Could You Be Transmitted By Radio Waves?

It's inevitable that, if you decide to choose any arts subject at University, you'll be faced with structuring an essay on a topic that, at first glance, seems completely unrelated. As a classicist, one subject that we tend to look at is philosophy, both ancient and modern. Below is an essay written on the topic of personal identity, with a somewhat disguised initial question...

Could you be transmitted by radio waves?

Assuming you’re reading this, it’s almost certain that you are a human person. This means that you are a person, which, as defined by Locke, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; and that you are human, a biological organism, which can be identified with the species homo sapiens through various scientific means. So, when considering whether you could survive being transmitted by radio waves, it’s clear that there are two separate issues at stake: firstly, your survival as the same person, and secondly, your survival as the same human being, as defined above. I will argue that, although we identify ourselves as persons with our psychological continuity, nevertheless, in all known cases of persons, such psychological continuity is only coherent within a bodily context. Therefore, to make sense of the exact same person, as opposed to an exactly similar person, we must invoke a physical basis for consciousness. For this reason, when you step into the matter-transporter, an exactly similar copy of you is duplicated at the other end, but it cannot be said to be the exact same person as you. The reason why we would nevertheless choose to be transported, despite the fact that ‘you’, in the strictest possible sense, do not survive the transport, is due to the fact that, in such extreme cases, our common-sense notion of personal identity breaks down and can no longer be applied.

Locke’s definition of a person heavily presupposes the notion that we identify a person with a continuing psychological consciousness. Indeed, this is the notion which we would accept according to common sense. Bernard Williams’ thought experiments concerning a pair of patients in a brain transplant procedure show that this is the case: if the brains (and hence the consciousnesses) of two patients A and B are swapped, such that A’s brain is now in B’s body and vice versa, the B-body-person would be referred to, at least by itself if not by others, as A. Williams similarly points out the unintelligibility of bodily criteria alone serving as the marker of personal identity: if B were told that the B-body would be tortured and the A-body given $100,000, he would (assuming egoistic motives) choose to transplant his consciousness into the A-body.

Given that our notion of personal identity is identified with a continuous psychological consciousness, therefore, it remains to be seen exactly how such a thing can be defined. Locke’s original explanation, relying on memories, is such that a person C-at-T1 is identical to a person C-at-T2 iff C-at-T2 and C-at-T1 share some memory. Due to Reid’s objection (that it is possible to forget everything that happened to you as a child very late in life, even if you can remember it at some intermediate stage – and that under Locke’s original definition this would result in the child and the old man being different people) this is clearly an inadequate explanation. Better than simply referring to memories alone is to invoke other direct psychological connections, either in tandem with memories or replacing them entirely. Examples of these are beliefs, desires, fears, and other states of (sub)consciousness. Given some psychological continuity along these lines, we are more easily able to construct a picture of what constitutes identity of a person.

With this definition of a person in mind, it ought to be possible to transmit a person over radio waves in some sense: if said person had existed simply as radio waves or data, without a corporeal body, for their entire existence (take for example futuristic notions of artificial intelligence), then this person could be meaningfully transmitted and be said to be identical. However, when considering a human person, psychological continuity is incoherent without some notion of physical continuity. Williams in his thought experiments as explained above refers to the brain of an individual: this is because, as far as we are aware, the brain is the organ in us responsible for consciousness. Without making reference to a brain in this way, it is not clear how Williams could have meaningfully formulated his thought experiments. Insofar as you are a human person, you are a person inextricably linked to the biological parts which make you a human.

This point is illustrated well by the following example. Assuming that it were possible for your exact physical and psychological states to be encoded as data and then transmitted as radio waves, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be possible for you to be materialised twice. But then we have a problem: which of the resultant persons is the ‘same’ person as the original? It seems odd to suggest that it can be both – as identity tends to require uniqueness. It is similarly odd to suggest that it is one but not the other – as this seems like an arbitrary decision. The only remaining option is that neither resultant human person is truly the ‘same’ human person as the original which stepped into the transporter: rather, both are exactly similar copies, with the original body having been destroyed. Even if only a single copy were made, it remains the case that two (or more) copies are not logically impossible: and it is a bizarre notion that your survival is dependent on the non-existence of something else in this way. Due to this, it is clear that, insofar as you are a human person, you cannot survive the matter-transporter: with the destruction of the body that houses your consciousness, the only way in which it can be meaningfully said to be the exact same and therefore identical consciousness has been destroyed.

Why, therefore, are Captain Kirk and his colleagues so willing to use the transporter, despite its fatal consequences? As Derek Parfit argues, in such extreme cases, the notion of personal identity which we hold begins to collapse. He uses examples of fission and fusion cases resulting from far-fetched (but not impossible) cases. In these extreme cases, it is clear that what we value is not in fact our survival, but the survival of entities sufficiently close to ourselves. One of his examples is that of a species, like our own in every respect except it reproduces by mitosis (budding), such that the resultant creature upon reproduction is an exact copy of the original, both physically and psychologically. Having ‘budded’ a certain number of times, and assuming similar loss of memories as new ones appear as occurs in our own species, eventually, one ‘exact copy’ would be so different from another ‘exact copy’ that we would say that they were different persons, but similar to some degree. Parfit argues that it is these degrees of similarity that we really care about, not survival of the exact same person – and if a product is exactly similar to the original (such as in the matter-transporter case) we would value it as if it were exactly the same.

Due to the fact that you are (probably) a human person, and due to the fact that the human person’s consciousness is by nature attached to some physical body, you could not, therefore, in the strictest possible sense, survive being transmitted by radio waves. However, this is arguably not what you would care about: something exactly similar to you does survive, having as close a degree of similarity to you as is possible, and to an extent, this is what we care about most when discussing personal identity.