Survival

ANDREW BRENNAN

S U R V I V A L

In an earlier paper, I suggested that one way of making sense of the claim that certain kinds of resurrection may be as good as survival is to distinguish between persons as types and persons as tokens. 1 If resurrection of the sort suggested by Parfit were to occur, 2 then exact replicas of people now alive would be constructed by God to serve as their representatives, so to speak, at the Great Day of Judgment. Clearly, there are pressures on us to regard such replicas as not identical with those whose replicas they are. Yet, for Parfit, the emergence of a replica of this sort is as good as survival. This proposal, focusing on the notion of survival, has the benefit of side-stepping many of the difficult issues surrounding the notion of identity. For all that, it is not clear how much sense we can make of the idea of survival, until we are clear what it is for something to survive in - or as - another thing, and what the nature of the surviving item is. My previous suggestion was simply that the type-token distinction is one way of making sense of the Parfit claim. My replica at the Great Day of Judgment is another token of the person type, one token of which is writing this paper now. Such a distinction between type and token persons fits in nicely with currently popular conceptions of persons as software for software itself is something which admits of a type-token distinction. 3

In this paper, I want to show that persons are by no means alone in permitting a type-token distinction. Having established by reference to apparently innocuous thought experiments that the distinction can be made to apply to any kind of object at all, it is prudent to review the sort of metaphysical mess the supposition threatens to land us in. I conclude by showing one not entirely satisfactory way out of the mess.

1. TELECLONING

The teleclone will play an important role in the development of my arguments. The virtues of both Mark IV and Mark V teleclones have been publicised by Dennet t ¢ but for those unacquainted with these devices, a brief description follows. A standard Mark IV unit consists of

Synthese 59 (1984) 339-361. 0039-7857/84/0593-0339 $02.30 © 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

340 A N D R E W B R E N N A N

a teleport unit and a (normally) distant receiver unit. Anyone wishing to travel to some outpost of the Galaxy simply reports to a teleport terminal where their body will be swiftly and painlessly dismantled into its molecular, and submolecular components. At the same time, a blueprint is made, detailing the structure and arrangement of every molecule and atom and in due course, this blueprint is beamed at light speed to the receiver unit, where carbon based molecules are pitched together according to the plans. Thus a replica of the 'traveller' exactly as he or she was at the moment of decomposition (to use a word with unfortunate associations in this context) is constructed, ready to go forth upon the alien terrain.

The Mark V machine is very similar. Using computer assisted, non- invasive scanning techniques, however, it produces replicas without the need for the original body to be decomposed at the teleport station. At first sight, such a machine seems to be a boon for the busy inter- stellar executive. Too much work to be done here, and a deal that needs to be clinched in person on remote Aldebaran 6? The Mark V teleclone will leave you free to continue your work here while your replica clinches the deal there. We philosophers, however, can see that problems arise for the Mark V machine that are of a different degree of complexity from those posed by consideration of the workings of the Mark IV model. As for the Mark VI model, on which Dennett is silent, its peculiarities will be discussed in due course. For our present purposes, though, I will only make use of examples involving the original, Mark IV, model.

So what about 'travelling' by teleclone? Forgetting about the risks - mangled blueprints, double replication, and so on - let us consider whether the teleclone is a way of getting from one place to another, or is instead, in Dennett's words, a 'murdering twinmaker'. The particular body which presents itself for scanning and decomposition seems to be destroyed by the telecloning process; at least we tend to take this view of the matter as long as we think of a body as an aggregate of matter. Yet the replica that emerges at the other end is equipped with so similar a body that we must pause over our verdict here. For the Parfit-minded, a person can be said to survive telecloning to some degree. At first sight, this might seem to show that there is more to a person than this or that aggregate of bodily material. The bodily material does not survive, but the person does. Against such a view I want to argue that if it makes sense to claim that the person survives telecloning, then it makes equal sense to claim that their body does. Likewise, houses, stones, chairs and

SURVIVAL 341

trees can all be regarded as capable of surviving the teleclone. Before pressing on with the argument, there are two caveats I must

make clear. The first is that I am not arguing that persons, or any other things, would survive telecloning. My own view about the case of persons is agnostic: just as some identity questions are, I think, indeterminate, so too are these survival ones. Such indeterminacy does not of course preclude the possibility of arguing that we could survive such procedures. The second point is related to the first. Even if there were no fact of the matter about whether we could survive telecloning, it would not follow that telecloning might not be the right thing to do in certain circumstances. To see this most clearly, imagine that, instead of recognising the indeterminacy, my firm belief is that death awaits me inside the teleport chamber. Yet I know that my telecloned replica will carry many of my distinctive characteristics, that even those near and dear to me will be unable to tell the replica from the real me. In circumstances in which I face death in any case, stranded in some remote nook of a dying star system, then I might choose to be telecloned, convinced though I am that I would in no way survive.

So, returning to the argument, let us start by considering what does survive the destruction of a person's bodily material inside the teleport chamber. Suppose, for the moment, that we can make sense of memories, ambitions, desires, intentions and other such characteristics surviving the procedure. Parfit's notions of q-remembering, q-intend- ing, and so on precisely fit the bill here. 5 But if once we admit the intelligibility of such notions, it is hard to resist the idea that we are thereby granting memories and the rest the double aspect of token and type. With some', rare and startling exceptions, we think of memories as unique to those that have them. O-memories are not like that at all. I can q-remember the experience of someone other than me, like the man in Williarns's story who wakens up one morning with all the memories of Guy Fawkes. 6 If remembering were really q-remembering, then this would mean that the same memory type could be shared by a number of people, each of whom has their own token of that type. My replica after telecloning, then, has the same memories, intentions, and ambitions as me in the sense that we share the same types, while each has his own tokens of those types.

