Who Knows?
Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson have recently gotten themselves into a scuffle over cryonics, immortality in silicon, and personal identity. I suggest skimming the original two posts and then reading Julian Sanchez’s take on the question — he approaches the issue with more caution and more philosophical expertise than either Caplan or Hanson.
Finally, Will Wilson says he is unconvinced by Julian’s reductionism; it’s part of Wilson’s piece that I want to address.
In fact, pace Julian, there exists such a binary property which I would consider to be the only property that matters — in fact I suspect that it’s the one that most of our pragmatic and moral determinations end up piggy-backing off of — namely the property of it being me. Yes, I’m being cute; but I’m also making a serious point.
The problem with postulating being me as a fundamental metaphysical property is that we lack adequate epistemic access to that property. An example will illustrate the problem.
Suppose Alice walks into a hospital and asks the doctor to make a carbon copy of herself (she always wanted a twin). She fills out the paperwork, and then the doc sedates her. Later, as she groggily wakes up, she observes another person who looks exactly like her lying in the next bed over who is also groggily coming out of sedation. At this point the doctor walks into the room, looking very embarrassed, and informs them that due to a clerical mishap, no one is certain which is the original and which is the newly created duplicate.
By hypothesis, there’s no physical way to distinguish the two. Introspectively, each of them thinks “Yes, of course, I am Alice. I remember signing all those forms!”. However, if you maintain that being Alice is an irreducible metaphysical property then one person has it and the other does not. It’s just that neither one has any epistemic access to the being Alice property — intuition and introspection don’t help.
I’m pretty unimpressed by philosophers who posit epistemically inaccessible metaphysical properties, for exactly the same reasons I’m unimpressed by scientists who propose empirically vacuous theories.
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