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By Root 1826 0

I have to return to SL #641’s theme in the dialogue, which is that the “I” notion is, fundamentally and in the end, a hallucination. Let’s let Episode III, my teleportation scenario with fresh copies on Venus and Mars and no copy left on Earth, apply to me instead of to Parfit. In that case, each of the new brains — the one on Mars and the one on Venus — is convinced that it is me. It feels just like it always felt to be me. The same old urge to say, “I am here and not there” zooms up in both brains as automatically as when someone taps my knee and my leg jerks upwards. But knee-jerk reflex or not, the truth of the matter is that there is no thing called “I” — no hard marble, no precious yolk protected by a Cartesian eggshell — there are just tendencies and inclinations and habits, including verbal ones. In the end, we have to believe both Douglas Hofstadters as they say, “This one here is me,” at least to the extent that we believe the Douglas Hofstadter who is right now sitting in his study typing these words and saying to you in print, “This one here is me.” Saying this and insisting on its truth is just a tendency, an inclination, a habit — in fact, a knee-jerk reflex — and it is no more than that, even though it seems to be a great deal more than that.

Ultimately, the “I” is a hallucination, and yet, paradoxically, it is the most precious thing we own. As Dan Dennett points out in Consciousness Explained, an “I” is a little like a bill of paper money — it feels as if it is worth a great deal, but ultimately, it is just a social convention, a kind of illusion that we all tacitly agree on without ever having been asked, and which, despite being illusory, supports our entire economy. And yet the bill is just a piece of paper with no intrinsic worth at all.

Trains Who Roll

In Chapters 15 through 18, I argued that each of us is spread out and that, despite our usual intuitions, each of us is housed at least partially in different brains that may be scattered far and wide across this planet. This viewpoint amounts to the idea that one can be in two places at once, despite our initial knee-jerk rejection of such a crazy-sounding thought. If being in two or more places at once seems to make no sense, think about reversing the roles of space and time. That is, consider that you have no trouble imagining that you will exist tomorrow and also the next day. Which one of those future people will really be you? How can two different you’s exist, both claiming your name? “Ah,” you reply, “but I will shortly be getting there, like a train pulling through different stations.” But that just begs the question. Why is it the same train, if in the meantime it has dropped some passengers off and picked others up, perhaps changed a car or two, maybe even its locomotive? It is simply called “Train 641”, and that’s why it is “the same train”. It’s a linguistic convention, and a very good one, too. It is a very natural convention in the classical world in which we exist.

If Train 641, heading east from Milano, always were to split up in Verona into two pieces, one that headed north to Bolzano and one that continued eastwards to Venice, then we would probably not call either half “Train 641” any longer, but would give them separate numbers. But we could also call them “Train 641a” and “Train 641b”, or even just leave them both as “Train 641”. It might happen, after all, that upon reaching Bolzano, the northern half always veers suddenly eastwards, and likewise that upon reaching Venice, the eastern half always veers suddenly northwards, and the two halves always rejoin and fuse together in Belluno, on their way — or rather, on its way — to Udine!

You may object that trains have no inner perspective on the matter — that “641” is just a third-person label rather than a first-person point of view. All I can say is, this is a very tempting viewpoint, but it is to be resisted. Trains who roll and trains that roll are the same thing, at least if they have sufficiently rich representational systems that allow them to wrap around and self-represent.