So much for 1:he easy case. The more controversial claim is that the whole person survives telecloning. In this case, our Parfit-minded philosopher claims that I survive in, or as my replica. Since survival comes in degrees, telecloning is just an extreme case of it. Were I to


wake up tomorrow with a sizeable portion of Jane Austen's memories, then she could be said to survive, to some small degree, in me. In the case of telecloning, the degree of survival is very high, so high that we may come to feel uncomfortable about declaring that the destruction of a person during the production of a blueprint is any more than the destruction of a token of a person type. Likewise, for those who claim that we could survive as computer programs, some sense can be made of this, by thinking of our being tokened in this or that computer, rather than in this or that body. What is.difficult about this case is that we do not seem forced to opt for type-token language; it is one way of giving sense to the Parfit claim. Once we make the move, though, we are able to make sense both of intuitions about survival and those ~about destruction. The person token is destroyed; but (with any luck) the type survives, as it were, through the new token.

With these points in mind, my argument can now be put more clearly. Suppose that we were to admit that persons do indeed survive telecloning. Then, I would urge, we cannot avoid extending the same possibility to other objects. Anything that can be accommodated inside the teleport terminal can survive the procedure - a stone, a building, a tree. The scratches on the stone, the dust in the building, every fine detail of the bark will be preserved in the replicas. So why not regard all objects as apt for telecloning? There are a number of worries that might make someone convinced that persons survive telecloning yet hesitate to agree with the proposed extension. To make the extension more plausible, we might construct the following rather bizarre case. In a novel by Douglas Adams, we are confronted with the total destruction of the planet earth to make way for a new hyperspatial bypass. 7 Suppose, though, that the technology capable of unleashing such massive destructive power were capable of producing a teleclone device of staggeringly huge dimensions. To remove the planet from its current location, it is disintegrated while an immense blueprint is made of every living and non-living thing and their relative dispositions. At an equally gigantic receiving station, this blueprint enables an atom by atom reconstruction of a twin-earth to take place. There is still a Mount Everest, and a Limpopo, on the replica, but not one atom, not one virus is common to it and its original. Would we want to say in this case that the people and other living things have survived, but not the mountains, rocks and rivers? If we say that the living things survive, why not say the same of any ordinary object?

S U R V I V A L 343

A Lockean who has been attending to this example now makes the following points. When the whole planet is telecloned, the living things do indeed survive, but the other ordinary objects are replaced by exactly similar objects. To say that the latter kind of things survived would be to obscure an important difference between the living and the non-living. For non-living things are 'mere cohesions of Particles of Matter any how united', while living things are a disposition of particles together with an organisation of such parts suitable for receiving and distributing nourishment and for continuing the vegetable life of the thing in question, s It is the replication of this organisation, or structure, which makes plausible the claim that a living thing survives telecloning to some degree; telecloning, indeed, is but an extreme case of the continual renewal of material typical of such organised living things.

There are at least two things wrong with this sort of objection. In the first place, we can ask our Lockean to consider what we would say if it turns out that the world is different from the way the objection imagines it. The best physical theory might, in the end, tell us that atoms are continually being renewed, that quartz crystals, despite their apparent lethargy, undergo more frequent renewals of their smallest components than any living thing does. There seems no good reason to rule out a priori a science that reveals such a discrepancy between how things appear, and how they in fact are. But such a scientific turn would, in effect, put living and nonliving things on the same footing in respect of telecloning. The production of replicas would not be an intrinsically different thing depending on the status of what is being replicated. Indeed, it would then be the organised structure that would distinguish one piece of quartz from another, not the mere aggregate of material in each.

The second, more powerful, response is to point out that the Lockean objection is wrong in regard to things as we currently think they are. We need no fanciful modifications Of contemporary science to enable us to regard stones, blocks of wood and lumps of metal as more than mere cohesions of particles united in any old way. Even the sketchiest knowledge of science brings with it an understanding of the importance of s t ruc ture . Indeed, we do not need to descend to atomic structure or the details of crystallography to find this out. A particular pattern of its grain may be distinctive of, and quite unique to, a certain block of wood. The block could be regarded as surviving telecloning, perhaps, to the extent that the pattern survives. When steel fractures through


fatigue, the break shows a distinctive crystal pattern, but the arrangement of crystals is unique to each fracture. A broken chunk of propellor, then, survives to the extent that its replica preserves that crystal pattern (as well as other structures).

The Lockean objection has been important, though. For it has drawn our attention to the fact that an appeal to structure can underpin a survival judgment. The notion of structure is, most commonly, the notion of a type, and so we should have no problems with the claim that a structure survives from one thing to another thing. But if enough structures are common to an object and its replica, then there are grounds for the claim that an object survives (to some degree) in - or as

- its replica. In this way, ordinary, non-living things have possibilities of survival analogous to those for persons. For we saw that memories, intentions and the rest can (like structures) be regarded as types. And if enough of them survive from an original to a replica, we seem able to countenance talk about the survival of the person in question. But now, just as we found one way of making sense of the notion of the survival of a person by a further appeal to talk about types, it is open to us to make just the same move for all the other things that may survive telecloning.

