_______________________________________ CLEARLY THINKING ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE Dylan Holmes _______________________________________ I actually really liked reading /Thinking Clearly About Death/. The author, Rosenberg, is an analytic philosopher, so the book is stuffed with fun examples about how our language is more complicated than we realize. The trouble with /Thinking Clearly About Death/, however, is the disconnect between the big, interesting questions that Rosenberg introduces and the curiously abortive answers he provides. Take the question about afterlife, for example: "Could you, in theory, meet someone again after they had died?" A rich and fascinating question, and a wellspring for the imagination. It evokes stories ranging from the mystical ("Maybe people are stored in the memory of god, so even when their body is destroyed, their identity persists in some form") to the science fiction ("If you could image someone's whole brain onto a computer, you might be able to speak with them years in the future.") Rosenberg approaches this afterlife question as a technical question about /sameness/ ("identity"): suppose you have a device that scans a person atom-for-atom so that, once that person dies, you can simply use the machine to reconstruct them anew. You decide to use this machine to reconstruct your grandmother, who greets you warmly with tears in her eyes and goes on to reminisce with you about your childhood and her childhood. Rosenberg wants to claim that the determining factor here is whether your resurrected grandmother is "the same [thing] as" your original grandmother. If she is, then your grandmother was successfully resurrected after death. If not, then there wasn't really a resurrection, only the appearance of one. Unfortunately, /sameness/ (so-called "identity") has a very narrow meaning to philosophers. It behaves like a crown, and only one person can wear it. Rosenberg would find fault with the fact that you could simply press the resurrect button /twice/, making two copies of your grandmother. You only had one original grandmother, so according to the philosophers' narrow definition, only one of these two people can be "the same thing as" your original grandmother. But these two people were produced in exactly the same way---how could you choose between them, even in principle? Therefore, Rosenberg concludes, the idea of the copying machine was flawed in the first place. Copying machines like this can't actually perform resurrection. They can't bring back "the original". It won't be "the same". I will say that Rosenberg's arguments about sameness are colorful and engaging and well reasoned. I just don't agree that "identicalness" is the pivotal concept. It may be /true/ that a resurrected person isn't /the same object as/ the original, but is it meaningful? A layperson might reasonably wonder about meeting someone after they had died. According to Rosenberg, however, even if a reasonably omnipotent /god/ were to reach into the clay and rebuild someone anew in an atom-for-atom miracle, it would not really be a resurrection because, of course, that god could easily reach into the clay a second or third time to create further copies. Rosenberg concludes that this divine copying process is a non-starter, unable to bestow that /one-and-only sameness/ that the original had. Really? Even /that/ wouldn't be a resurrection? For me, there's an important sense in which a divine miracle or an atom-for-atom replicator obviously /can/ bring about a meeting with a long-departed loved one, and technicalities about philosophical "identity" are unconvincing. To be sure, it would be a little weird if there were multiple versions of your grandmother around, but weirdness nonwithstanding, it would be an authentic, cathartic reprise of your shared life story. I carry that same intuition when Rosenberg claims that, for example, a bacterium does not survive cell division because, in the aftermath, there are two bacteria instead of the one. Or when Rosenberg claims that if you had a machine to completely swap the contents of two people's brains, it would only /look/ like a mind transfer; really, you've just created an elaborate machine for making people so insane they believe they're another person. Never mind the gulf between a typical hallucination and actually embodying a total, faithful lived experience, including preferences, secrets, dispositions, capabilities, and so on. Rosenberg's "sameness"-based arguments are supposed to expose the flaws in our concepts of resurrection, copies, mind transfer, life after death, and so on. On my reading, they simply expose the flaws in the philosopher's "sameness". After all, "sameness" is an anthropological idea. When we ask whether things are the same, we implicitly have some human purpose in mind. In some important ways, you might be the same person after your wedding, after years of schooling, or after an injury. And in other important ways, you might be different. And of course you can ask questions about sameness /without/ a usual human purpose in mind (If I pour the cup of tea into another glass, then pour it back in, is it "the same" cup of tea? If I smiled last week and smile again this week, is it "the same" smile?), but it might not yield much. As I see it, our relationships with other people are built out of a dense interconnected web of shared experiences, relationships with people we both know, our home turf, aesthetics, knowledge and values, social roles, capabilities, and so on. When I wonder whether a person has in fact been resurrected, these are the purposes I have in mind. I wonder how much this web---which we accumulate and disrupt and modify throughout our lives---has been restored. I think that an atom-for-atom machine could do a good job; I think a suitable miracle could, too. There are deep and interesting questions about the parts of the web that an atom-for-atom machine /cannot/ bring back---what if your hometown was gentrified in the meantime? what if your mutual friend has become estranged? We miss parts of ourselves, and accumulate new ones. And there are questions about what happens if you press the replicate button twice in a row. I find these possibilities provocative rather than disqualifying. Conversations like these can help us understand our dreams for each other and for ourselves and for our world. A stodgy idea about "identical things" should not close the door to such conversations.