Ethics assumptions, rev 1

Reading about moral paradoxes got me thinking about my ethics assumptions. These are things that I believe to be true, not because they follow from other truths, but instead because they are reasoned statements stemming from my observations of the universe.

After some thought, I came up with three assumptions, which I list here with little confidence that they're exhaustive. That lack of confidence is why I've appended to this post's title rev 1: I expect future revisions and additional assumptions.

1. Moral values are epiphenomenal. That is, what makes an action good or bad derives from the circumstances surrounding it, not from static or objective criteria against which humans are measured. As such, ethics is the theoretical side of social engineering, where the goal is to bring about the best ends for the mass of people. What those best ends are and how they should be brought about has a lot to do with circumstances beyond our control.

   For example, much of traditional morality of the last couple thousand years in the Western world has to do with reining in the inborn appetites that are good for the preservation of a hunting-and-gathering species. The ability to gorge on territory, food, and sex were once the virtues of our forebears, later necessarily turned into vices when homo sapiens settled down into agrarian lives. Consequently, it's because our genetics haven't changed much in the last ten thousand years that our moral ideals have had to change. That modern moralities are dependent upon a lifestyle choice, such as agrarianism versus hunting-and-gathering, exemplifies how morality is derivative.

2. The moral value of an action in the present partly depends upon how that action affects moral decisions in the future. Human decisions happen in a vast web of feedback loops, where what one person does now affects the likelihood of other people behaving better or worse in the future. These future decisions can't be ignored, morally. If a person does good in the present at the cost of making it likely that other people will bring about badness in the future, that badness is part of the moral value of the present action. If the future badness is significant enough, and the present good insignificant enough, then the action may be morally neutral, if not bad, despite its immediate good consequences.

   One example of a moral feedback is my choice to bike instead of to drive most places. Originally I saw my decision as a morally good act that makes the world a little better. Since then, it has occurred to me that every major city in the United States reaches a transportation equilibrium that involves jammed freeways during rush hour. That is, people collectively drive more and more until any excess road capacity is consumed. Thus, my solitary decision to drive less and bike more probably hasn't reduced motoring in the Phoenix area; rather, it has given every other motorist a tiny extra bit of incentive to drive more. Therefore, the moral benefits effected by me biking rather than driving are selfish benefits to myself, such as improved health, and not benefits to the group as would be the case if there were in fact less motoring going on overall.

3. In identical scenarios when facing the same decision, there will sometimes be multiple best moral actions. This follows from the necessity of having diversity within any ecosystem, including those occupied by humans, in order for that ecosystem to be productive and resilient. Because humans are best off over the long term in a productive and stable ecosystem, there must be a diversity of moral values to prevent the ecosystem from collapsing into fragile monocultures due to a uniformity of individuals' choices. With the human global population as large as it is, there doesn't exist a self-preserving morality that won't eventually lead to unsustainable destruction to our natural environments. People must choose sufficiently differently from one another.

CI, PD, and the value of diversity

Today's post answers the question of how I came to be against the categorical imperative.

I never liked the categorical imperative—not since I first learned about it in an ethics class during my second year in college. But my current reason for rejecting the CI is new.

When I first learned about the CI, I thought it could be used to prove just about anything and was therefore a bad theory. For example, CI proponents often use the CI to claim that lying is universally bad based on some specific cases of lying being bad. But there are some specific cases where it's bad to tell the truth, so what's wrong with the claim that telling the truth is universally bad?

In hindsight I'm sure I missed something about the CI.

But nevertheless, a couple years ago I changed my mind in a way that made my previous doubts about the CI moot. What happened is I came to believe that humans are part of their ecosystem, not apart from it. This change-of-mind may not sound like much, but it has profound consequences.

One such consequence is the corollary that we live in a world full of trade-offs—that few ways of doing things are better in all regards. This is opposed to the world view of the rationalist, who believes that by thinking things through hard enough, one can eventually arrive at the best answer. The answer may be worldly, such as the secular ethicist who believes in the universality of the CI, or it may be otherworldly, such as the monotheist who believes in an unlimited god.