2. ARTEFACTS

In the light of the arguments just given, there seems to be a case for distinguishing stone types from stone tokens, and Mount Everest types from Mount Everest tokens. Thinking about the teleclone has brought home to us possibilities that we might never previously have considered. Until we think about replicating Mount Everest, the notion that it is a token of a certain type might seem too absurd for words. Yet we are quite aware, when dealing with a different range of objects, that a type-token distinction applies, even if we are not able to say, in every case, whether reference is being made to the one or the other. The objects in question are artefacts.

The distinction between type and token artefacts is not hard to draw, even if, as Wiggins notes, identity conditions for artefact tokens are not in practice clear. 9 My present car is a token of the type Saab 99; as it ages, and undergoes mechanical and bodywork repairs, I tend to regard it as still being the same car (token), even though less and less of its original material remains. This casual attitude may not, in the end,

S U R V I V A L 345

satisfy the identity theorist who may wish, for theoretically sound reasons, to point out that what I regard as ownership of one car has been ownership of several. Satisfied on the whole with the service my previous car - or cars - has (or have) given me, I elect to buy a new Saab 99. If I say that I am buying the same car again, the reference would be understood as being to the type (although there are of course circumstances in which I might buy a certain token artefact more than once!).

As far as tile declarations of motoring correspondents, or con- versations in the pub, are concerned, it is not always clear when assertions concern types, and when tokens. Indeed, it seems important in various conversational contexts that a certain referential opportunism should be practised. If Albert asks Brian 'How do you like your new Cortina?' , Brian is free to take this as a reference either to a type or to a token. His own reply may, opportunistically, leave the question of reference still undecided.

This is, I suppose, no more than an exemplification of Grice's maxim of quantity. It is not that we cannot tell for any utterance whether it concerns a model (type) or a token of that model. Rather, there will be occasions where the question of whether a type or a token was being referred to is simply indeterminate. My suspicion is that such vagueness aids and abets the flow of normal conversation. It is worth noticing that it does not follow from the fact that a conversation, or an article, turns out to be abou~t the model, in the end, rather than about tokens of it, that the initial indeterminate uses were in fact about the model all along. A more plausible picture to work with here is to think of us switching from type claims back to token claims, and doing so on occasion by means of claims about which there is no fact of the matter of whether they embody reference to types or to tokens. Any given conversation could then be reconstructed in such a way that every claim was represented as being explicitly about a type or about a token. My point, in that case, is just this: there will be several such recon- structions available, no one of them obviously more true to the facts than the others.

If I am right, then it may be that some problems about artefact identity should be considered with the distinctions between types and tokens in mind. We have already touched in passing on the problem of how much change my car can undergo by way of mechanical repair and body patching while remaining one and the same car. But if by 'one and


the same car' we mean 'a token of one and the same car type' we will tolerate, maybe, greater changes of material while continuing to affirm identity than we will if we mean 'one and the same car token'. Wiggins' 'indubitably sufficient condition of artefact identity' seems to be a condition on the identity of artefact tokens, for 'it excludes all addition or subtraction of matter whatever'. 1° Yet if we are prepared to accePt conversational fudging of the distinction between types and tokens, it may be that a similar fudging occurs in arguments about identity of artefacts through time. Moreover, it may be that some problems about identity lose their urgency once we realise that for many purposes no more is required than the production or acquisition of a token of the appropriate type.

Some content can be given to these reflections by looking at the well-known case of Theseus' ship. In this peculiar example of fission we are asked to imagine that a ship is laboriously repaired, plank by plank, staying afloat all the time. At the end of the process, we have a ship that is structurally identical with the original, but composed of completely new material. At the same time, someone with a love of old things has been obsessively hoarding the discarded planks, rigging and sails, from which to construct a ship structurally identical with the original, but also composed of all the original material. With the Parfit-minded, we can say that Theseus' ship has survived twice over. The identity theorist, though, wants to know which ship - the continuously functioning one, or the plank-hoarder's one - is numerically identical with the original one. The theorist may, in this case, have set a question to which there is no determinate answer. But, though we recognise this, we can also observe that some of the concerns that might prompt the question are capable of being satisfied even in the absence of firm guidance on the matter of token identity.

The ship case, indeed, is no more than a special case of what goes on in standard artefact manufacturing processes. It is not unusual for a prototype artefact to be produced; for simplicity, let us suppose this to be a token, which, if it performs with due success in a number of trials, will be replicated through some manufacturing process. The prototype will have been produced according to a set of plans and specifications of materials to be used in production. Rather like the score of a symphony, which enables different performances of the same work to be given, the plans will enable different tokens of the same type to be made. Think now of Theseus' ship as embodying uniquely a particular

SURVIVAL 347

design. It is, then rather like a prototype. Its continual repair, and the construction of the plank-hoarder's ship, represents a somewhat eccen- tric (and inefficient) manufacturing process. The process, though, has the advantage that it can be carried out even if the original plans have been mislaid. Suppose that in the less unusual case, we launch into full production after trials of the prototype have been successfully com- pleted. We can then bring it about that there are two tokens of the same ship type available (the prototype and the first of the production run). Likewise, in our odd case, we have also brought it about that there are two tokens of a type available. The complication is simply that we are not able to say for sure which token (if either) is identical with the prototype. For certain purposes, of course, like insurance, and legal claims to ownership, it is important that the matter of token identity be settled, and it is noteworthy that treatments of this topic have often concentrated on the legal problems involved. 11 But not all practical problems are so awkward in the resolving. A purchaser of one of the token ships, for example may be well satisfied with either if what had impressed her were the good sea-going properties of the type. The decision to buy the plank-hoarder's or the continuously functioning ship, if both were on offer, would then be made by reference to relative cost, and likely life-expectancy, both of which would no doubt differ from token to token.

