Where What I Am Ends

October 18, 2003
 

            When I was a child, about five or six years old, I found myself sitting in church one day, and rather than planning out the adventures my Star Wars toys would be having later that day, I began to wonder.  How do I know I am really me?  What if someone stole the real Peter and replaced him with an artificial stand-in who was brought up to believe that he was Peter?  Who would I be, and who would the person I replaced be?  In short, am I really me?  The short answer is, of course, yes.  I must be me.  I and Me are reflexive pronouns that both refer to, well, me.  The more difficult question, however, is this:  Who is this me character?

John Locke

            John Locke argues that personal identity is nothing more than memory.  Locke’s argument breaks down like this:  A person at time t2 is the same person as the person at time t1 if and only if his memory is genuine and continuous between t1 and t2.  In other words, I am the same person I was twenty minutes ago, if and only if my memories from twenty minutes ago are genuine, and the twenty-minute span of time is filled with a continuous stream of memories.  Locke’s argument also has other qualifiers to adjust for cases of forgotten information, amnesia, and the like.  The basis of his argument (i.e. genuine continuous memory equals personal identity) still stands.

Bernard Williams: The Self and the Future

            Williams describes a case in which two similar people (who I will call Mary and Alice) take part in an experiment in which they enter a machine that exchanges their memories, so that Mary’s body will come out with Alice’s memories, and Alice’s body will have Mary’s memories.  Before the memories are exchanged, both subjects are informed that after the process, one of them will receive $100,000, and the other will be tortured.  Naturally, Mary will want the person with Alice’s body to receive the money, and Alice will want the person in Mary’s body to receive it.  After the experiment, Mary/Alice (i.e. the person who has what was once Mary’s memories and Alice’s body) is tortured, and Alice/Mary (Alice’s memories and Mary’s body) gets paid.  Mary/Alice would rightly say that the outcome was not what she had desired, and Alice/Mary would say that it was. 

            Locke would most likely claim that the people are the same people in different bodies.  The real Alice would be the person with Alice’s memories, and Mary would be the person with Mary’s memories.  He would argue that both Mary and Alice have had a continuous stream of genuine memories, and only the bodies around them have changed.  If identity is defined by memory, each identity would remain constant, because the memories stayed consistent.

John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality

            Perry’s book tells of a dialogue between to men (Sam Miller and Dave Cohen) and their dying friend (Gretchen Weirob).  Gretchen was in an accident and, due to severe internal injuries, was expected to die at any moment.  She asks Sam and Dave to convince her of some sort of afterlife to comfort her.  Dave mentions a recent news story in which a woman, Julia North, is run over by a streetcar.  Mary Frances Beaudine, an onlooker, is shocked by the events that took place, and her brain just shuts down.  Julia’s body is mangled, but her brain is fine.  The doctors place Julia’s brain inside Mary Frances’s body, and, according to almost everyone, the resultant person is Julia.  The only people who disagree with the view that Julia has lived on are Mr. Beaudine and Gretchen.  Mr. Beaudine disagrees with the view, presumably because he wants to be with the person he recognizes as his wife.  Gretchen disagrees because the person in Mary Frances’s body has artificial memories. 

Alex Proyas: Dark City

            Alex Proyas’s film Dark City tells the story of a group of aliens, called Strangers, who, in an attempt to find the human soul, create new artificial memories for everyone in the city.  Every night, the Strangers would go through the city and give different people new memories, new pasts, new homes, spouses, children, jobs, and so on.  They would manufacture trinkets, diaries, stuffed animals, love letters, and such to trigger the subjects’ memories.  The people in the city were all convinced that the lives they were living were their own. 

            The main character, John Murdoch, had awoken during the imprint process, and only a few of the new memories had taken effect.  He had to find out who he was, without actually knowing that the identity he was searching for was artificially created.  Throughout the film, Murdoch learns of the past he never really had, the wife he never really married (who, subsequently, never really cheated on him), and the murders he never really committed.  The Strangers designed this set of memories for him to see if a person with the memories of a killer would kill again.  Ultimately, the goal was to see if he would murder his own wife.  Naturally the plan never played out, good triumphed over evil, and love conquered all.

            Proyas’s story differs from Williams’s and Perry’s in a significant way.  With Williams and Perry, the subjects’ memories are switched between bodies.  Proyas’s subjects are given completely artificial memories that were mixed like paint in a Petri dish.  None of the memories implanted into the people in Dark City ever actually happened.  John Murdoch, for example, has fractured memories of his youth at Shell Beach, where his parents died in a fire.  While everyone he spoke to knew about Shell Beach, none of them could give him directions to get there, because it simply did not exist.  Nevertheless, it was an aspect of the entire city’s collective memory. 

            It is clear what Locke would say about the subjects in Proyas’s film – the people were not who they thought they were, because of the fact that their memories were not genuine.  John Murdoch’s identity was based solely on the memories he acquired after the experiment.

Matt and Ghaada

            The stories of artificially implanted memories by Williams, Perry, and Proyas contain a fundamental flaw.  We are led to believe that the subjects in all the stories have similar attributes.  Williams even goes so far as to say that Mary and Alice are in most ways similar.  With Mary Frances and Julia, we can assume the same, to an extent.  They are both grown women, and they are likely from the same region.  The only implied difference between the two is that Mary Frances was married before the accident.  The similarity qualifier is where the argument breaks down.  If the argument is to be logically sound, the subjects’ identities need not be similar.