The former is Hofstadter's world of pure reason and superrationality, where prisoner's dilemma players have cause to believe their thought process ought to be shared by all other players and that therefore there is a correct answer to the game. But if humans are in an ecosystem then there's no basis for that belief. Behavior in an ecosystem satisfies niche, not law. And niches are finite, mutable, and diverse.

This is in direct contradiction to the CI, which is infinite, unchanging, and uniform. Thus, the CI has no place in an ecological world view—unless of course one niche is to accept the CI.

Now, many people would object to what I've written. They might say: Yes, human behavior is subject to niche, but humans will be judged according to law. Thus, the CI could be valid as a law. This would be the position of, say, a Christian who accepts ecological principles.

I have no counter to that objection. It seems to me that where a person stands on this issue is a matter of faith. And I welcome a diversity of opinions on the matter.

Against the categorical imperative

I reject the categorical imperative. I believe it fails to lead to sound moral conclusions, so I give it little credit as criticism against ideas—mine or others'.

The reason I mention this is so no one around here uses the categorical imperative to argue against something I write. I don't want anyone to have the expectation that I'll be influenced by what you have to say if that's the case. I reject the categorical imperative.

Not that anyone has done such a thing. As far as I remember, no one—myself included—has mentioned the CI here at JEC until today. But today's post is a prudent warning in case I someday make a comment such as, “Nearly all middle-class Americans would improve their circumstances if they spent a lot less money.” That sort of comment inspires CI-based reasoning these days.

For those of you wanting a refresher on the CI: it's the idea that you can determine an action as morally good or bad by asking yourself whether everybody doing that action would make for a better or worse world. If everybody doing it would be a good thing, then the action itself is good. Otherwise, the action is immoral.

This sort of reasoning goes on everyday. Sometimes it lends itself to pleasant ends, such as when someone decides not to litter because of the mess there would be if everyone littered. But sometimes the CI lends itself to unpleasant ends, such as when someone finds themselves pressed to tell the truth and admit that their friend's new haircut is ugly. As for the spending-less-money maxim I wrote two paragraphs earlier, the likely CI-inspired reaction is to worry about the consequence of wrecking the economy if all middle-class Americans consumed less. That's needless universality, I say.

My problem with the CI is that it starts from the assumption that monoculture is a good thing—that in a moral world all people would act the same when in the same context. Though I can accept a lot of axioms as hypotheticals, this is one I find too unlikely. First, there's the practical problem that people don't in fact act the same—one person deciding to do X isn't going to cause everyone to do X—and so measuring humans against such universality is questionable. But more importantly I believe monocultures are themselves bad things. Diverse ecosystems are stabler and more productive than monocultures, and so the best moral measurements will acknowledge that people ought to act differently—even when in identical contexts.

But don't let me convince all of you of this. We shouldn't all reject the categorical imperative. Proponents of monoculture fulfill an important part of our diverse ecosystem.

You are not a beautiful snowflake

After years of earning and spending money, a person gets to believing that dollars are real things. And why should we believe differently? Of all the things we surround ourselves with, money has the most day-to-day impact. Whether it takes the form of dollar bills, checks, or electrons whizzing around in a data center somewhere far away, money is how we most alter other people's behavior to our benefit. The difference between me walking out of Fry's Electronics with a flat-screen TV and either (1) going to jail or (2) not going to jail has everything to do with money. So in a way, money is as real as anything else: it has cause, and it has effect.

But most of us agree that money is a peculiar kind of real thing. We've all read or heard enough history to know that sometimes money loses its ability to cause much effect. Markets occasionally collapse, and money goes from real to imaginary—and it does so quickly. (Picture pre-WW2 Germans shoveling Mark banknotes made worthless by hyperinflation.) Though few people alive in the United States today have lived through such a scenario, so sharp are our imaginations about it that we get the feeling the essence of money is transient and illusory.

And yet, despite knowing this, many Americans act as though it's our birthright to live a long, healthy, and rewarding life as paid for by money. Anything less and we're not getting our due. It's tacitly agreed across the bitterest of political rivalries that in any fair world (most) Americans get to consume an order of magnitude more resources than the typical Asian factor worker assembling our gadgets. Pressed about the inequality and we may proclaim that opportunities are evening out and eventually Asian factory workers too will have such abundance—such is the marvel of the modern world. But how easy faith is when it upholds one's privilege.