Suppose, for a different case, that a naval archaeologist, some hundreds of years after both ships have sunk, has the choice of recovering one but not both. Further, information is available to make clear which token ship lies in which location. As a result of various lawsuits, let us further imagine, it has been established that, for insurance purposes, the continuing ship which stayed afloat until all its components we, re entirely replaced was one and the same token ship throughout. Even so, it is by no means clear that this decision settles the matter for our archaeologist. On the contrary, of the two tokens, it may be the plank-hoarder's that is of greater archaeological interest, for it will yield information about the original woods used, perhaps also providing evidence about methods of construction - evidence that may not be so readily gleaned from the continuously functioning ship. The point is that the process has yielded a double survival of Theseus' ship: not only is this double success not a failure, it allows us interesting choices that are., in some cases independent of decisions, whatever they may be, on token identity.


To say all this is to skate thinly over various difficult issues. It looks as though the question of artefact modification might raise the same sort of difficulties as the problem of what counts as the per formance of a given musical work (admitting wrong notes, variations of tempo and so on) rather than a per formance of a different work. It seems clear that the same concerto can survive transcriptions f rom violins and strings to organ (as with Bach 's transcriptions of Vivaldi) yet in a chain of such a t tempted transcriptions there would come a point where it no longer seems to make sense to claim that the original work survives. 12 Likewise, my car can perhaps undergo various modifications to its bodywork and engine while still surviving. And this time we can go on to imagine a succession of such changes whose result would be the product ion of a different car - perhaps even a token of a different model (not so hard to do these days when sports cars and estates are variations on one underlying saloon design) - or even the product ion of no car at all.

So what is required to ensure that a ship, or a car, survives? It will be some time before we are in a position to give a complete answer to this question (and, in the case of persons and similar items, I am not sure that any determinate answer is available). For the moment , let us note two features of an account of artefact survival. The first is that each time I modify an artefact such modification must leave me with enough structure in com m on with the original, but need not leave me either with a token of the same artefact type or even with an item with similar functions to the original. There seems to be no reason why a car should not survive, to some degree, modifications which change the original to a different model, a Saab to a Volvo, say. 13 Such survival would be aided in situations where f rom a token of a given model (type) we can fairly readily, or easily, obtain a token of a different model. The ease of the t ransformation in such cases will be explained by the closeness of the structures in question.

The point about function is perhaps more controversial . If we think of fairly general artefact types, it is clear that broadly similar functions can be discharged by items of markedly different structures. Yet, of course, we give an artefact a particular structure so that it can per form its specific function or functions. Nonetheless survival of an individual may involve us assigning a later token to a quite different artefact type, while funct ion-preserving modifications may fail to support survival claims. Thus a house may be thought not to survive a series of changes

S U R V I V A L 349

even when each change results in a house, and a bidet with its taps removed may survive happily on the patio as a flowerpot.

The second important feature of the account is this. Suppose I undertake a series of modifications to a car. Even though at the end of it all I have before me a putative token of some car type, it is not necessary for the claim that the car survives that I be able to specify just how many such tokens my modifications produced along the way.

Startling though these results seem, more surprises are in store for us if we combine ~Lhe considerations emerging from this section with those adduced in the, preceding one. There will be times, I have suggested, when it is impossible to tell whether a certain expression is being used to refer to an artefact type or an artefact token. And in the case of natural objects I have suggested using the type/token distinction to make sense of what Parfit and others have said about survival. So suppose we agree, albeit provisionally, to regard whatever it is that survives telecloning as the type, not t!~e token. But if persons can survive the teleclone so, I have argued, can stones.

There will be those, of course, who balk at the thought of even a person surviving the process; others may draw a line of the sort suggested by the Lockean; yet others may draw a line elsewhere. In the absence of asking such people about telecloning or similarly fanciful situations, how could we tell from their referential practices just where they draw their lines? In normal circumstances we will be unable to derive evidence one way or the other. So our present referential practices are compatible with construing all our apparent references to concrete individuals as in fact references to types. Put differently: it could be that the basic items in our universe are not the concrete individuals we unreflectingly take them to be.

Moreover , artefacts themselves now face a double difficulty. For although we used the vocabulary of type and token to distinguish car models from their various physical embodiments, those physical embodiments may themselves be far less concrete than we might uncritically have supposed. Albert 's car, taken as a token complete with dents, simulated sheepskin seat covers and stereo cassette player, is as apt for telecloning as any other thing. So what we have been taking as tokens for one purpose (in contrast with the designer's Form, as it were) can also - from the point of view of their surviving telecloning - be regarded as types. Our present considerations seem to be taking us along a route that few contemporary philosophers would traverse

350 ANDREW BRENNAN

without significant qualms - the path to platonism.

