Identity

Identity is a difficult problem.  I want to address it first from the perspective of personal identity.  I found a few videos really helpful for representing how we can try to define and use identity, and the philosophical and ethical problems that can arise from poor definitions.  I recommend you watch these before reading my responses and resolution: Kurzgesagt’s video and CGP Grey’s video. Kurzgesagt begins his video with a very biological definition of identity, which equates your self with your body—the collection of matter that you comprise.  But this immediately leads to messy situations, as he explains: “if you donate an organ, billions of your cells will continue to live on inside someone else.  Does this mean that a part of you became a part of another person?  Or, is this other body keeping a part of you alive?” (Kurzgesagt).  Obviously, situations like this would be difficult to dissect.  Yet situations like this constantly arise—we’re constantly exchanging cells with the outside world.  As Kurzgesagt himself admits, “almost all of your cells have to die during your lifetime.”  If you identify as the pile of matter in your body—that’ll lead to problems in a few hours.  But even if you identify as the cells in your body, your cells will die and be replaced in a matter of years, well before most people would say you had died.  This leads us to the classic example of the Ship of Theseus, which CGP Grey brings up.  Most people seem to be comfortable identifying as a constantly changing set of materials, so long as the overall self remains relatively unchanged.  This fact invalidates any purely matter or cell based definition of the self—some other thing remains to keep you being you.

With this in mind, we need to find a definition of identity that describes something about yourself other than the physical stuff which makes you up.  This makes sense—you don’t verify someone’s identity by taking a blood sample.  Something else differentiates our selves from others.  While it is tempting to think that this question can be resolved with some simple essence of yourself (like the idea of a true name in Eragon), this is not a very helpful tact.  As philosopher Kwame Appiah explains here, “Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer, father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it isn’t going to be that.”  This is important to understand.  Even though the word “English” is used to describe both populations, it has taken on a different meaning with each.  No fundamental core lies in the center of every identity, waiting to be discovered.  People, like England, change over time.  And their identity should reflect these changes, not be constrained to the fundamental truths about them that don’t change, as tempting of an idea as that might be.  Try as you might, boiling your self down to some central core will give you a husk of a person, not the spitting image of you.  We need some way to define identity that’s both malleable and useful; essentialism gives us neither.

However, we need to make sure that such a non-material, non-essentialist definition is still possible—that there’s some real way in which you are really you.  CGP Grey raises notable concerns about this in his video.  He tries to keep his assumptions about identity pretty general: “Who is you? That’s a helluva big question but let’s try to be good scientists about it.  We don’t assume there’s a magic part of you that can’t be measured.  After all, if it can’t be measured, that means, by definition, that it can’t affect anything.  So, Occam’s razor it away and we take you as you seem to be: a collection of atoms arranged to think they’re you.” (CGP)  Note that while his definition includes atoms, he is focused on their arrangement, not the specific atoms that are in you right now.  This ‘arrangement’ definition is kept functionally vague throughout the video, to allow for different opinions about identity.  However, through various thought experiments with transporters, Grey becomes convinced that no such definition can be sufficient.  Even though there is (by definition) no difference between the atomic composition of pre- and post-transport you, he asserts that there must be a difference.  To make this obvious, he imagines a perfect transporter that duplicates you at the desired position but fails to destroy your original body.  “Step into a working transporter with a broken disassembler and death is revealed.  Pre-transport and post-transport you can disagree on who is you.” (CGP)  To him, the fact that you disagree on which of you is really you means that you are separate beings, and therefore the destruction of your pre-transport body in any fully functional transporter would constitute death.  Since there is nothing measurably different between the two bodies, but they continue to act differently, and even disagree about their identity, there obviously has to be something more to selves, something deeper than even your material self.  Since this contradiction arose after Occam’s razoring away the idea of a non-physical consciousness, it leads Grey to rethink this assumption entirely: “there is something unmeasurably different.  The transporter forces confrontation with the possibility that there’s something about being a conscious creature that isn’t measurable from the outside.”  There is something appealing about such a conclusion; it leads us back to the idea of a soul which so instinctively arose when humans began to think about their selves.  However, this directly contradicts not only my own definition of consciousness  (this isn’t non-physical in the non-functionalist sense, but entirely unphysical—not theoretically measurable or detectable in any way), it also leads us down a road of paradoxes.  Why should I care about your identity if there is no measurable way it can affect me?  By my own definition, that means your identity isn’t real.  Since this is an even larger contradiction—one which implies that no one has an identity—I choose to interpret this example in a slightly different way.

