- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
beard? What, if anything, would John’s
body feel about the switch? Would it
reject ‘you’, or welcome ‘you’? Is there
anything it’s like to be John’s body
now, or to be ‘your’ body with John’s
brain in it?
If you think that both you and John
will wake up in the ‘wrong’ body,
then presumably you think that the
conscious self depends on the brain
and not the rest of the body. So in
another popular thought experiment,
the Martians scan the brains and then
swap only the patterns of neural
information. This time, all your memories and personality traits are swapped over,
but the brains stay in place. Now who is it who experiences the feel of the hairy
legs and the beard? You or John? Is the experiencing self tied to the body, the
brain, the memories, or what?
Ego and bundle theorists differ fundamentally in their responses to such questions.
The ego theorist might say ‘of course it will be me’ (or ‘of course it will be John’)
because the self must be associated with something, whether it is the body, the
brain, personal memories, personality traits and preferences, or some combination.
In other words, there has to be a right answer to the question ‘who has woken up?’
Ego theorists may try to find that answer by investigating the relationships between
the conscious self and memory, personality, attention, or other brain functions, or
between the brain and the rest of the body and the environment.
For the bundle theorist, this is all a waste of time because none of us is a continu-
ous experiencing self. Yes, the person in the bed might scream and shout and be
very unhappy and confused, but if you ask ‘is it really me?’, then you reveal your
own confusion. There can be no answer to this question because there is no such
thing as the ‘real me’.
Are you an ego theorist or a bundle theorist? If you are not sure, this next thought
experiment may help you find out.
Imagine that you are offered a free return trip, anywhere you want to go, in a
teletransporter (very much like the Star Trek transporter). All you have to do is
step inside a special cubicle and press the ‘Go’ button, whereupon every cell of
your body is scanned and the resulting information stored (though your body is
destroyed in the process). The information is then sent, at the speed of light, to
your chosen destination and used to reconstruct an exact replica of you. Although
this science-fiction idea is meant only as a thought experiment, some people
believe that something like this may one day be possible (Kurzweil, 1999). We will
return to this and other possible futures for our selves at the end of the chapter.
Since your replica’s body and brain are in exactly the same state as yours were
when scanned, the replica will seem to remember living your life up to the
moment when you pressed the button. It will behave just like you, look like you,
have your personality and foibles, and in every other way be just like you. The only
difference is that this psychological continuity will not have its normal cause, the
FIGURE 16.5 • Reprinted from S. Law (2000),
The philosophy files (London:
Orion), p. 66, with permission.