Now, I generally try not to hold it against someone when they do what's in their self-interest. If it's possible for someone to get away with consuming more than most other people on the planet, then I expect that person to do so. To expect otherwise is to set oneself up for disappointment. Blame the rules, not the person—if one insists on blaming something.

But such selfishness aside, the belief in “our due” is leading Americans to a crippling cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, our hopes for long, healthy, and rewarding lives will manifest only through the efficient, uninterrupted flow of resources made possible by a stable monetary system. On the other hand, we realize that money isn't always real, and current circumstances suggest that the First World's current monetary reality isn't so strong.

So which is it? Is abundance our birthright, or will the misfortunes of the past visit us once again? Though we hope for continued abundance, no one knows with certainty what will happen in the future. But the sane course is to realize that both scenarios are possible—as well as all shades of gray in between—so that one needn't add bafflement to grief should our future lead to lesser wealth.

To put it in plainer perspective, the per capita GDP of the world, normalized for purchasing power, is about the same as the poverty line for a single American. Poor is average. What makes you deserving of wealth?

On the other hand

The government has a hand in everybody's business and another in every person's pocket. By limiting such governmental pickpocketing, we can limit its incursions on our freedom.

—an example of a reification fallacy

Mr. Skeptic: Why don't governments have hands?

Mr. Normal: Duh. Can't you see they don't have hands? Look around. You won't see an actual hand attached to any government.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but I'm told most people have hands, and yet I've seen and will see only a small percentage of the fourteen billion or so hands in the world. So I'm unsure that saying I won't see it is a sufficient reason for my believing it doesn't exist.

Mr. Normal: Oh, come on, stop being pedantic. The difference between the hand of government and the hands of a person you've never met is that you could see the person's hands, presumably by meeting that person and asking them to take their gloves off if they're wearing them. Whereas, governments don't have a physical body and therefore don't have a physical hand.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, I agree governments don't have physical hands, but that doesn't answer my question as to why they don't have hands. Maybe it's more evocative to ask the compliment question: Why do people have hands?

Mr. Normal: Because they're born with them, obviously.

Mr. Skeptic: OK. What about people who lost a hand and now have a prosthetic hook instead? Do hooks count as hands?

Mr. Normal: No, hooks are definitely not hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So some people are missing a hand?

Mr. Normal: Yes, some people are missing a hand.

Mr. Skeptic: What about people who lost their hand and have successfully undergone hand transplant surgery? Do transplanted hands count as hands?

Mr. Normal: Yes, of course, just as transplanted livers count as livers.

Mr. Skeptic: OK, then what about Luke Skywalker? Is his prosthetic hand a real hand? Or is it just a hand-like thing? I mean, it's a lot more hand-like than a hook, but it's a lot less hand-like than a transplanted hand, too.

Mr. Normal: I think Luke Skywalker's prosthetic hand counts as a real hand.

Mr. Skeptic: So if Luke Skywalker and I met, and we greeted in the custom of modern Western Civilization, you would say we were shaking hands, not shaking one hand and one hand-like prosthetic?

Mr. Normal: Well, you could say either, though it would be more polite and to the point to call it shaking hands.

Mr. Skeptic: So exactly how hand-like must a prosthetic be before it counts as a real hand? How unlike a hand may it be before it stops counting as a real hand?

Mr. Normal: Look, stop trying to make this into a problem of demarcation by forcing me to arbitrate the definition of the word hand. People have hands; governments don't. In order for a person to have a hand, their arm must terminate in a sufficiently hand-like thing. Presumably that means the thing has a palm and some fingers and is able to do hand-like actions with it, like grasping objects and shaking hands with other people. Maybe the exact definition of hand wiggles a bit, but I'm not going to make this a matter of arbitrary definition.

Mr. Skeptic: Hmm… I'm unclear about these other words you use: arm, palm, and finger. Can you define them for me?

Mr. Normal: You're missing the point. Hands must be tangible, physical things. They must attach to an arm and be sufficiently hand-like. That's it. It's not rocket science.