3. T H E P H I L O S O P H E R ' S S T O N E

The quite remarkable case of the philosopher's stone poses an even greater threat to our metaphysical sanity than any of the matters considered so far. The possibilities of transmutation by teleclone might have remained forever unexplored, but for a chance remark by a customer about to depart. The person in question remarked to the attending technician that it would be nice if his replica were exactly like him except for his habit of biting his nails, a vice he could well do without. The technician, whose name just happened to be Paracelsa, was prompted by the remark into starting an investigation of the whole issue of blueprint modification. As is obvious, blueprints contained both structural information about atomic and molecular arrangements and also specifications of the nature and quantities of various materials required. At first, the prospects seemed wonderful: perhaps not only psychological characteristics could be changed, but also physical illness and even congenital defects put right.

On closer study, Paracelsa found none of these hopes borne out. The dependence of psychological characteristics on fine physiological details was not only unclear, but seemed to vary dramatically from one subject to another. And even minor changes to living things - like scar removal - threatened to have disproportionately large side effects. So Paracelsa wisely concentrated her efforts on simple inanimate structures. Thanks to computer crystallography, she was able to change internal crystalline lattices in certain structures while maintaining the object's external shape. Students of pseudomorphism were already aware of changes like those from fluorite to quartz that occurred naturally, though slowly. Paracelsa was able to teleclone a crystal of fluorite to a terminal only billionths of a light second distant, where a crystal of exactly the same shape and of precisely the same dimensions would appear, only this time the crystal was of the purest quartz. This instantaneous replication of a natural process was merely a hint of what was to come. Using Paracelsa's technique, it soon became possible to transmute by teleclone an item of virtually any material into an exactly similar item of a different material. The proverbial lump of lead could

S U R V I V A L 351

be recreated, as it were, by 'telemutation', in gleaming gold, with every scratch, every surface irregularity of the original faithfully reproduced.

Although the teleclone in Paracelsa's new Mark VI form had proved itself to be the philosopher's stone, not all philosophers were happy with how people started to describe the results of telemutation. A vogue sprang up among the wealthy, for instance, of using the process to acquire artefacts in new materials from objects whose originals had been fashioned in more workable material. A metamorphic rock like slate, or marble, does not carve well. But a wooden original, complete with fine carvings could be transmuted into slate. "Look at our slate dresser", people would say, "It was in pine, originally, and you can still see the beautiful carving on the drawers." What worried the unhappy philosophers, most of whom were essentialists of a sort, was that both artefacts and natural objects seemed, in the view of those making use of the process, to survive telemutation. Not only walking sticks, chairs and tables, but jewels, and even humble pebbles gathered from the beach, seemed to survive the most wondrous changes in their material stuff. In Aristotelian terms, it looked as if items were said to survive so long as the form of the original was the same as that of the replica, even if the matter was radically different. TM

For those readers with a sound grasp of science, who know something of crystal structure, or who are aware of the impressive and lengthy processes involved in the rock cycle - for you this latest fantasy may seem no more than a reductio of telecloning. Of course, it is not a logical reductio, but, you may protest, the case of telemutation reveals the absurdity of the procedure, viewed from the standpoint of current science: and what other reasonable standpoint is there? But if transmutation by te~eclone is absurd, so too is the whole notion of telecloning in the first place. Now if you are drawn to this conclusion, do not make the mistake of thinking that the points made by appeal to these impossible procedures collapse along with the viability of the procedures themselves. Rather, bear in mind that a philosophical point can be made quite readily by appeal to the physically impossible. Further, I could have argued that we mistake the nature of the referents of our proper names and demonstratives, and that objects can survive complete change in their material stuff, without appeal to science fiction or the physics of the absurd. The recourse to telecloning can be viewed, therefore, as no more than a dramatic heuristic device.


4 . I D E N T I T Y A N D S U R V I V A L

We seem to be in danger of departing a long way from common sense, and arguing ourselves into a world whose denizens are less concrete than our empiricist intuitions would have us take them. We think of reference, in certain ordinary cases, as a relation between expressions like 'my bicycle', 'Cally's stone' and 'Anthea's hammer' and concrete objects. Yet a consequence of referential opportunism, as we have seen, is the possibility that what we may take to be references to tokens may equally well be construed as references to types. Moreover, the Mark VI teleclone, with all its opportunities for transmutation, has added to the problem; for it looks as though, again provisionally, we might make sense of the continuing use of the same expression, e.g., 'Anthea's hammer', to refer to an object that shares only its structure, but none of its stuff, with the original referent of the expression. And the sense we make of this may again involve us taking reference to be not to the token but to a type which encompasses tokens of different materials, so long as they are structurally similar (as well as causally linked to the original token in an appropriate way). 15 It may be that, in the end, we have argued ourselves into a corner from which there is no escape. In the rest of the paper, I want to show that there are ways out of this predicament. However, my own preferred escape route is not entirely without problems of its own.

