[This is the first post in an irregular series of reviews and discussions of fiction and non-fiction books relating to bioethics or concepts in the field.] 

Robert J. Sawyer is a hugely creative sci-fi author (Hugo, Nebula multi-nominee and winner, slews of other awards) with a fascination for issues touching on human personhood and human nature. He has a widely-read series that posits a parallel universe in which H. neanderthalensis evolved to become the dominant species, with a distinctly different human nature from that of H. sapiens, and a number of similar books in which human nature and the science/religion conflict are examined from a perspective slightly removed – by the license granted to science fiction – from our own. His most recent book is Mindscan, an examination of the possibility of cognition “uploads” – the copying of memory and thought from the human mind into a permanently-rebuildable (hence immortal) synthetic substrate. The fact that the copying process does not destroy the original – that it creates two cognitively-identical minds housed one in its original organic body and the other in an indefinitely long-lived synthetic one, which then vie for recognition as the “real” person – gives the plot its tension.

Sawyer recognizes the most significant problem with this scenario: it does not grant immortality to the entity actually choosing to undergo the copying process. Most sci-fi stories involving mind copies seem to forget this entirely. (The Sixth Day seemed to grasp it dimly, but awkwardly. Others blithely assume that “you” are the new you, and the old you is . . . no longer a factor. Not so.) Sawyer’s main (organic) character, in this story, wants to undergo copying to evade an unavoidably fatal congenital neurovascular defect, and hence extend his life; he enters the MRI-like copying machine, endures some blinkenlichten, and . . . emerges exactly as he was before, and just as doomed. For some reason, the fool seems to have believed his – organic – consciousness would be transferred to the synthetic body, even though it was explained it would be copied instead (and that there is an elaborate quasi-legal process by which legal personhood is transferred to the new body, and the old bodies are whisked off to mandatory lifelong retirement in a senior-citizens’ colony on the far side of the moon). He remarks in disappointment that he had hoped to wake up “somewhere else”, and had expected it would be “a fifty-fifty shot” whether he was the new person or the old one. He only realizes at that moment that his consciousness, as an artefact of his brain, stays with his brain; the new body gets its own consciousness, resident in its synthetic brain, which picks up with the exact memories and thoughts the old one had had and then branches off on its own path, but the old one just remains what it was. Oops.

This raises the salient question why anyone would want to undergo such a process: you’re not buying anything extra for “you”, you’re just creating a new person who happens to share all your memories up to that instant (and presumably your personality traits as well), but then becomes its own entity and lives its own life. A good deal for that new person, of course, but why would “you” care? Simply kick-starting new lives so they can go off and experience the joys of being you is all well and good, but “you” get nothing out of it. Sawyer implicitly answers this by way of the fact that most of his characters are intellectuals who have something to contribute to the world in their synthetic form – a civil-rights lawyer, a novelist – and who appear to be copying themselves to give the world the benefit of “their” continued existence. That’s a bit arrogant, but it makes sense. For the person who wants continued benefits for themselves, copying offers nothing. As a potential (though not in the foreseeable future) “body enhancement” technology, copying is thus much less desirable in general than simple organic life extension, or life extension of the original organism via cybernetics.

By introducing the persistence of the original mind, Sawyer shifts the frame of discussion from the most obvious benefit of copying – immortality – to its less obvious corollary: the personhood of the copy vis a’ vis the original. The main conflict in the story arises as the synthetic clones assert their humanity against hostile organics: the synthetic male character is challenged by his organic original for status as the “real” person, and the synthetic female character (who has taken over the property of the wealthy original, per the transfer of legal personhood) is challenged by her son, who attempts to probate his mother’s will after the organic original dies.

