appear
to be in conflict but are inextricably interwoven in such terms as
"personal history" and "personal development". Two separate paradoxes
emerge:- (1)  the problem of how one individual can become two and yet the
two can share the same time-line, and.... (2)  the problem of how one
individual can be so different in respect of virtually all of the personal
characteristics  that we use to recognise a person at different times of
their life. 

The first problem would seem to contradict the universal applicability of
branching-identity since two individuals have emerged from one, but if we
were to follow the time-line of the younger of the two it would eventually
duplicate that of the elder, so avoiding any divergence. But from whose
perspective could it be said that there were not two people, but only one
individual,  present in this situation? 

The second problem appears to affect both memory and body as criteria for
establishing identity. For example, if I were to wake up tomorrow
believing myself to be four years old, having the memories I had then, and
behaving as I did then - would it be "me"? What  DO we mean, then, when we
use the term personal identity - and what would count as "preservation" of
identity, or  as personal survival? 



submitted by Frances Loeber. 

PS Ihope this will be formatted o.k. at your end. My sysop says that the
problem is that different mail editors behave differently - yours treats a
sentence as a continuous line of text... up to 2048 characters long in my
case. All I can do is to make frequent use of the "enter" key. The above
text is uploaded from a text file that I wrote using fairly short lines.
My sysop said that you should receive it that way - if not, then there is
nothing I can do about this problem. How much of a pain is it to
abbreviate my long lines with your text  editor? 

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