The heroic course, indeed, is to accept the consequences of the argument. The theory of identity could, perhaps, be abandoned in favour of survival theory. Not only does a grasp of survival conditions underpin our use of singular terms, but terms of divided reference, or sortal predicates, may require likewise a grasp of survival conditions for their application. We should be careful, however, not to claim benefits for this course that are not its by right. It might be held, with respect to singular terms, that they always refer to objects. A hard-nosed Fregean who takes this view may not much mind denying that such objects are the concrete bundles of stuff we unreflectingly suppose they are. A radical development of this line would be to take such objects of reference as distinct, from a semantic point of view, from the objects, whatever they are, that inhabit the 'real world'. Such a development pays immediate dividends. For example, fictional discourse does not require a different semantic treatment from other discourse. Put crudely, the objects of reference in fiction do not have correlates in the world, while in purportedly factual contexts we need to seek just such

S U R V I V A L 353

correlates; but in each case the objects of reference are abstract items, and our referential semantics would be concerned with these, while we might assign te our pragmatics (or to some other convenient pigeon- hole) the question of correlating objects in the world with the abstract ones.

Attract ive though such a model of semantics is, we can hardly claim its benefits for the heroic course. It is doubtful whether types should be taken as objects at all, albeit abstract ones. Peirce, and others who have followed him in making the type-token distinction, 16 are usually clear that types just do not exist. Whatever Frege's objects are, they can hardly be non-existent. 17 Moreover , if we do try to construe types as akin to set theoretic objects, we find ourselves in some difficulty. For what sense can we now make of the notions of type survival, or failure of type survival.? I may have doubts about surviving the teleclone, but there is no doubt at all about the survival of the set whose sole member is me. I was born, but it was not. Unless types are very different indeed from sets, the present construal of them threatens to make nonsense of our earlier modes of speaking.

So what made us think, then, that platonism was threatening at all? A confusion, I conjecture, between identity and survival. Let us go back to the original case of telecloning and consider a way of sorting out identity from survival. Matilda, let us suppose, reports for telecloning at a terminal on earth and in due course a replica of her emerges some light years away from a terminal on a remote planet. For reasons too complicated to enter into, it turns out that the replica is usually called 'Belinda', rather than 'Matilda'. Now some of us may want to say that Matilda survives in or as Belinda. But others may want to go one better and argue that, despite the complete change of bodily stuff involved Matilda and Belinda are one and the same person. Now, in what way is the identity claim different from the survival claim? Fairly obviously, the survival claim does not require that Belinda and Matilda be assigned to some one thing. For the identity claim to be true, we have to allow that Matilda and Belinda are both stages of some same person. The survival claim, by contrast, is compatible with the view that Matilda and Belinda are different persons: one thing can survive as or in another thing.

It may be objected immediately that, literally speaking, a thing can only survive as itself. A critic who takes this line would have made no sense of the earlier statement that under the right circumstances Jane


Austen could be said to survive in me; nor would the same critic be able to make sense of the idea that survival comes in degrees. For the objection amounts to no more than a denial of the distinction between identity and survival. Yet, despite the distinction between the two notions, it is all too easy to forget which notion we are operating with. It is for those who think that one same person survives telecloning that the shadow of platonism looms. For them, likewise, one numerically same thing may survive the transmutation of its substance. It may be that some people find this way of thinking entirely natural in the face of both sorts of imagined situations. Such people do not really need to resort to the distinction between type and token in order to describe the cases. Rather, they are prepared to take an episodic view of objects. Just as the screening of the final episode of some T V serial may be almost indefinitely delayed, so resurrection may be the deferred final episode in my life. This episodic view of objects seems incompatible with the view of them as concrete continuants of any kind.

Of course, someone interested in our imagined cases as cases of survival would not deny that survival is generally less problematic in one kind of case where identity questions have been settled: if Matilda and Belinda are identical, then Matilda most probably survives as Belinda. But it is possible to be sure about survival even when identity questions cannot be answered. But why, we might then wonder, talk about token and type? For to speak of two tokens belonging to the same type is to speak of two admittedly distinct items being assigned to one and the same item. And in the case where I wake up with Jane Austen's memories, the claim that she and I are tokens of the same type looks manifestly absurd.

This problem takes us to the heart of the matter. For although I have suggested making sense of s o m e cases of survival by appeal to the type/token distinction, it was not my intention to suggest that every case of survival can be thus described. In the case of words and similar symbols, we are happy to make the type/token distinction. For any given inscription can be replicated, and if it is replicated well enough, we obtain a new token of the same type as the original inscription. Now, a child, when learning to write, may at tempt to replicate a particular inscription, but do it so badly that the effort is dismissed as not an inscription of a word at all, or as an inscription of a different word. Yet something of the original transcription may survive in the child's version, even though the latter is not counted as another token of the

S U R V I V A L 3 5 5

same type as the original. Only some cases of at tempted replication, then, will be of the sort in which the type/ token vocabulary can naturally be applied.

So now we have three notions in play: identity, survival and replication. In general, where we have replication that is successful, the vocabulary of type and token is appropriate: hence the various token bicycles of the same type, or the various token performances of the same symphony. But bicycle tokens can be telecloned, and performances of symphonies can be recorded. Just as a recording of a performance may be almost as enjoyable as the real thing, so a good photocopy of a paper will do just as well as the real thing (except, perhaps, for the purposes of the manuscript collector). An atom by atom duplicate of an original - whether artefact or natural object - is not simply nearly as good as the real thing: it is as good. Telecloning belongs in the same league as other high quality replication. And, given the enormous variations in handwriting, we are rather generous in our extension of type/token language to replication processes that are of far lower quality than digital recording or photocopying. Of course, in all these cases, there will be the question of type identity. But there will be no need for us to take the referents of ordinary singular terms to be types. ~ Rather, if we claim that Matilda survives in, or as, Belinda, we are referring to - and relating - two tokens. That there will be a type of which they are both tokens does not mean that any of our everyday singular terms ~n fact refer to this type.