Mr. Skeptic: Sure, but the hand of government is hand-like insofar as it's used to—or so I'm told—pickpocket people. Why doesn't that count? And as for tangible physicality, one hand of the U.S. government may be presumed to be the IRS, which is a real, physical thing—or at least, they've got a lot of brick-and-mortar locations and they're made up, among other things, of real hands, which you yourself admit are real. As for the arm of government, we could say that's the Department of the Treasury. So it seems the hand of government meets your criteria for being a real hand.

Mr. Normal: What is wrong with you? Only by loose metaphor does a government have hands and arms. Whereas people have real, non-metaphorical hands.

Mr. Skeptic: Except for Luke Skywalker, of course.

Mr. Normal: No, we agreed that Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is sufficiently hand-like. There's no loose metaphor going on there.

Mr. Skeptic: But what makes Luke Skywalker's prosthetic sufficiently hand-like and the hand of government insufficiently hand-like?

Mr. Normal: Look, Luke Skywalker's prosthetic is like a real, natural human hand. It looks like a human hand, and it functions like a human hand. The metaphor that allows us to say the prosthetic is indeed a hand is a tight metaphor. You wouldn't know Luke's hand was a prosthetic without seeing the original hand lightsabered off or the prosthetic being attached. Whereas, the hand of government is a loose metaphor. That hand functions as a hand only symbolically.

Mr. Skeptic: So it's the tightness of the metaphor that counts?

Mr. Normal: Yes, exactly.

Mr. Skeptic: So then how tight does the metaphor need to be? And how do we measure the tightness of a metaphor?

Mr. Normal: Gaah! You measure it by seeing how similar the presumed hand is to an actual, real human hand.

Mr. Skeptic: And by real human hand you mean the kind of hand a person is born with.

Mr. Normal: Exactly. Finally, you're getting it.

Mr. Skeptic: No, I'm not getting it. It sounds like you're saying people have hands and governments don't have hands because people are born with hands and governments aren't born with hands. That's just shifting one arbitrary definition to another, from the hands we have now to the hands we were born with. It's begging the question. Why then is it appropriate to call the arm termini that humans are born with hands but not the arm termini that governments are born with?

Mr. Normal: Look, it is arbitrary. The word hand is just a label we apply to something, and it's something that (most) humans are born with—two of them, in fact—and that governments don't have. The end. We could have picked different words to use, like say humans are born not with hands but instead with flands, and tax-collecting agencies in government are hands. And instead of pickpocketing, what thieves do is called blickblocketing and pickpocketing is what governments do when they collect taxes. What's the big deal what we call these things? The important thing is that people, like you and me, have these things that by convention we call hands. And some people pickpocket with their hands. But despite whatever differences there are in the size, shape, color, and ability of people's hands, those hands are all very similar, and it makes sense to lump them into a single category, which we call hands. Any hand of government will be sufficiently dissimilar to human hands to warrant not being in that category. The end.

Mr. Skeptic: But who decides how similar two things need to be in order for them to count as being in a group, and how dissimilar two things need to be for them not to count as being in a group?

Mr. Normal: Convention decides it.

Reification

In my parents' house there's an old Rand McNally book of state road maps published in the 1980s. A few years ago, after having moved to Phoenix and while visiting my parents, I found the book lying on the coffee table, and I opened it to the map of Arizona. The map had an inset for the Phoenix metropolitan area, and the inset showed only three freeways traversing the city: the I-10, I-17, and U-60. I laughed. In the time since that map's publication, the Phoenix area has added five freeways.

If you were to use that old map to navigate Phoenix today, you would see firsthand the general rule that the model doesn't always match reality. In the last few decades, in addition to adding new freeways, Phoenix has added and widened thousands of miles of roads. Some of those roads were unpaved back then but have since become major thoroughfares wider than a football field. Other roads have been decommissioned, closed off, or redirected. Whole new extensions to the city now exist where the map shows a blank emptiness. In short: a real road changes though a printed map does not.

