Arram Sabeti

In college I had an anthropology professor who was politically very liberal. When he talked about the belief systems he'd studied - the Amish, Native Americans, African cultures - he spoke with respect and admiration.

But when it came to the politically conservative school administration, whose decisions were based on Christian beliefs, he became Voltaire - they were absurd, stupid, and damaging. He raised hell for them. 

 

Anachronistic beliefs are charming until the people holding them have power over you.

Edit: I wrote this essay a few years ago and never published it. I must have rewritten it over a dozen times.

"I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe." - Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be a Verb (1970)

What do you mean when you say "I"?

 

What you see in the mirror hasn't been there long, at least not as long as you have. Your cells are new every 10 years. By 25 you've swapped out your mass at least twice. If your matter is in constant exodus, that means that all that's left to be you is information transmitted through matter the way a ripple flows through a pond. You can think of a ripple as a simple signal; it has a definite form but isn't bound to any specific matter either.

 

When you think about it, this applies to everything. We don't care about matter; we care about form. You don't pay $400 for the 17¢ worth of plastic and assorted metals and minerals in an iPhone; you pay for the form that's been written onto it. Mass is fungible; one atom is as good as another.

 

There are bizarre consequences if you admit to being information. Immaterial souls are actually a great philosophic convenience. They avoid a lot of tangled questions by making the essence of a person immutable.

 

For example, imagine we have a Star Trek style transporter and William T. Riker. Say we transport Riker by reading this information, beaming up his matter, and recomposing it a short distance away. Have we done anything wrong? Most would say no. Since his memories were carried, Riker just experienced being in one place, then another. You can experience the same thing by blinking in a moving car.

 

Now suppose we read his information, leave his matter, and create him a short distance away with other matter. Now we inconveniently have two Rikers, so we shoot Riker number one in the head. Have we done anything wrong? Most would say yes, because other than having a copy nearby, it's no different than any other murder.[1]

 

But we've established that matter is irrelevant, so the second situation is the same as the first. In both the first instance of Riker is ended.

 

If your reaction is to vow never to use a transporter, pull out a childhood photo and realize that the body you had then is scattered across the world now. Like that ripple, you're taking in new mass and leaving old mass behind. It's no different from what happens to Riker, it just takes longer.

 

Even if you embrace a certain pattern as 'you', there's another problem - the pattern isn't stable. You're not the same as you were even 5 minutes ago. Reading this essay has changed the physical structure of your brain. In the time it takes to enshrine a pattern as your identity, you've already changed.

 

Some say our memories are what make us us, but basic physics dictate that our memory has finite capacity. New memories supplant the old and the strongest are those recalled and refreshed frequently. Given a thousand years to live, you could conceivably forget everything you now know. Personal history is a revolving door.[2]

 

Ignoring practical limits of biology and lifespan, (as we're likely to do in the next few hundred years) there's no limit to how much you can change.[3] This is a little shocking, because if we've established that you're no specific mass, and no specific information, then we've reasoned ourselves out of existence.[3]

 

Buddhism has a principle called Sunyata, usually translated as 'emptiness' or 'void', which teaches that all things lack absolute identity and are interdependent. What first seems mystical turns out to be extended common sense. Your edges are somewhat imaginary. There are no solid lines distinguishing you from the rest of the universe, and in the wide span of time, the matter and information composing you will weave in and out of everyone and everything else. Or, as a Zen master once wrote to a dying student:

 

Notes 
[1] If you said no for the sake of consistency, imagine we let him live a few days, go to a concert, eat a nice meal, then shot him in the head. You could argue that this further experience distinguished him from the copy we'd made, but then it becomes a matter of degree. Do those memories really matter? If the difference of a day is too much to safely terminate him, is a minute? A second?

[2] Even if you believe in an immaterial soul, remember that your memories and personality are known to be the result of biological processes. The above still applies to these parts you probably think of as you.

[3] Not to say information is as irrelevant as matter, rather that neither are stable definitions. Information is identity so far as anything discrete exists.

 
Square brackets made possible by a generous grant from Paul Graham.

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