From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 20:44:16 MDT
gts wrote:
> > [In fact, I think something stronger:
> > we *must* do this, because there can be no answer to the identity
> > question, as it is malformed.]
>
> I don't see it as malformed. What is needed here is, I think, a
> generalized answer to the question "Who are you?"
The answer to that question is to reply with the most important, relevant
and unique properties that hold about you.
> When asked this question, people will typically respond first with name,
> serial number, occupation, social security number, driver's license
> number, etc. Pressed for a more detailed answer, they will begin to say
> such things as "I am a supporter of the xyz political party," "I am a
> member of the xyz religious faith," "I am a lover of rock and roll," "I
> am someone who opposes/supports abortion rights," "I am a quiet person
> who likes to read," "I am a tall fat person," etc, etc, etc. The person
> will be listing the attributes of his body and personality that together
> make him a person distinct from other persons. It is to those attributes
> that he refers when he refers to himself as "I" or "me." *Those* things
> are who he *is*.
Sure, but I take a different moral from this than you do.
Allow me to make a similar point. Suppose I indicate a barn in which
you'll find only a horse. How many objects are there in the barn? Well,
there's a horse. But a horse's head is also an object, and so is any
other part of the horse. But there's no adequate way to count how many
"parts" a horse has in any formally rigorous way. And that's not even
considering the air! So instead, we count the number of things which have
relevant properties that happen to interest us; when they agree in terms
of those properties, we count them as one thing. Thus you may be
permitted to say that there is only one thing in the barn, so long as we
share a context in which that makes sense. You might still say that even
if the horse had a saddle on its back, in some contexts.
You might think of this as an alternate version of Leibniz' Identity of
Indiscernables law, which is often dragged out in conversations about
xoxes. The "law" is: x = y iff for any property P, if P is relevant and
P(x), then P(y). [I believe Geach holds a similar view: that counting is
always done in terms of a property (which here may be the conjunction of a
variety of relevant properties). You don't count the number of "things"
or "objects"; rather, you can count the number of horses, or the number of
limbs, or the number of displaced partitions, or whatever.]
Of course, immediately we notice that "relevance" is vague and
context-sensitive. Couldn't we get more technical? Yes, we can, if we
formalize which properties are relevant to us.
But I think that's impossible in the case of xoxes. Some of us think that
the fact that the xoxes are in different locations is enough to show that
they're different people, but some people *just don't find that relevant*.
I say that they're counting in two entirely different terms; they're both
right, modulo their interests and situation.
[Before any of the Objective Truth folks get uppity, I do concede that we
can get very technical indeed most of the time, but I think you also have
to concede that we let "objective truths" fly about willy nilly which are
vague at best, if not wrong from a technical perspective. Another example
from the philosophy of counting. How many hands have you got? Assuming
you haven't lost any, the answer is two, right? Well, consider your right
hand minus one molecule on the right hand side. If you removed that
molecule, you'd still have a hand, right? But it wouldn't be the same as
the hand you have now... So you've got three thingies which count as
hands: left hand, right hand, and right hand minus a molecule. Of course,
obviously you have many many more thingies than 3 which might count as
hands; at least as many as there are skin molecules, plus a number of
plausible combinations of molecular subtractions. We can get very
technical as to what kinds of thingies we're interested in, but most of
the time, we're vague. "I've got two hands" we each say, and that's one
of the most objective truths there can be! And I agree, that is
objectively true, but it wouldn't be true in another language in which
more thingies counted as "hands". Objective truth is "out there," but our
sentences about them are always in a language; the truth values of our
sentences don't generally survive redefinitions and other language
switches.]
> So then to determine if a dupe is equal to his original, we need only
> compare the list of attributes. Given that our personality changes
> through time in response to events in our lives, and given that the life
> experiences of duplicates differ from their original's, it seems quite
> obvious to me that the dupe's personal attributes will be different from
> the original's personal attributes, even if only slightly. Thus we can
> answer the question of identity in the negative. A dupe is not the
> original. The original and the dupe begin to diverge immediately after
> the moment of duplication.
Ah, but the question is whether they diverge in a relevant way. Again,
how many overlapping people are you when I could start plucking off
trivial molecular combinations and get a different thingy? You don't
generally concede to the idea of identity persistence through time, but
most of us find such points along a time line and even drastic long-term
revisions in personality (within a "normal" scope) to be insufficient to
count two people. We don't sweat the small stuff.
> Lee's argument for the equivalency of dupes (which leads him to make
> nonsensical statements such as "A person can be in two places at the
> same time") fails to account for changes in personality. He focuses only
> on the duplication of memories, forgetting that personalities change
> through time.
Eh. Personalities do change, but a millisecond after duplication, I
hardly think that the personalities are different in any interesting way.
Maybe it's interesting to you, but you seem to find a lot of odd things
interesting for counting; for example, you find even trivial differences
over time to be important enough to count as two things. I don't, and
neither does most anyone else. But some do, especially when they're
trying to be "technical."
Why all this talk of relevance and identity, when I've already sworn off
the problem by bracketing it? Because, in my view, the only properties I
care about here are those properties which are practically/morally
relevant. As I've attempted to show, whether you call xoxes the same
person or not *isn't morally relevant*. You'll make much the same choices
regardless.
> I think brother-brother might be the best analogy for our relationship
> to our xoxes when both us and they are alive. They are not us, but it
> would be natural to feel fond of them and morally obligated to them in
> the same way that siblings usually feel toward one another.
I think that the relationship is much stronger than the relationship
shared by identical twins, but also that the relationship grows weaker
over time. A few years after xoxing, yes, I think your analogy to twins
would hold. But *immediately* afterwards? Not really relevant to me.
In fact, I could probably go a month or, if need be, even a year before
I'd treat one of my xoxes as "merely" an identical twin.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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