*

Anyone who has used an old road map knows this. The map is an example of a leaky abstraction—a type of problem whereby a simplifying model fails to fully capture the complexity of the real thing. A map of Phoenix is an abstraction that's simpler than Phoenix itself. That's why the map is useful. It's easier to plan a route by seeing Phoenix's roads at a glance using a map than it is to try to see them at a glance in actuality—even from a bird's eye view atop Camelback Mountain.

But the price of an abstraction's simplicity is inaccuracy, such as when a map becomes outdated and possibly worse than useless. Simplicity succeeds by leaving out details, and it fails by leaving out details.

Joel Spolsky coined the term leaky abstraction when he lamented this pattern of failure as it happens in software development. In the software world, leaky abstractions abound. But they also abound outside the software world, too, and it's a shame Spolsky's audience didn't extend beyond computer geeks because the rest of the world is missing out on a great term for a common problem.

Though, there is almost another term. A leaky abstraction is an informal analog to what in formal logic is called a reification fallacy. That's the logician's name for the error of mistaking a model for the real thing. But the spell checker in the text editor I'm using to write this blog doesn't recognize either the words reification or reify, and neither does Firefox's spell checker recognize those words, so I presume that logicians' reach isn't much greater than Spolsky's.

*

In its most literal interpretation, an example of a reification fallacy is trying to drive your real car on a real printed road map, treating the map as though it is the actual roads. But this is hard to do because those solid red, black, or gray lines on a map denoting roads are tricky narrow—and never mind trying to drive on dashed lines.

A fuzzier and more likely example of a reification fallacy is conflating the information on an old, out-of-date road map with the state of the roads today. This would be the case if I used my parents' map of 1980s Phoenix to find my way around this city in 2012.

Reification fallacies, a.k.a. leaky abstractions, abound in the real world. You can't read a newspaper or news magazine that doesn't sneak in at least a dozen of them—sometimes per page. As an example, keep in mind that nearly anytime you read or hear the phrase the economy in today's parlance, you're being entreated to slip into fallacious thinking. The phrase the economy is shorthand that refers to a complex, worldwide system of innumerable material exchanges involving billions of people that defies the understanding of any one person. But more often we hear simplifying expressions like, The economy is recovering, and, So-and-so's tax policy won't fix the economy. These reifications treat that complex system of exchanges as a simple, singular entity that—even worse—is to be judged on a linear scale ranging from fixed to broken. This is as dangerous as trying to drive your car on a printed road map. The reality is that some people do well for themselves in recessions and some people do poorly during economic expansions, and the notion of an economy is a loose generalization. We'd be more honest if we substituted the status quo for the economy in most cases.

There are countless other reifications in common speech—equality, justice, rights, freedom, good, evil, power, culture, the people, the government, the corporations, the environment, beauty, the relationship, happiness, them, us, and so on. All are ways of simplifying the real world to allow us to talk about things that would otherwise be too complex to talk about. All are sly ways of simplifying away real details. Reification is double-edged.

*

So much for explaining what a reification fallacy is. Next week I aim to explain what this has to do with the problem of personal identity.

The demarcation of personal identity

Any way you define what a person is is fraught with problems. These are problems of demarcation, of deciding where a person's identity begins and where that identity ends. In my three previous Monday posts, I described three of these problems: resurrection, duplication, and replacement. Those are abstract, science-fiction-like problems we don't encounter in the real world, but some problems with personal identity are practical. If you want a reminder of one of these real-world problems, try loudly proclaiming in a large group of mixed company your opinions about abortion. Even if that group has only a few outspoken people who disagree with you, you'll soon remember which of your beloved assumptions regarding personal identity are not shared by everyone. In particular: when does life begin?

If you've ever debated the ethics of abortion, you've run into this question. And you discovered—hopefully quickly and without losing friends—that no matter what you believe about when life begins, there's no fact that irrefutably backs up what you're saying. There are some facts, and they each give some credit to various claims, but there's no ace of spades that trumps all other facts. Ultimately the question "When does life begin?" is decided by the arbitrariness of choosing a definition—Life begins at X. Given such a definition, the best you can do is to be consistent with how you apply that definition to your other beliefs.