The story then becomes an impressively detailed and carefully wrought debate over the meaning of personhood and personal identity. Sawyer is versed in the philosophical literature on these concepts, and conducts the discussion as a reasonably well-informed survey of the traditional positions. His limitations as a writer become painfully obvious, here. In general, Sawyer’s books, like most “genre” fiction, are “plot-driven” – they depend on setting up interesting scenarios and working them through, rather than particularly subtle depictions of human character. His dialogue is rather stagey, and clunkily presented. In Mindscan, his probing of the conflicting schools of thought on personhood takes the place of set speeches put in the mouths of characters representing traditional fields: he sets up a court scene in which various expert witnesses – a neurologist, a philosopher, a religious believer – plump for different positions using straightforward recitations of the standard scholarly arguments. There’s a whiff of Cliff’s Notes about it. Even so, Sawyer manages to drag sci-fi into the realm of the “novel of ideas”; if it is a reluctant introduction, we can acknowledge that Sawyer is not the first to make it, and, in his defense, his awkwardness in the job in some ways recalls Tolstoy, who had the same penchant for long speeches by cardboard characters. Sawyer breaks down a bit trying to extend that discussion into his hypothetical scenario (in particular, the crucial parallel he draws between fetal personhood and copied-mind personhood makes little sense, I think), but he tries gamely and produces some interesting theoretical twists. At any rate, he throws it out there, and puts the conflicts he uncovers into realistic-enough scenarios that you can see how these issues would play out in real lives. It’s a creditable job of illustrating the complexities of major technological shifts impacting the traditional parameters defining human nature; I kept thinking, as I read along, “But what about . . . ?!”, only to find he introduced exactly that concept as the plot unfolded. The book does a fine job presenting some aspects of philosophy of mind and personhood, as well as dramatizing their implications. (He also sets the book in a near future – 2045 – in which US President Pat Buchanan has overseen the complete criminalization of abortion and the finalization of the right-wing backlash in American society. Liberals flee to Canada, but global warming drives the US closer to the northern border, leaving even less breathing room for normal society. If you don’t care about mirror-mind robots, the book will scare the pants off of you with that alone.) It’s worth a read.

So much for Sawyer. I’m interested in some of the actual issues he touches on, however.

One of the sticking points of the book is the identity of the individual who has undergone the copying process. Even granting that the new synthetic copy is identical to the old mind at the moment of its creation, that isn’t sufficient to declare it the same person - a problem made only more acute by the persistence of the original mind. The issue obviously touches on the definition of personhood (hinging on mental performance, or corporeal existence), but everyone recognizes that personhood is only an enabling factor in personal identity. Obviously – and especially so given the continual renewal and replacement of our bodily tissues – personal identity depends upon some sort of persistence argument, the continued and unbroken link, Ship of Theseus-style, of momentary identities of almost-indistinguishable entities that form a life history. And, heretofore, every person who experienced persistence of personal identity also experienced persistence of bodily identity – the mind is the brain, so the mind persists only because the brain persists. We do see brains without minds, and there we – the rational we, that is – have no difficulty discerning that the brain persists but the person has terminated its existence; thus, these examples do not challenge the correlation of mind with brain, other than to make it clear the implication of that correlation is one-sided – if there is a mind, there will be a brain, but not vice versa. We thus conclude – perfectly reasonably – that personal identity is a function of the persistence of mind (or, persistence of a functionally adequate organization of the brain, to put it in non-mental-realist terms), not of body. But Sawyer gives us a satisfyingly confounding hypothetical. If persistence of mind is the key, and body is essentially irrelevant, and if two copies of the mind can exist at the same moment, how do we decide which is “the real one”. It is natural to think of the mind in the original body as the “original mind”, and hence the “real one”, and the other merely its backup, like a tape made from a music-studio master reel. But we just got done saying that the body doesn’t matter. We would agree that that mind, copied in a sole and single version into a computer or other device, was “the real one” even if its organic body was destroyed – why isn’t the synthetically-based copy of the mind in the robot body “the real one” if the organic original is not destroyed? Why is possessing that irrelevant carbon-based housing enough to make that individual “the real person”, compared to the one in the synthetic body, if we don’t think that organic housing is vital to being “the real person” under other circumstances? Alternatively, how can we call the copy “the real person” – even if the body does not matter, and the minds are essentially identical, surely the mind in the synthetic body is further removed from the original than is the mind occupying exactly the same material substrate without disjunction?