We can now distinguish two questions. First, under what conditions can a be said to survive as b, even though a may not be identical with b? Second, when is it appropriate to claim not only that one item survives as a different item but that, additionally, both are tokens of one and the same type? The answer to the first question need give no account of replication, unlike the answer to the second. My intention is to give an outline account of survival and then to go on to use the notion of survival in the description of what it would be for a surviving item to be a token of the same type as its original. Although the account that follows is extremely sketchy, it seems to me to be along the right lines.

In the first place, it is necessary, if a is to survive as b, that they fall under some of the same sortal universals (in Strawson's sense) but not

that they fall under any of the same characterising universals. TM In many of the examples that we have considered, the surviving item falls under


many of both sorts of universals. But in general, if a crystal or stone is to survive telemutation, what it survives as will likely be a crystal or a stone. If not, there will be some other sortal concept applicable to the original and survivor. Indeed, this first condition may be no more than a consequence of what I propose as the second, also necessary, condition: that a and b share a sufficient number of structural properties.

Such a condition as this latter sounds a bit lame at first. But we must bear in mind that survival comes in degrees, and that although in very clear cases of survival there will be a great deal of shared structure, in some cases survival to a very slim degree may depend on an equally slight sharing of structure. Interesting questions about structure arise when we turn to items of such complexity that we are able to distinguish higher level properties that appear to depend on lower level structural organisation. Robots, persons, animals and the like seem to be items of this kind. Memory, ambitions, skills, and personality are features that may depend on lower level structures in a way that beliefs, for example, may not. 19 It is possible to imagine ways in which the claim that Jane Austen survives in me, as a result of my 'acquiring' her memories, would perhaps satisfy the proposed structure criterion.

The third condition for survival is (of course!) the causal one. There must be an explanation of the appropriate causal kind linking b's possession of a certain structure or structures with a's prior possession of it or them; likewise an explanation of b's falling under a sortal by reference to a's doing so. It is fairly clear what kind of causal account will do. I dismantle my bicycle and then put the parts together again along with a new component ; we teleclone a stone by making a blueprint of it as we dismantle it and rebuilding the replica according to that blueprint. The puzzling cases arise when we are at a loss for the causal explanation. Suppose I do wake up tomorrow with all of Jane Austen's memories. To what extent does this constitute partial survival of Jane Austen or even the survival of her memories? It is in a case like this that the causal condition is of great importance. Those who regard Jane Austen as surviving, to some degree, in me are, I conjecture, revealing their belief that a causal explanation of the right kind exists, even though they may have no idea what it is. They are rather like Quine on the matter of dispositions: happy to use the language so long as they believe that one day non-dispositional properties will be discovered to explain the phenomena. 2° On the other hand, if we think that no causal explanation will ever be forthcoming for the acquisition

SURVIVAL 357

of these memories, then why talk of Jane Austen's surviving rather than making the weaker claim that her memories survive? Better still, why make any survival claim at all?

The three conditions seem to me at least necessary for a survival claim, and may well be jointly sufficient for one. What is interesting is that they make no appeal to continuity of stuff, or of fifty per cent of stuff, 21 or to any other arbitrary proportion of an item's original material. However important such appeals may be to the identity question they have little significance for matters of survival. But since survival comes in degrees, we may be tempted to think of identity as survival of the highest degree - of degree one. Such a temptation is worth resisting, for in a case like that of Theseus' ship, we may want to accord the highest degree of survival to both the plank hoarder's and the continuously functioning ship. Also, in that case, the two ships are not simply linked by the survival relation; rather they are tokens, in our sense, of the same artefact type. Let us look, then, at what we must add to the account of survival to get an account of two items tokening the same type. What I suggest, again somewhat roughly, is an account of replication. Some things can replicate themselves to an impressive degree of accuracy. Crystals can do so, and cells also. Within cells, the mechanism responsible for their reproduction is the DNA, of which those amazing replicators, the genes, are Constituted. Some writers on genes show an immediate sensitivity to the type/token issue. Thus Dawkins writes of genes in terms of 'longevity-in-the-form-of-copies' where the hyphenated phrase calls attention to a type phenomenon. 22 Whereas gene tokens are pretty well short-lived, the types of which they are tokens survive for far longer, on the whole, than the bodies they inhabit. Now, any gene token is linked to its descendants in a way that satisfies our three conditions on survival: each descendant is itself a gene; each is structurally identical to the original; and there is a causal chain of fission extending all the way back to the original. In each case of cellular fission, incidentally, there is a transfer of half the chrom- osomal material, and this transfer is a guarantor of the accuracy of the replicating procedure. But it is easy to imagine a copying process that is highly accurate without requiring such transfers of material: digital recordings for instance are amenable to copying without loss of information.

