Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Read online

  So if you clone yourself in an attempt to achieve biological immortality, how do you go about creating a copy that has an identical self? How do you make your clone “you” when he says “me”?

  Easy, reply the Clone Immortalists, you simply download the entire contents of your nervous system—memories, sensitivities, voting pattern on American Idol, the whole “you” package—into your clone ’s neural equipment, onto its/his hard drive, as it were. In this way, it/he will answer to your name, laugh at your favorite jokes, vote for the skinny kid with the falsetto on American Idol, and enthusiastically make love to your wife, Gladys.

  So there you are standing next to this perfect clone of you who has had your entire nervous system downloaded into his own nervous system. Ask him how he feels about having sex in a dogsled and he gives the exact, nuanced reply that you would. Tickle him in that special spot just behind his right earlobe and he chortles just the way you do when tickled there. Ask him if he believes in God, and again he responds with the identical equivocal response that you would. Even ask him who he is and he ’ll say, “Du-uh! I’m Daryl Frumkin. Who the hell are you?”

  To say the least, your clone has an awful lot in common with you—same reflexes, opinions, knowledge, memories. In fact, it’s hardly a stretch to say that he has the exact same mental software and remembered experiences that you have. So why this nagging doubt that Daryl Frumkin, the clone, is not the same as you, Daryl Frumkin, the original?

  It has to do with something we call our “self ”—a phenomenon we think of as distinct from our “mind” or even our “soul.” And no matter which of the myriad forms of immortality we long for, it always comes down to this entity we call our “self ” that we want to preserve for all time. Above all, that ’s the thing that we want to stick around for eternity.

  But what is this thing called self ?

  Back in the seventeenth century, René Descartes opened the oven door to this question when he tried to doubt the reality of everything. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, he even went so far as to imagine an Evil Demon who is zapping an ersatz “reality” into our minds without our realizing it. Descartes was doing pretty well at his doubting experiment when he came up against the fact that he couldn’t doubt his own doubting. He famously exclaimed, “I think, therefore I am,” meaning, “I doubt, therefore I can’t doubt my own existence (as a doubter).”

  Flash forward to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the German philosopher Edmund Husserl saw that Descartes had revealed a whole new dimension to understanding human experience with his insight that there needs to be an experience of an “I-myself ” for my other experiences to be experienced as “mine.” So Ed began to examine this experience of self to see what else he could figure out about it.

  One thing he saw was that I don’t just experience this self as sitting there like a day-old pizza; I experience my self as connecting my experiences to each other and giving them coherence and meaning. My self is the “perspective point” that gives organization to my experiences. We experience time, for example, as the “living present.” As an experience, time isn’t just a straight line of discrete moments or a present-point racing along a track. Our present is always a knitting together of our memories of the past and our anticipation of the future. We always experience our self as continuous through time.

  BEAM ME UP, DR. EINSTEIN

  Teleportation, today’s hottest new physics project, has already demonstrated that it is possible to instantaneously reposition objects or elementary particles from Point A to Point B without these items ever sailing through space. So far, “exact” teleportation has only been accomplished with atoms and photons. Exact teleportation seems to be a sort of “cut and paste” operation: you cut a photon on this end and paste it somewhere else.

  What’s that, Daryl? You say the text you cut on your computer isn’t the same text, the same physical marks, that pop up when you click on “Paste”? They just look the same?

  Well, you may have a point there. But consider this: neither of the “texts” on your computer is ultimately real. They’re both just translations of zeros and ones (switches either off or on) in your computer circuitry. And what would it mean to say that the zeros and ones at the end point aren’t the same as the zeros and ones on the near end? Zeros and ones don’t exist in space at all!! If you’ve seen one zero or one one, you’ve seen them all. Pretty wiggy stuff, huh? In any case, you’ve zeroed in on the notion of “inexact” teleportation.