Clearly, the two yous are going to act differently.  This means that consciousness is not just a magic thing tied to a certain arrangement of atoms anywhere in the universe, but a unique product of those atoms.  But we still need to resolve the problem of identity—both yous claim to be the real you.  Since we have asserted that both beings are physically identical at the moment of teleportation, we must cede that (given the failure of the earlier attempt to the contrary) both beings are in fact the real you in that moment.  After that moment, both selves diverge, becoming more and more physically distinct the longer they yell at each other about which one deserves to live.  But wait—how could both of them be you?  Well, because Grey’s transporter is a really powerful tool.  By his construction of it, the Star Trek universe has access to the ability to create a fully conscious, functional being, anywhere they want, at the press of a button.  So yeah, this power leads us into strange dilemmas.  Given this power, is death an especially meaningful concept, given that a developed, conscious life can be created at a whim?  I would assume that it becomes much less important; the constant destruction of bodies no more meaningful than the slow exchange of matter through your own cells over a much longer time.  Thus the idea that the Star Trek universe is racking up billions of deaths is not a concern because it is able to perfectly recreate these lives in an instant.  Additionally, if the pre-transport self is destroyed as it is copied (and not allowed to live out a short, separate life), death seems to be a questionable word: you never don’t exist, so how would you have died?  The fact that this is such a weird scenario is a function of the power of this machine, not the failure of physical meaning.

However, these implications about identity become a lot more real when other breaks in consciousness are considered.  If this separate version of you can be you while having a distinct consciousness, then should we understand other situations in the same way?  As Grey explains, “while transporters aren’t real, breaks in consciousness are.  If you go for surgery, when they put you under, you can’t be sure if it’s you that woke up.  For that matter, your bed might be a suicide machine.  Every night’s slip into unconsciousness the warm embrace of the reaper.  And every morning the first and only day of a new creature’s conscious life.  It’s impossible to know.”  As I said before, death here seems to be a questionable word, given that there’s no dead you anywhere.  But the meaning is plain: does every night of sleep work the same way as the teleporter, ending existence for one consciousness and beginning another one anew in the morning?  There doesn’t seem to be an easy line of distinction—if identity can be shared without a shared consciousness (as in the case of the broken transporter), then how would one ever guarantee that the consciousness that’s you in the morning is the same one that went to sleep?  Would we even expect it to be?  We wake up feeling different each morning, with new memories and emotions from the day before.  Why would we expect our consciousness to stay the same if we change?  But this line of thought gets slippery fast.  As Kurzgesagt asserts, “the image of ourselves as a static thing is untenable,” because “we know that you’re made up of trillions of little things, made from more little things, that are constantly changing.  Together, all those little things are not static, but dynamic; their composition and condition is changing constantly.  So we might just be a self-sustaining pattern without clear borders that gained self-awareness at some point, and now has the ability to think about itself through time and space, but only really exists in this exact very moment.”  Why only now? Because the exact set of thoughts, feelings, and memories that make up your identity right now will only be exactly like this for an instant.  As soon as you read the next word, your brain changes as it remembers it, your thoughts change as you wonder which word would be able to change who you are as a person—but all of them would.  Functionally, you are a different person halfway through a conversation than you were at the beginning or will be at the end.  You are physically different, and will act and think differently in response to different stimuli (a stimuli like someone asking you to summarize what you’ve read or heard so far).  These changes are happening in every moment.  This implies that you are constantly feeling the “warm embrace of the reaper,” as Grey likes to say, and then beginning anew in the next moment.  This way of understanding our identities I call Constant Death Theory, or CDT.  It implies that the true you only exists in this moment, that you will be a new creature with a new identity in the next.  CDT allows us to confidently answer many questions we would have been troubled by before.  Do you die when you enter a transporter?  Yes, in the same way you do at every moment (provided that the copy of your body is made at the same moment your old body is destroyed).  Do you die when you go to sleep?  Yes, but you shouldn’t care any more than you normally do, provided you know you’ll wake up (this doesn’t apply in extreme situations).  What would it feel like to be uploaded to a computer simulation of consciousness?  Provided they got it perfectly right, it could feel just like Grey’s teleporter, which should feel just like existence does at all times—a conscious experience that’s only ever consistent for a single moment before your identity changes again.  CDT finally gives us a consistent framework by which to understand these problems.
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However, CDT has its own blind spots.  When I brought up the idea, my philosophy professor remarked, “nobody really believes that.”  At the time, I thought I did, but I came to realize that she was right.  I don’t treat other people as completely variable, unpredictable entities.  Nor do I see myself in this way.  Though people can change moods and learn new things, I treat them as the same fundamental person minute to minute and day to day.  Thus, I feel that there’s some underlying identity to them, in their personality, that doesn’t die every second they’re awake.  These concerns led me to a new definition of identity, which I call Integrated Identity Theory, or IIT:Your identity is your current self and anything you share with other selves.I call this Integrated Identity Theory because it implies that you are both yourself in this moment and a continuous sum, or integral, of your previous selves.  This definition allows us to roughly maintain the answers CDT provided, without having to swallow the idea that everyone is dying all the time.  It also has some nice implications of its own, but we’ll get to those later.  First, let’s explore how it functions.  What is “your current self”?  The same self that kept dying under CDT: the conscious, aware being that thinks it’s you and has all your memories and thoughts and plans and dreams and feelings.  This is how IIT allows us to keep roughly the same answers to the problems CDT solved.  A transported you would still be you, and then change over time to be less you.  When your pre- and post-transport selves fight, both of you share nearly all of your experiences, except for the last few very strange moments, so both of you have a large claim (significantly larger than anyone else in the room) to being the self that was in the transporter.  This works how we would intuitively think.  When you sleep, tomorrow-you shares nearly all of itself with tonight-you, so you’re nearly entirely the same person, though only the current you is ever entirely you.  If your consciousness were uploaded to a computer, you’d share a lot with that self, though your physical and virtual selves would obviously diverge over time, much like the broken transporter.  This largely captures the intent behind Kurzgesagt’s statement that “we might just be a self-sustaining pattern without clear borders that gained self-awareness at some point… but only really exists in this exact very moment,” while allowing us to (theoretically) quantify exactly how much you exist in this moment compared to the last.

