Sunday 28 March 2010

Caprica

Caprica is set in the Battlestar Galactica milieu but set several decades before that story. It is set in a world of a mixed aesthetic of the 1930s prohibition US and some time very near in our future. Men wear hats and conservative clothing, smoking, standing by apple carts. There is sexual liberation, casual interplanetary prejudice, and a multisensory, immersive online world where anything goes.

The story revolves around a group of families from different backgrounds connected by the tragedy of a single terrorist act. This act is in the service of a religious group called the Soldiers of the One True God. One family's daughter is a member of this group; she dies in the first episode. Her father is the original designer of the Cylons.

************************************

Caprica breaks away from the typical science fiction model of these shows in the first few episodes by playing with a very common premise: The Super-Girl. There is one of those in it, certainly, but here she does not look like a girl; she has the mind of one. In most shows, the Super-Girl looks like an ordinary girl but she is actually a super-hero/robot/and so on. It is important that, no matter what she is, she looks normal. Here, she doesn't look normal. She looks like a great big clunking machine. She, Zoe, is downloaded into the body of a Cylon . Although, there is a bit of a cheat on this - the immersive virtual world (if I remember the world's name I'll set it in) allows her to appear as a girl.

***************************************

One of the ideas in this series is that Zoe, in being downloaded from the immersive virtual world into her Cylon body, leaves the immersive virtual world. She cannot simply be copied into the Cylon body. She is not like a file. You cannot simply copy her and make two of her.

In the last four years, I've been a tutor at the university where I did my doctorate. There, we ran courses in the philosophy of mind and the introduction to theoretical philosophy. Some of the thought experiments run were like the following two:

(i) In the future, you can teleport to very distant planets by doing the following: You step in a machine which scans information about all the atoms in your body, with all the relative locations, parts, etc. It then sends this information to a receiver in a far away planet, where the machine over there assemblies an exact physical duplicate of the original body as you stepped in. The person who steps out is physically identical to you, down to the arrangements of the most basic atoms.  Meanwhile, the body in the original machine is broken down into raw materials for assembling bodies from incoming signals.

Would you get in the machine?

(ii) From surgical evidence, it seems as if a person can lose a hemisphere of their brain (have a hemispherectomy) and still retain their personality, memories etc.(for, e.g., epilepsy). Let's accept that we can survive as ourselves with just one hemisphere, and it doesn't matter which one.

Now say also the following, slightly more science-fiction scenario occurs. An evil scientist knocks you ought, then clones your body.  They then swap one hemisphere of your brain in your original body with one hemisphere of your cloned body. The scientist then wakes both of you up. 

Who is the real you? Is the other a real person?

If they have the same personality, memory, etc. as you, and look the same, and actually have one of the original hemispheres from your body, are they just as right to think of themselves as you?

Let us say this happens: the scientist clones your original body, replaces one hemisphere of that clone's brain with one of your hemispheres, then destroys the rest of your body. The scientist then wakes....you up in your new body (because it is your hemisphere in there, and this has all of your personality in there)? ...Wakes your clone up (and has murdered you)? Which?

Change the thought experiment to this happening: the scientist is not evil at all but good. You barely survive a plane crash, which  happens at the base of her secret mountain fortress. She finds your smashed, ruined body in the debris, and that you have barely any brain activity; only one hemisphere is intact, but it is very intact. So what she does is clone your body in her laboratory, and then put the surviving hemisphere into the clone. A few days pass, the brain-body connections seems fine, so she wakes....is it, you? up.

If you get different answers for whether or not the hemisphere-in-clone is you, why do you think that is? Am I subtly leading you to those conclusions, perhaps? If so, is there are a more neutral way of describing these?


*************************************************8

These thought experiments are not identical to all the original courses' details. I pick out the details that suggest the following: You can physically copy  a person so that they are indistinguishable from the original copy - including: moles, cuts, broken noses, stomach ulcers, haircuts, environmentally worn neural pathways, etc. If you do this you get a psychologically, consciously, personally identical being to the original. This is true even if you keep the original.

Is this right? 

**********************************

So, is an exact copying of someone possible? Is it incoherent to say that it happens? Is it incoherent to say that it cannot happen? How could we know?

No person has never been exactly copied;  we don't have any evidence if it is right or not. 

What we have is whatever our assumptions about the world give us.

***********************************

Caprica suggests* a different response: whether they are merely  physical or not, persons are unique; they can only be maintained in one physical place;. This may mean one of two things, one of which I consider better than the other:

(i) A physical copy can be made, but a conscious or mental copy cannot. 
 Making a copy results in something that acts, looks and reacts just like a conscious, mental person, but this thing is not a person. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that the original keeps the consciousness or the mind. The physical duplicate or the clone-with-its-original-hemisphere might have the consciousness or the mind, and the original lose it. The point is that the behaviour of the non-conscious or non-mental thing is just like it has consciousness or a mind, but it doesn't, because only one of them has a  mind.

This option exploits one or both of two philosophical issues, the problem of other minds and the possibility of philosophical zombies. I'll put these aside for now (but will return to it later).

(ii) A physical copy can't be made and the original survive.
No matter what we do, no matter how exactly our technologies  should, in  principle, physically duplicate the original, either:
a. The original remains intact, acting like it is the same conscious/thinking, etc. person but a copy can never be constructed of the original person.
b. The duplicate is a proper person but the original fails in some crucial respect, so that it fails to behave like a conscious, thinking, person.

In comparison to (i), (ii) is rarely considered.  Yet, so far as it stands, in terms of contemporary evidence, (ii) is as possible as (i). And what someone claiming (ii)  is also doing is making a falsifiable statement about the world. It's just it comes from how we think about minds, not how we think of the physical world.

Both alternatives are possible at the moment. Until we actually succeed in making a copy of someone while keeping the 'someone' as well, we cannot discount either. If we do succeed, then we throw aside (ii), leaving just (i), and then face the puzzle of who is the real you.

But at the moment, it is all just a problem for the characters in Star Trek, just like evil is a problem for the characters in Christianity.

*******************************
-------------------------------------------------
*Although it only suggests it. Arguably, Cylon-Zoe is a software copy of original Zoe. Although, they also seem to be different - and they are not as clearly distinguished as how I put it here (which is interesting too).

No comments:

Post a Comment