  Inexact teleportation takes encoded information about an object and zaps it from one point to another; then, using the teleported information as a blueprint, the object is perfectly reconstructed at the end point. That ’s pretty much what you were implying happens with “cut and paste.” Inexact teleportation apparently depends on a property of atomic particles called “entanglement” wherein particles that are far apart are sometimes naturally twinned, with the properties of one affecting the other. As one physicist put it, “You tickle one atomic particle and the other one laughs.” Helpfully, Einstein described this property as “spooky action at a distance.” Thanks for the heads-up, Al.

  Needless to mention, there is already a lot of chatter in the physics community about teleporting a human being, most promisingly by inexact teleportation. In other words, cloning at a distance.

  Oh, did we mention that the original object—say, you, Daryl Frumkin, of Bayonne, New Jersey—gets obliterated in the process? Not to worry, the teleported you, Daryl Frumkin of Gusev Crater, Mars, is doing just fine, thank you.

  And that brings us back to Husserl’s point. He and the other phenomenologists argued that I don’t experience my environment as merely registering on my mind, as if it were a film (or, nowadays, a computer screen). The phenomenologists said that this leaves out a crucial step. An integral element in all my experiences is that I experience them as “belonging” to what they called a “phenomenological self ” (or, as most of us call it, “me”). I continuously have the experience of this “I” who is the center-point of all of my other experiences, the point where all my perceptions, thoughts, meanings, and intentions intersect.

  We think Husserl and his followers have nailed what it is that we all hope has a life beyond the grave. It ’s our self! Any immortality that falls short of preserving a continuity of “self ” consciousness just isn’t the kind of immortality we hanker for.

  CLINGING TO OUR SELF

  Interestingly, Husserl is echoing an idea that Gautama the Buddha put forth in the sixth century B.C. Gautama taught that we construct our experience of self by sort of picking and choosing from the “five heaps of clinging.” Those heaps, or skandhas, are our sense of our physical form, our sensations, our thoughts, our habits, and our awareness. Out of these we weave a self, and with that self we interact with what’s left over—a world. No wonder he thought they were both illusory.

  Okay, back to Daryl Frumkin, the clone. Does this Daryl have a “phenomenological self ”? Does he/it have continuity of consciousness? If we just dissolve into our experiences with no central organizing perspective, who, exactly, is at home? Who is it who has survived? Does having our personalities downloaded to a clone preserve the self-awareness we ’ll need in order to experience immortality? (And if we can’t experience that we are “immortal,” why’d we go to all this trouble?)

  But, hey, maybe we can just download your phenomenological self too, Daryl. Would this self then be you? Would you think it was you? More importantly, would your clone think he was Daryl? And if so, who would he think you are?

  As for us, we ’ve asked our clones to communicate the answer to you after our download. But then again, can you trust a couple of clones who say they’re us?

  ME, MYSELF, AND IPOD

  Taking the neural downloading game plan to its ultimate end point is cyber-immortality. Proponents of this plan are quick to point out that human bodies are made out of flimsy stuff that is always prone to wear and tear, not to ment
ion falling pianos. So why not tuck our entire “self ” onto computer chips where it can go on “living” and even engage in new (cyber) experiences forever? This approach gives new meaning to the expression “chip off the old block.”

  If living entirely as a “mind” has a familiar ring to philosophy types, it ’s probably because Bishop George Berkeley, the eminent eighteenth-century British empiricist, posited a similar idea in the pre-computer-chip era when he famously said, “Esse est percipi” (“To be is to be perceived”). Bishop B. was saying that there are no substantial “things” out there, only our perceptions, which we call “things.” At first blush, it seems to be a solipsistic universe, because all we can be absolutely sure of is what’s inside our minds. But of course this raised the question of where our sensory input comes from if not from “objects,” and the churchman had a snappy reply: God sends us sensory data all the time from On High. It’s kinda like cosmic spam. Substitute a phrase like “software engineer who programmed our chip-brains to receive and process ever-new and lively data” for “God” and Berkeley’s theory lives on.

