I Am a Strange Loop

There are two questions that Parfit does his best to answer. The first one is: When Parfit is teleported to Mars in Episode I, is his Cartesian Ego teleported along with him, or is it destroyed along with his body? The second question, seemingly even more urgent and confusing, is this: When Parfit is teleported to Mars in Episode II, where does his Cartesian Ego go? Could it possibly go to Mars, abandoning him on Earth? In that case, who is it that remains on Earth? Or conversely, does Parfit’s Cartesian Ego simply stay put on Earth? In that case, who, if anyone, is it that debarks from the cubicle on Mars? (Note that we are conflating the word “who” or the phrase “who it is” with the notion of a specific, uniquely identifiable Cartesian Ego.) The temptation to ask such questions (and to believe that these questions have objectively correct answers) is nearly irresistible, but nonetheless, the nearly universal intuitions that give rise to this temptation are what Parfit is out to crush in his book.

To be more specific, Parfit staunchly resists the idea that the concept of “personal identity” makes sense. To be sure, it makes sense in the everyday world that we inhabit — a world without telecloning or fanciful cut-andpaste operations on brains and minds. The fact is, we all more or less take for granted this notion of “Cartesian Ego” in our daily lives; it is built into our common sense, into our languages, and into our cultural backgrounds as profoundly, as tacitly, as seamlessly, and as invisibly as is the notion that time passes or the notion that things that move preserve their identity. But Parfit is concerned with investigating how well this primordial notion of Cartesian Egos stands up under extreme and unprecedented pressures. As a careful thinker, he is doing something analogous to what Einstein did when he imagined himself moving at or near the speed of light — he is pushing the limits of classical notions — and, like Einstein, he finds that classical worldviews do not always work in worlds that are very different from those in which they were born and grew.

Am I on Venus, or Am I on Mars?

In his hundred or so pages of musings on this issue, Parfit analyzes many thought experiments, some dreamt up by himself and some by other contemporary philosophers, and his analysis is always keen and clear. I have no intention to reproduce here those thought experiments or his analyses, but I will summarize what his conclusions are. The essence of his position is that when pushed to its limits, personal identity becomes an indeterminate notion. In extreme circumstances such as Episode II, the question “Which one of them am I?” has no valid answer.

This will be extremely unsatisfying and unsettling to many readers of Parfit’s book, and to many readers of this book, as well. Our intuitions as we grew up on planet Earth have not prepared us for anything in the least like a nondestructive teleportation scenario, and so we clamor for a simple, straightforward answer, yet somehow we also intuit that none will be forthcoming. After all, we could invent Episode III, featuring a destructive teleportation scenario as in Episode I, but with signals simultaneously sent out to receiving stations on Venus and on Mars. In this scenario, shortly after the destruction of the original Parfit body and brain, two brand-new Parfits (both complete with shaving nick) would be assembled more or less simultaneously on the two planets, and now there really doesn’t seem to be any valid claim of primacy for either one above the other (unless you argue that the first one finished should get to claim the honor of the Cartesian Ego, but in that case, we can simply posit that they are assembled in synchrony, thus barring that easy escape route).

To our everyday, downhome, SL #642–style minds, it’s very stark and very simple: one of the Parfits is a fake. We cannot imagine being in two places at once, so we think (identifying ourselves with the intrepid voyager), “Either I’ve got to be the Venus one, or the Mars one, or neither one.” And yet none of these answers is in the least satisfying to our classical intuitions.