            Suppose, for example, that Dexter the Evil Scientist wants to perform a body transplant, only, instead of choosing similar subjects, he selects a heterosexual, working-class, white man from Newark (Matt), who is in his 50s and suffers from post-traumatic stress after having lost a leg in Vietnam.  The other subject is a heterosexual 16 year old Saudi daughter of an oil baron (Ghaada) who, until recently, suffered under the Taliban regime.  With the exception of being human, Matt and Ghaada have nothing in common.

            After the transfer takes place, the person with Ghaada’s brain goes to Saudi Arabia, and the person with Matt’s brain goes to Newark.  When the person with Matt’s brain arrives home, no one recognizes him, not even himself.  He is able to walk again, and he is much more energetic.  His new female body changes things for him, drastically.  He finds himself being constantly harassed by men, and, being attracted to women, he must accept the fact that he is now gay.  Furthermore, with a Saudi body, he will experience a lifetime of harassment for being a minority. 

            When the person with Ghaada’s brain returns to Saudi Arabia, she will also experience a life of difficulty.  She will go unrecognized by family and friends.  She will be unable to walk like she used to, and she will have no recollection of how she lost her leg.  She will be shunned for being American and gay, even though she was originally neither.    

            Suppose, on the other hand, that the person with Ghaada’s body goes to Saudi Arabia, and the person with Matt’s body goes to Newark.  The person with Ghaada’s body will first be accepted, be looked upon with respect because of her upper-class family.  She will enjoy her family’s wealth until her friends and family realize that she has changed.  She will be shunned, socially, for becoming so Americanized, and she may be disowned by her family for her sexual preference.  She will no longer be willing to participate in Muslim rituals and traditions.  She will also have to acclimatize herself to Saudi living conditions.

            The person in Matt’s body, on the other hand, will be in an entirely different world from what he was accustomed to.  He will have to learn his job over again, meet new people, and find the means to continue practicing his Muslim faith (if he chooses to do so).  He will have to learn to live on his own and on a tight budget to match his low income.  He will also have to learn to cope with living in New Jersey.

            After the experiment, it is clear that Matt and Ghaada have drastically changed.  But do they still have their identities?  If Locke is correct in his assertion that identity is only genuine continuous memory, then they retain their identities.  Their memories were attained through genuine means, and they went uninterrupted.  The only thing to change was the vessels in which the memories resided.

Race and Gender

            In claiming that identity is memory, Locke dismisses some very important aspects of personal identity – race and gender.  A person’s race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage are a large portion of his of her identity, as anyone who was involved in the civil rights movement in the sixties will say.  Millions of people have suffered and died based on their racial or cultural identities, and many of them died in their fight for equality.  Even today, a person’s race or cultural heritage is a defining aspect for that person.  Director/producer Steven Spielberg, for example, is an icon for Hebrew culture, and he has made important films that never would have been made, were it not for the fact that he is a minority, films like Schindler’s List and The Color Purple.

            A person’s gender also plays a large role in personal identity.  Children are raised to fit into gender roles from the moment they are born.  The first thing the doctor says to the new mother is whether the child is a boy or a girl.  It may seem odd and even a little disconcerting that a large portion of a person’s identity, as well as that person’s entire social future can be determined simply on the presence or absence of such a small physical feature, but it is true.  Men and women are raised differently, and they act differently.  Boys are raised to be competitive and physical, with their G.I. Joe toys and Tonka trucks, while girls are taught to be pretty homemakers with their Barbie dolls and E-Z Bake ovens.  As a result, men are supposed to be powerful, dominant, and well-equipped to run the company, nation, or world.  Women, on the other hand, are expected to be submissive, weak-willed, and concerned with pleasing men. 

            Race and gender are both physical and social.  A person’s physical make-up defines how the person is treated by society.  As a result, the physical body becomes ingrained into the person’s identity so deeply that the person would not be the same if the body were somehow changed.  Locke might counter this argument saying that upbringing and social status both qualify as memories, and this is true, but the basis for them is completely physical.  This is evident in the case of Matt and Ghaada.  Both were defined in part by their physical make-up.  Without the physicality, these identity traits could not exist. 

If my previous interpretation of Locke is wrong (i.e. that memory is identity, despite the physical bodies in which they reside), then Matt and Ghaada no longer exist, per se, and the people who were the result of the experiment are entirely new people altogether.  The reason they would no longer exist is because their memories are no longer genuine.  They may have been genuinely made, but once they were moved between bodies, they became artificial.  The same principal applies to the previous stories by Williams, Perry, and Proyas.  The people who existed before the experiments ceased to exist afterwards, and the resultant people from the experiments were entirely new people.

What Locke does not account for in his theory is the significance of the artificial memories and the impact they have on people’s lives.  In Dark City, John Murdoch’s wife Emma is wracked with guilt after sleeping with another man.  The issue is that Emma only came into existence the day the film began, and she, therefore, never actually married or cheated on John, and all the memories of those events came out of a Petri dish.  Nevertheless, the guilt remained.  As far as Emma was concerned, the events really took place, and she was a product of them. 

While memories may be artificial, the significance of the roles they play in a person’s life is not.  If identity is based solely on memory, then these memories cannot be discounted.

Bibliography

Perry, John. A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Indianapolis. Hackett Publishing, 1978

 Proyas, Alex (Producer/Director/Writer).  Dark City.  New Line Cinema, 1998

 Williams, Bernard, The Self and the Future, Reprinted from The Philosophical Review, vol. 79, no. 2 (April, 1970)