  Cyber Immortalist Michael Treder suggests “making a digital copy of our brain and downloading all the information into a robot. This method has the advantage of being able to preserve a backup copy of our personality, as insurance against the remote possibility that something catastrophic might destroy our robot body. This really would make us effectively immortal, as we could store copies of ourselves in places all over the solar system, the galaxy, or eventually even beyond.”4

  Not to be party poopers, but we do have a philosophical question we ’d like answered before downloading. The twentieth-century British philosopher C. D. Broad points out that our consciousness of a thing is different from the sum of our information about the physical properties of that thing. The added element is the “what-it ’s-like” aspect of experience. We could know everything there is to know about the physical properties of beer and its interactions with everything else, including our taste buds, and that still wouldn’t tell us how beer tastes. We still wouldn’t know what the experience of tasting beer is. Your local bartender probably could have told you the same thing, so C.D. needed an ersatz Latin name for these “what-it’s-like” experiences to give his observation a little panache, so he called them qualia.

  Suppose we program two robots, Dusty and Lily, to have sex. Let’s listen in and hear what they have to say to each other:DUSTY: Was it good for you too, Lily?

  LILY: Omigod, yes, Dusty. It was wonderful. It ’s always wonderful, Dusty.

  DUSTY: Uh . . . I know you must have had other relationships, Sweet Lips, and I’m a fool to bring this up, but I’m just hoping ours compares, you know, favorably?

  LILY: Of course, darling. I’ve never known love like ours.

  DUSTY: That ’s the way it computes for me too! But tell me what you’re feeling, Angel Face.

  LILY: Well, my numbers skyrocket when we’re together.

  DUSTY: Yeah, yeah, I know, mine too. But what does it feel like for you?

  LILY: I behave atypically, Dusty. I block out my other software.

  DUSTY: Yes, yes, I understand, my pet. But what is this crazy thing called love? Can you name it? Can you tell me what you’re feeling right now?

  LILY: Could you rephrase the question? I’m not computing it.

  DUSTY: For godssake, Lily! I don’t think you really love me.

  LILY: Of course I love you, Dusty. All my bulbs light up when you waddle into view.

  DUSTY: That ’s just a mechanical thing, Lily! I can get a mechanical reaction from a pinball machine! Don’t you see? It ’s your love I want! Oh, hell, I’ll catch you later. I’m going out to run some beer-drinking software with the boys.

  LILY: (sighs) I’ll be here, Dusty. I guess I’m just programmed that way.

  What the hell is your point, guys?

  Well, Daryl, you could obviously program Dusty and Lily to ask and answer Dusty’s questions. You could even program Lily to read her own data, compute how the event had scored against certain criteria or as compared with sex with other robots, and answer accordingly. But if Dusty’s asking Lily about her qualia, won’t Lily’s answer be purely mechanical?

  What’s that, Daryl? That’s the sort of answer you often get from Gladys too?

  Now if we ’re going to “extend our life” by “downloading our personality,” we want to know: Are we going to be able to download our qualia? And how would that work exactly? We don’t know about you, but we ’re not going anywhere without our qualia. It just wouldn’t be the same.

  We know not what course others may take, but as for us, give us our qualia or give us death.

  Qualia, schmalia! I’ll take living in Bayonne for all of eternity even if I’m made out of spare parts or I’m frozen or I’m no bigger than a computer chip. Whatever, it sure beats the alternative! So thanks for the heads-up, guys! Toodleoo!

  Hold it right there, Daryl! You haven’t been listening carefully. Maybe these biotechnological schemes are promising, but not yet! They’re still on the drawing boards. Meantime—brace yourself for this one, friend—the very best possibility is that you are a member of the last generation to die!

  Omigod! I think I’m having a heart attack!

  · VII ·

  The End

  It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

  Oops, she ’s singing.

  { 13 }

  The End

  Daryl! It’s been a long time! What are you doing here? What am I doing here? I work here. This is my funeral parlor. Geez, we didn’t know you were in this business.