There's also the practical problem of when life ends. Just as with determining when life begins, there's no irrefutable fact that forces one answer to this question. And if you doubt the importance of determining life's terminus regarding real-world scenarios, try returning to that large group of mixed company and loudly proclaiming your opinions about euthanasia.

So personal identity suffers from problems of demarcation, of identifying an exact boundary around what at first glance seems obvious. We're all in agreement that healthy thirty-year-olds are alive—the middle cases are easy. It's the border cases that give way to differing beliefs and attitudes and fail to satisfy all our intuitions.

These problems of demarcation are symptoms of a greater problem. They suggest that personal identity is a leaky abstraction.

Immaterialism and replacement

For the previous two Mondays, owing to the inspiration of Kagan's online Philosophy of Death lectures, I've written about a couple of problems with the physicalist notion of personal identity: resurrection and duplication. To summarize: resurrection is the reconstruction and revival of the body of a deceased person; duplication is the creation of a body identical to that of a living person. Both cases are similar in that they involve two identical copies of one body whereby the copies are made disjoint by a break in continuity. In the case of resurrection that break is in time by way of death; in the case of duplication that break is in space by way of replication. The problem each presents for physicalism is that, according to the physicalist notion that personal identity is purely corporeal, discontinuity shouldn't matter to personal identity. But according to common intuition about identity in general, as shown when we think about bikes and block towers being reassembled, discontinuity seems to matter.

I wrote about resurrection and duplication to lay the foundation for expressing my own view about personal identity—which, as I've already alluded to, is that common intuition is misguided. But before I move on to explaining myself, I want to address an objection many people would raise now, if not sooner: that physicalism is wrong from the start because it neglects the non-physical aspect of a person's existence—i.e., their soul.

Far be it for me to convince anyone who believes in immaterialism to change that belief. There's no bulletproof argument against the existence of souls for the same reasons there are no bulletproof arguments against the existence of anything that's unfalsifiable. I've written about that here. I'm not going to argue against the existence of souls—not in this post.

Instead, I'll point out that immaterialism leads to the same kinds of philosophical conundrums as physicalism does. In particular, theories about immaterial existence struggle with discontinuity, too. First of all, immaterialism also suffers from the problem of duplication: Supposing a soul is copied into a second body, do the two souls constitute the same person or two different persons? Just as with duplication as it pertains to physicalism (and the case of two William Rikers), the answer isn't clear.

Replacement

A problem that's unique to immaterialism is replacement. Replacement is the swapping out of one soul with another. For example, if Jones goes to sleep one night with a soul, X, but wakes up with a different soul, Y, then his soul has been replaced.

Replacement may sound implausible, but the problem isn't how likely replacement is to occur. Instead the problem is: how can you know if or when replacement occurs? In short, the answer is: you can't.

Because souls are immaterial, they are undetectable by direct observation. Instead, we observe souls only by indirect means, such as knowing a person's behavior, memories, and desires. If a soul is swapped out with a soul that produces the same behaviors, memories, desires, etc. as the first soul, then it's impossible to know replacement has occurred. To everyone outside that person, it will appear as though one soul has existed all along, undisturbed. Even to the person (or persons) of the replaced soul, the newly swapped-in soul could produce all the same qualia as the previous soul did, thus giving even Jones the himself the illusion that no replacement occurred.

I won't elaborate on the problem of replacement. Just as I'm not going to argue against the existence of souls, it's not my purpose to argue the merits of replacement as an objection to immaterialism. Instead, my point is that while many people may think immaterialism is immune to the kinds of problems of continuity that plague physicalism, both belief systems suffer their share of problems. It's that both systems suffer these problems that leads me to my view on personal identity, which I'll explain next Monday.

Physicalism and duplication

This is another post I'm inspired to write in response to Shelly Kagan's Philosophy of Death class, which is freely available online.

Last week I wrote about physicalists' problem of explaining resurrection: is a resurrected person the same person after death as before death? Or is a resurrected person a new person? Borrowing from Kagan, I gave two analogies to the problem that each suggest a different answer. The first analogy involves a bicycle that's taken apart, fixed up, and put back together. In that case, there seems to be only one bicycle throughout, both before and after the fix-up. But in the second analogy, which involves a boy's block tower that's destroyed and rebuilt by his dad, there seem to be two distinct block towers, one before the destruction and one after the reconstruction. I said I think the first analogy has it more right, that in the second analogy both towers are the same tower, but also I think both analogies miss the point.