As I hinted at before, IIT doesn’t just provide a CDT that aligns more with our intuitions, it leads to its own non-trivial conclusions.  How much do you share with yourself at 5 years old?  Very little?  IIT would then imply that you don’t identify with that self very much, not as all as much as you just a few days ago (assuming you’re not 5 now…).   You truly can become a changed person over your lifetime—that’s not just a phrase.  People therefore cannot simply be the self in the body that they seem to keep over their lifetime.  Say you went through an extremely traumatic experience with someone, something that rattled you to your core and changed how you fundamentally understand life.  You might possibly identify more with that other person now than your own self before the experience, according to IIT.  And as Rick and Morty has pointed out rather dramatically (in 304), a blacked out version of you should really be treated as a separate self, since you don’t share their feelings or memories.  But these distinctions carry more than semantic weight.  If you share essentially nothing with 3 year old you, you shouldn’t be held responsible for your actions as a 3 year old, as they are a distinct individual from you.  On the other hand, you should be held responsible for your actions last night, since you share much more with that self, even if you were blacked out.  These differences make sense, causally: you should only want to punish those you have a reasonable expectation of needing to improve.  A shared inclination to violence means you share something, and thus partially are, the self that was violent before.  If you share nothing with that previous self (and thus are no longer that self), that inclination to violence is no longer there to be punished.  IIT leads us to a conception of people similar to but more quantified than our instinctual one.  It provides a dynamic yet sturdy conception of self, which answers our previous questions and provides new direction for understanding yourself and others.

And it doesn’t just work for people.  Larger entities frequently struggle even more to define and maintain their own identities.  Think countries, companies, and clubs.  These groups frequently turn over leaders, workers, ideas, and aspirations, yet seek to maintain an identity through it all.  IIT allows for identity without a single “golden nugget” defining a group’s identity (we’re the country that stands for freedom, etc.).  These groups are what they are today, and whatever of that that is shared with previous iterations of themselves.  So if a country does have a common motivation underlying all their people and laws, that would certainly be part of its identity.  But if it’s grown tenfold in size and population, has no common leaders or people with those present at its inception, and works in a world almost unrecognizable to the one it was created in, it might be time to ask if it should have the exact same governmental structure as it did at the outset.  Such is the power of IIT; it allows you to reason through seemingly meaningless questions like “is my country the same country as before” and arrive at real answers, both for people and groups of them.
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I am writing this post for a very specific purpose.  I want to use IIT to allow me to talk meaningfully about the implications of oughtlessness.  I argued before that you owe nothing to the universe.  There is nothing you ought to do.  Now I have clarified exactly what I mean by you.  I intend to use this clarity to fill the void potentially created by oughtlessness, to explain where I draw my motivation from, and to explain why I think others should work this way too (and no, it’s not just because they ought to).  I hope you can see the power that a definition like IIT provides, even if you don’t know where I’m heading with it.  Oughtlessness for individuals defined by IIT will be the foundation on which I build my arguments in future posts.  I honestly believe these ideas can change why and how our world works, and I hope to light the way.