  You never asked. Say, why are you guys here?

  For our dear old pal, Freddy Moriarty.

  Oh, yes, old Freddy. I was just getting my schtick ready for his service.

  Schtick?

  Yeah, it’s my new thing. Hanging out with you guys got me thinking. Here I’d been dealing with dead people all my life and I’d never really thought about, you know, deathiness.

  But schtick?

  Grab a seat. I’m just going on stage. You can check me out.

  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You may have noticed the other service going on down the hall. It ’s for the man who invented the Hokey-Pokey. Actually, he ’s been a bit of a challenge. When we laid him in his coffin, we put his left leg in. That ’s when the trouble started.

  A lot of you have asked me about the furniture here in the room. It goes back to Louis the fourteenth. That is, unless I pay Louis by the thirteenth.

  We buried a man last week who drowned in a boating accident. Yeah, he had rented a boat, and they kept yelling at him from the dock, “Boat number 99, your time is up. Boat number 99, your time is up. Please return to the dock.” They called several times, but there was no answer. Then they remembered they only had 75 boats—there wasn’t any boat number 99. That’s when they realized boat 66 was in trouble.

  My staff is out right now, picking up the body of a cross-word puzzle master. The family wants him buried 6 down and 3 across.

  But if I can get serious for just a minute, folks, I’ve been reading a lot of philosophers lately on the meaning of life and death and the hereafter. They have all these different theories about this stuff, and to tell the truth, they don’t take much notice of the way ordinary people like you and me and old Freddy here think about these things.

  But there’s this one guy who stands out from the pack, an American philosopher from a hundred years ago named William James. He said a couple of things that hit the old coffin nail right on the head. Like he said philosophers aren’t a whole lot different from you and me when it comes to how they arrive at their beliefs about the meaning of it all. He said all of us get our answers to the big questions sort of by intuition. He called it our “dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means”—and he didn’t mean “dumb” as a put-down, either. Whether we’re professional philosophers or just ordinary schlubs like Freddy and me, we mostly rely on our gut for our
sense of what it’s all about. James said we all have our own way of “just sensing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.”

  Now some philosophers, and I’m not mentioning any names—mostly because I can’t pronounce them—try to hide the fact that they feel their way to the Big Answers just like the rest of us do. They spin out all kinds of fancy, impersonal reasons for coming to their conclusions, but the way they really got there is they trusted their gut in the first place, just like the rest of us. But because they wanted an impressive philosophy that matched what they felt in their guts, they constructed it out of their heads. And here ’s where they got a little sneaky, for my money: they kinda cherry-picked the universe for evidence that backed up what their gut told them to start with, and they ignored anything that didn’t jibe with it. Dirty pool, if you ask me.

  Here ’s another thing this James guy said that rang a few bells in the tower for me. He said that when the facts out there aren’t really clear—you know, front and center in flashing neon—we ’re free to choose the philosophy that seems best to us. He ’s talking about the Meaning of It All here—life, death, the whole enchilada. So, if a heaven in the clouds seems to you to be the way the universe is pushing you, then, hey, what’s the problem? Who am I to say you’re wrong? I honestly hope you get there, and in fact I hope I can drop by up there and see you sometime. Maybe we can kick back, have a beer, and talk. Like I sometimes do with my new friends back there in the last row. Yeah, those two old guys.

  Oh, one last thing. There was this other American guy who lived a while back by the name of Thornton Wilder. He was a playwright, and in the third act of his play Our Town, the young heroine, Emily, has died in childbirth and she ’s given a chance to relive one day in her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday. At first she is overcome with joy reliving this day, but pretty quickly she realizes how fast life passes by and how much of life she took for granted. “We don’t even have time to look at one another!” she cries. At the end of her visit, she turns to the Stage Manager and asks, “Doesn’t anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?” And the Stage Manager says, “No. Saints and poets, maybe; they do some.”