But before I divulge how I think the analogies miss the point, I'm going to describe another problem for the physicalist view: the problem of duplication. Duplication is like resurrection but without the person first dying. Instead, two identical copies of the person's body exist simultaneously. In the block-tower example, duplication happens if the block tower isn't knocked over, but instead the dad builds an identical tower to the first while the first tower still stands. Are both towers the same tower? Or are they different towers?

But why resort to using examples of block towers? Science fiction gives us the same scenario with real people—albeit of the fictional variety. In the Star Trek TNG episode Second Chances, Commander William Riker leads an away team to the surface of the planet Nervala IV. The mission is a routine one other than how the planet has a strong distortion field that makes transporting impossible for eight years at a time, while the planet is too far from its sun. The away team has a three chances over four days to get in and out.

However, after first beaming down to the planet's surface, the team is surprised to discover the presence of another human, one who appears to be just like Commander Riker. The man says he is Riker and that he's been stranded on the planet for eight years ever since he failed to transport out in time during his last mission. The away-team Riker corrects him, saying he (the away-team Riker) was there eight years ago, but he transported out OK. But neither man's account explains how there are now two Rikers, and the away team, along with the new Riker, beam back to the ship to sort out what's going on.

It turns out the problem was due to a transporter accident. Eight years ago while Riker beamed back to his ship, part of the transporter energy beam made it to the ship, where Riker rematerialized, but part of the energy beam was deflected back to the planet's surface, where another Riker materialized. But everyone in the ship, including the successfully beamed Riker, figured the transport worked, and so the ship's crew and all the universe went on with business, unaware of the second Riker doomed to playing Robinson Crusoe on the planet below.

That raises the question: Are both Rikers the same Riker?

It's hard to see how they're the same, and indeed the show plays to that conclusion. Without giving too much away, by the episode's end the second Riker gets an assignment on a different ship and has decided to change his name from William to Thomas, his middle name. But the show also shows how Tom Riker is very much like Will Riker by way of Tom romantically rejecting Counselor Deanna Troi to instead focus on his career, just as Will Riker had rejected her eight years previously.

Back to physicalism. The problem duplication presents for physicalism is that if, as according to physicalism, a person is nothing more than a body, then there should be something purely corporeal to account for what makes the two Rikers different. The quick answer is that there is such a difference. Will Riker spent eight years normally, serving as a Star Fleet officer; meanwhile, the other Riker, Tom, spent eight years alone and abandoned on the surface of Nervala IV. It's remarkable Tom didn't go insane, given such a lengthy solitary existence, and in any event the two Rikers now have enough sufficiently different experiences to be different people—to have different thoughts, desires, goals, etc.

But that answer ignores the moment when both Rikers rematerialized, one in the ship and one on the planet's surface, back when they had the same experiences, thoughts, desires, goals, etc. Were the two Rikers the same person at that moment? Presumably the two Rikers, if they were ever the same person, forked in identity as soon as their sensory organs took in different input: different sights, different sounds, different smells, etc. From that moment on the two Rikers diverged physiologically and thus became different people. But in that one moment after the split but before differentiation, were the two Rikers the same person?

It's a fun question to ponder. But I think that it, like the two analogies I wrote about last week, misses the point.

Physicalism and resurrection

Those of us who don't believe in souls have some explaining to do. Without a soul to identify what a person is, we're left with only the person's body and the physical stuff it comprises. But that's not the whole story—there are loose ends. Some of those loose ends came up in Kagan's Philosophy of Death class, the first half of which covers a collection of theories and arguments about personal identity. Though Kagan himself is settled as a physicalist, and thus rejects the existence of souls, he acknowledges that his arguments leave open many questions.

One problem for physicalists has to do with our notion of resurrection. According to one version of physicalism, resurrection entails nothing more than reconstructing a body identical to that of a body from the past—presumably the body of someone now dead. Such a reconstruction could be the result of a Star-Trek-like replicator device, which conjures physical things from raw materials. After replicating a body, the body's corresponding person would be brought back into existence. Or would it? Here are two analogies of bodily reconstruction that lead to different answers to that question.