Sawyer does not satisfactorily resolve these issues, though he elucidates some of the conflict. Part of the problem is his continued discussion of the two entities as “copy” and “original” – a framework none of the characters challenges. (He gives himself an easy out by setting up the conflict over personhood between a “live” robot and a dead organic, not between organic and synthetic copies of the same individual. Thus it is clear from the outset that there is only one person present; the only question is who it is, not which one of them is “it”.) In fact, I think this perspective is flawed. The “copy” individual is not like the duplicate made from an original master tape; it is (in Sawyer’s technological milieu, at least) more like a digital copy of a piece of software: indistinguishable in its information content. There is not then an “original” and a “copy” – there are just two distinct copies of the same content, which instantly begin to diverge as they accumulate different experiences from that point forward. And the question of body is utterly irrelevant. It is true that the synthetic copy has memories that were accumulated within an organic body that it never inhabited – but the same is largely true of the organic copy within that body. We grant identity – we say the body is “the same body” – over time to organic bodies on the basis of the Ship of Theseus model, but it is not literally true that the material of the body at any moment is the same as that at all previous moments. (For one thing, bodies grow, adding material that was not previously incorporated; for another, living bodies replace their substance continuously, and at some point are composed virtually entirely of new matter that was not part of the same body at some earlier point.) So the mind in the organic body inhabits the “original” body only in respect of the last few years of that body’s life – both minds otherwise bear the same (non-)relation to the “original” body in every sense but that of Ship of Theseus continuity. It seems obvious, then, that at the moment of copying we merely have two distinct individuals who happen to share some mental history. This is no different from the case of identical twins, who prior to the splitting of the embryo would have to be regarded as one entity, and afterwards as two different entities derived from a common stalk. (Note: I did not say “person”.) I see no reason, in principle, to think we cannot have such a splitting mentally as well as physically (making allowances for the hypothetical nature of Sawyer’s example). That would suggest that neither daughter entity was “the original” or “the real one” – that both are new entities each with an equal claim to being a continuation of the prior, and thus, presumably, neither one of them actually identical with that prior.

This leads to the other sticky point: the transfer of legal personhood from the “original” to one chosen daughter entity (the synthetic copy). Sawyer accomplishes this with a simple declaration that the synthetic copy is to be accepted as the survivor personality – he acknowledges that this has no known legal basis, and that fact becomes the central point in the legal case that occupies much of the second half of the book. If we were actually to accomplish mind transfers – with or without persistence of the original copy – this issue would have to be addressed. I have argued above that persistence of personal identity does not depend upon persistence of body; I would think that a mind transferred into a computer, or a robot body, should be recognized as the same person as its original manifestation, and have the same rights – and own the same property, and occupy the same legal status - as the original. But I have also argued that two minds, one copied from the original in the same way as previously but with persistence of the original as well, should be regarded as distinct entities, neither of which is the original. This elucidates a significant conflict arising from my earlier argument. By that argument, neither the organic body nor the synthetic body houses the “real” original person, and neither is that original person – they are each distinct persons set off at the moment of the copying into brand new, sui nominus (if that’s at all a reasonable term) personal identities. But this means that in each case it is the existence of the other copy that determines whether the individual is or is not the original person. A normal person who is not copied is obviously the original person. A normal person who is copied becomes someone else, because of the copy? A copy whose original is destroyed is the original – in though, memory, and personality, and therefore in all relevant respects – and should be recognized as such. A copy whose original is not destroyed becomes someone else, because of the original? These are very difficult contradictions – yet they seem unavoidable on the seemingly-obvious fact that a copied mind, by itself, bears no relevant disjunction from the original mind. The problem becomes worse when you consider that, even if copy-with-persistence technology became available (a’ la Sawyer), there is no reason why a copy has to be accompanied by persistence of the original (the original might happen to die immediately after the copy was made, or you could build some sort of death ray into the copying machine); some copies would then have original “twins”, and thus no clear personal identity, while some would have no twins and would assume the identity of their originals, a rather reclkless contingency which does tremendous violence to the notion of attempting to find the “real” person at all. Deciding who should inherit the legal identity of the original is thus much more problematic than finding a legal mechanism for doing so.

Despite the seeming absurdity of hanging one person’s identity on the existence of another person, I am still inclined to assert my original analysis. (At least until I’ve had more time to think about it and figure out something that doesn’t sound quite as stupid.) As counterintuitive as it may be (and here comes yet another good reason for never trusting intuitive arguments), there is really nothing wrong with saying the identity of a person depends on contingent facts such as the existence of another person. Certain parts of one’s identity – “brother of”, “husband of”, “Prince of Wales” – depend entirely on the existence or non-existence of other people, and change as those people go into or out of existence. More to the point, our persistence-of-identity schemes – on which all personal identity arguments are based – are predicated upon a pre-supposition of non-forking identity histories: the idea that a person, once come into being, either is or isn’t one and the same person, literally, to the end of their days. For this reason we say that personal identity persists across huge, and even quite sudden, personality changes, such as due to brain injury; we even say it persists across the loss of the mental contents that define a person. We strongly resist the notion that a given person could ever become some other person, or even just plain not the same person, other than by being dead. But the possibility of bifurcating mental histories requires that we broaden our understanding of cognition-based definitions of personhood, and therefore personal identity. And the most obvious way is by the adoption of theories encompassing bifurcating personal identities.

Sawyer touches on the much-abused notion of “zombies” as well, but we will leave those for another day. The book is provocative enough – and has forced me far enough out on much too thin a limb – as it is. Good fun.