The Dissolution of Identity
by Lee Corbin, 1993

There is a certain region in the space of thought experiments where dwells the dissolution of identity. A vague, formless realm where conclusions are less availing than usual.

Consider what happens as the bandwidth between your hemispheres is gradually lowered. A substance, slowly introduced into your corpus callosum, inhibits nerve impulses. Eventually the baud rate goes to zero; your hemispheres are effectively isolated as in the split brain experiments. Where are "you" then? Where were you while this was gradually taking place?

Studies of patients who've had their corpus callosi split reveal that two separate identities result. At least in the beginning, however, the two "individuals" have a very hard time believing in the independent existence of the other, a condition possibly due to having much memory in common. Perhaps if the experiment were performed on young children, each hemisphere would more readily recognize and acknowlege the other's separate identity.

Something quite similar occurs in thought experiments in which memory access time is increased. Suppose for example that many years from now an uploaded version of yourself acquires an enormous store of memories. Suppose also that your central processing speed---roughly measured by how many logical conclusions you can make in a specified unit of time---is tremendously augmented.

(A great many scenarios, as envisioned by Drexler in "Engines of Creation", for example, discuss artificially intelligent systems operating at speeds millions of times greater than the speeds at which neurons are able to process information. So this supposition is not fantastic.)

If this uploaded version of yourself has so many memories that they cannot all be stored within several meters of your central processor, then access time for these memories will be relatively enormous. How do our identities fare under such circumstances?

To what degree can you judge an entity to be yourself, if, for example, it takes the equivalent of many years to RECALL the name of an old boyfriend or girlfriend? And takes the equivalent of many years to recall all sorts of information which currently you deem to be an integral part of your personality or consciousness? Hey, if it took me the equivalent of years to recall most of the features of my own life, I would have serious reservations that I was still myself! We might term this the Memory Access Problem.

Another way that the memory access problem arises is in considering identity over ordinary brief periods of time in very mundane situations. Most of us agree that if we were stricken with an extremely severe case of irreversable amnesia, it would be equivalent to dying. To be parted forever from all the memories that you've accumulated during this life reminds one of the kind of Christian "immortalitity" advocated by some clerics: one spends eternity in a Heaven without benefit of any of one's Earthly memories. But that's hardly what any of us find acceptable these days.

Well, then. Do you regard lack of access to your memories equivalent to being dead, or to not existing? You probably do. We cryonicists are especially worried about memory loss upon resusitation.

The rub is then this: consider some very high tension moment in your life in which, shall we say, you were attempting to complete some arithmetical computation at top speed, or perhaps rushing through some other task that required total concentration. WHERE WERE YOUR MEMORIES THEN? Can you truthfully assert that your behavior was being influenced in the slightest by the presence in your nervous system of all those memories you hold so dear?

I think it safe to presume that while you were expending so much concentration, an extremely advanced technology could have removed almost all your memories with "you" being none the wiser. That is, roughly the same events would still have occurred in that interval, and if this entity then restored your ability to access these memories at the conclusion of the episode, you'd regard the experience in exactly the same way you do now---namely that this was an experience that happened to YOU.

How can this be? If you did not access those memories (they weren't even there) was it truly YOU who did that arithmetical computation or whatever? How do you know (why do you claim) that it was "you" that did the calculation and not "someone else"?

The only explanation is this: only a prejudice obtained from our memory of having done single-minded tasks before biases us to think that we were "there" while those memories were being formed. It is only the MERE CONFLATION OF THAT MEMORY TO "OUR" OTHER MEMORIES that makes us suppose that "we" did that calculation. Now, if we conflate any old memory at all onto your others, say a sharp, distinct memory of having walked on the Moon, do you suppose that this experience really happened to YOU? Certainly not! Yet it would very, VERY strongly seem that it happened to you.

This has a revolutionary implication. The only difference between you burning your hand on a stove and me burning my hand on a stove is who retains the memory. Is the memory of the sudden pain to be added to the store of Corbin-memories or to the store of your memories? Provided, you see, that the interval of time is too short for the person being burned to access his or her memories, there is no important physical difference between who's getting burned. Virtually the same physical events happen either way: a mammalian nervous system experiences sharp pain strongly conditioned for limb reflex-removal. .sp

I know of only two ways that the concept of identity appears to dissolve like this before our very eyes. One, by gradually increasing memory access time, the other by fragmenting the brain (or DP system) piece by piece, gradually cutting off or toning down internal communication.

Be sure to contrast this dissolution of identity with other gradual losses of identity that are infinitely easier to grasp. Consider each of the following separate examples: (1) you are teleported with varying degrees of fidelity from point A to point B, the fidelity going from 100% to 0% (2) you are reanimated from the cryogenic state a century from now with varying degrees of memory loss (3) you gradually evolve into a vastly more sophisticated creature who has absolutely nothing in common with the you now (4) the working mechanism of your brain and your memories are surreptiously replaced over a few days by the memories and mechanisms of the late Joe Shmoe---so that presently you no longer exist---but Joe does.

Each of these four cases constitutes a very easy to understand gradual loss of identity. The loss can be considered linear: it makes sense to suggest that you suffered "50% memory loss", or you're now "25% yourself, 75% Joe", and so on. To be sure, this quantification is far from precise or even measurable, but because the process is a comparison of extreme cases along a continuum, the metaphor of linearity is applicable and useful.

This is NOT the case with the dissolution of identity described above. Who has any idea of how much of "you" would remain if your memory access time were significantly increased? Or if your brain, after being split along its corpus callosum were somehow further subdivided? Our present concepts of identity cannot begin to address these questions.

Our concepts shall evolve to the point that they can, I believe, when medical science has provided us more enlightenment about how it would feel to be a split brain patient. How does each hemisphere come to regard the other? Can they ever reach the point where they stop making excuses for each other's behavior and begin to recognize the legitimacy of each other's separate identity? What happens when the corpus callosum is repeatedly "frozen" and "thawed" so that one would accumulate memories of what it was like to split and merge repeatedly?

Obviously our present monolithic concept of identity is doomed. Science (i.e., our gradually expanding knowledge) will force us to renounce some of those feelings (of such tremendous importance to us) that we ARE separate individuals or perhaps that we "ARE" at all.

Yet we cannot just throw up our hands. I don't mean "should not". I mean CAN not: Now, sometimes Robert Ettinger, among others, suggests that identity is completely illusory and that perhaps we are "not the same person" from second to second. Considering some of the scenarios presented above, it's easy to see why sometimes the whole idea of identity appears to make no sense. But there is a strong reason why identity MUST remain an important concept:

Evolution has built it into us. And built it into us in a fashion, moreover, that precludes our ever being able to jettison it. Every operational human being will continue to make selfish decisions every day, philosophy or no. We cryonicists will continue to want to save our lives; we will want to continue to have warmth and shelter in the coming months; we will want to continue breathing even in the next minutes---requirements which supersede all others. Our philosophies simply must, and will, fall into line and continue to accept these requirements.

Some of us have transcended the childish ON/OFF notions of identity; it's not really difficult at all to adopt the physically and scientifically plausible view that identity is a matter of degree. A few us have even been able to cheerfully and confidently believe that identity like everything else is simply a physical phenomenon, and, provided that the events occuring in some volume of space meet specifiable (though perhaps yet unknown) physical criteria, "I", or "you", or whoever, will be there. (Even if that means being in more than one place at a time, or at more than one time at a place-- no sweat!)

But who is going to be able to internalize a coherant notion of identity when it just dissolves---just disintegrates---as in these cases of distributed processing or brain fragmentation?

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