Analogy #1, the bicycle

(In his class, Kagan uses an example of a watch, but I prefer to use a bike because I know more about bikes.)

Imagine you have a bicycle. You take the bicycle to a mechanic to have it overhauled. As part of the overhaul, the mechanic will take the bike completely apart to clean the parts and possibly replace some parts. He'll strip everything from the frame—wheels, chain, gears, cranks, brakes, cables, shifters, etc. After having cleaned or replaced each part, he'll put the bike back together to make a bike nearly as good as new.

But midway through the overhaul, the mechanic spots a problem. He phones you during lunch and says your cassette shows signs of wear, do you want to have it replaced? You're wary of the bike shop and wonder if the mechanic is trying to overcharge you by selling you unneeded parts, and so you respond that you'll stop by the store that afternoon and take a look yourself. Later that day, in the bike shop, the mechanic greets you and shows you your bike. It consists of a frame, fork, handlebars, and wheels lying in a heap on the floor and the other components in a cardboard box on the counter. Where's my bike? you ask.

Right here, say the mechanic, pointing to the heap on the floor. "And there," then pointing to the box on the counter.

That's no bicycle, you say. That's just a bunch of bike parts.

Well, yeah, it's your bike midway through an overhaul, responds the mechanic. By the way, your shifters are gunked up. You want to just upgrade your whole drive chain? We have a special deal on Campy—

—But the shifters were working fine when I brought the bike in… And so you drop the ontology argument and instead argue with the mechanic to keep your original parts (and a smaller bill). The next day, overhaul completed and a new cassette installed, you go to the shop and retrieve your bike, restored to full form from the mere heaps of parts it was the previous day.

In summary: Take a bike, strip it down to bare parts, clean some and replace others, and then put the bike back together: same bike.

Analogy #2, the block tower

A four-year-old boy builds a massive tower out of toy blocks in the living room. He's proud of his achievement and shows his dad, who's impressed with his young son's promising architectural skills. But alas, it's past the boy's bedtime, and the dad says as much.

But can't I show Mom my tower? the boy asks.

No, kiddo, it's bedtime, says Dad, and Mom is out with her friends till late tonight. I tell you what: I promise I'll show Mom your tower as soon as she gets home. Now, off to bed.

Father and son walk to the boy's bed, where Dad tucks the boy in. On the way back to the couch in the living room, when passing by the tower, Dad accidentally kicks a key block at the tower's base, causing the entire tower to fall over, sending blocks scattering across the floor, the tower now thoroughly destroyed. Oh no! Dad thinks. I just promised him I would show Mom that tower.

Fortunately, Dad took a photo of the tower before its untimely destruction, back when the boy was showing it off. Gathering the scattered blocks, and using the photo, Dad constructs a tower identical to the one his son made an hour ago. He places the base of the tower in the same spot on the floor, and he meticulously chooses blocks of the right color and shape to match the blocks in the photo. After a few hours of careful reconstruction work, Dad finishes the tower, just as the front door opens and Mom walks through the door. What's that? she asks.

That's a tower our son made. Isn't it wonderful?

Here, many people will say the dad is lying, or at least not being truthful. The son didn't make that tower; he make a tower that was knocked over and no longer exists. The new tower, however much a facsimile of the original tower, is a different tower than the one the son made.

In summary: Take a block tower, knock it over, and have someone else recreate it: different tower.

Which story?

Which story best matches the resurrection of people's bodies? Is a body like a bike, where taking it apart and putting it back together means the same person is brought back into existence? Or is a body like a block of towers, where if destroyed and brought back into existence a new person is created?

My own interpretation is that both analogies fall short—for a reason I'll discuss in a future blog post. But if I had to choose from the two choices here—bike or tower—I would say that a body is more like a bike. I would think the summary from the second analogy is wrong: that the tower built by the dad is indeed the same tower built by the son. The tower isn't defined by who constructed (or reconstructed) it; rather, the tower is defined by what it is.

But what I find most interesting is how both analogies fail.