But when a gene has been replicated, or a cell for that matter, the replica is such that it too can be replicated and leave us an item


indistinguishable from the original. And the replication in question is t h e same process whether applied to the original or to its replica. Telecloning, albeit physically impossible, is likewise just such a process. The telecloned replica can itself be telecloned furnishing us with another, equally good replica. Photocopying, at least on the machines I have used, is not such a process. There comes a point where a photocopy of a photocopy of a p h o t o c o p y . . , so far from replicating an original text yields no more than a blank sheet of paper. We have now been given the clue, I think, that will enable us to make a tentative stab at the question of when one item not merely survives as another but when both can be counted as tokens of the same type. An item b is a token of the same type as a given item a when, as well as our three earlier conditions being satisfied, the following condition is also satisfied: it is uncontroversial that a survives to a very high degree as b, and b results from a by virtue of a process (of replication) such that were the same process to be applied to b to yield c, a would survive as c to the same degree as it survives as b. Thus, for example, the process that led to ttie construction of the ship of new materials from Theseus' original one, if applied to the ship of new materials would in turn result in a ship in (or as) which Theseus ' original would survive to the same degree as before. The process of copying a manuscript by scribe in theory - although notoriously not in practice - should result in a manuscript which, if copied by a scribe, would result in a manuscript in (or as) which the original work survives to the same degree as it survives in (or as) the first copy. Whereas we previously had necessary conditions on survival, it seems to me that we now have a set of sufficient conditions for producing items that are tokens of the same type as a given original - but conditions which are too strong to count as necessaryY

If these suggestions are along the right lines, we are in a position now to fill out some of our earlier remarks about type survival. For in those cases where we produce new tokens of a given object - whether by telecloning, or accurate reconstruction, or copying within admissible tolerances - what we called ' type survival' meant no more than that we had at hand a process for generating replicas of the items in question. We do, as a matter of fact, have at hand processes for replicating literary works, and crystals, but not for replicating Mount Everest, or a Monet (though if we had a (Mark V) teleclone, an original painting might come to be something of no more than historic or sentimental

S U R V I V A L 359

value, for it and its replicas would be indistinguishable). Relative to our sufficient condition for generating further tokens of an original, it is clear that tape recordings and family photographs fall far short of constituting suc, h a process in the case of persons. Yet it may be that even telecloning fails to do for persons what it promises to do for stones, chairs, and works of art. Use of the Mark IV model may still be accompanied by the uncomfortable feeling that death awaits us inside the teleport chamber. The grief of those dear to us, though, must be mitigated by the consideration that the replica emerging at the other end will be quite indistinguishable from the original! Yet what makes us take extra care with crosswind landings, and perhaps avoid teleclone machines, is not simply a concern with the reaction of others. Each one of us has the wish that w e see tomorrow, or the day after. The thought that my replica may see tomorrow may well prove unconsoling to m e no matter how high the quality of assured reproduction. In this way, our attitude to ourselves may well prove very different from our attitude to our favourite symphonies, pets, friends, lovers or spouses.

The account of survival as a relation seems to work well as a means of avoiding the undesirable platonist consequences that our earlier arguments seem to suggest. Reference, for the survival theorist, is not a problem, for one thing can survive as another. But it is not clear that all questions about types and tokens can be solved by a theory of replication. Two items may be tokens of the same type even though not linked by any survival relation, nor lying on the same causal tree. Martian DNA molecules, if just the same in composition as earth- bound ones would surely be tokens of the same type as the latter. 24 One way of dealing with this case is to opt for possible world talk: there is a possible world in which Martian DNA is the result of applying a certain process to the earth-bound variety, or vice versa. I have not yet investigated the risks and benefits of such a proposal.

However, when confronting cases of survival where we additionally want to speak of tokens of types, the strategy suggested in the paper does seem to render talk of types harmless. For in this context, it is shorthand for talk about items generated from an original by a process with certain information preserving features. Nonetheless, there is still an urge to ask what this one thing is that the replicating procedure preserves. Although I have said lamentably little about the key notion of structure, it is the reappearance of certain structural features in a replica that makes survival and type/token claims so natural. It is but a


short step to go on to regard mountains, persons, or whatever, as no more than tokens encoding these features, while regarding the features themselves as what persons, mountains and so on 'really' are. Although we have seen how to resist making this step the temptation to make it, in the case of persons, is quite strong: how convenient to come to regard oneself as the type and not just a passing t o k e n Y

N O T E S

1 In 'Personal Identity and Personal Survival', Analysis 42, 1982, 44-50. 2 D. Pan'it, 'On "The Importance of Self-Identity" ', Journal of Philosophy 68, 1971, 683-90. 3 See the selection in part IV, 'Mind as Program', of D. C. Dennett and D. R. Hofstadter, The Mind's I, Basic Books, New York, 1981. 4 In the introduction to Dennett and Hofstadter, The Mind's I. 5 D. Parfit, 'Personal Identity', Philosophical Review 80, 1971, 3-27. 6 Bernard Williams, 'Personal Identity and Individuation', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57, 1956/7, 229-252. 7 Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Pan Books 1979. 8 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 27 is the source of the view, and of some of the vocabulary, in the paragraph. 9 See chapter 3, and associated footnotes, in D. Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980. lo Ibid., p. 97. Indeed, Wiggins' sufficient condition seems to rule out artefacts which are designed to change in order to carry out their functions. Drilling machines, welding tools, and the like are subject to regular additions to, and subtraction from, their stuff, and more bizarre artefacts are not hard to envisage. 11 For example, see B. Smart, 'How to Reidentify the ship of Theseus', Analysis 32, 1972, 145-48. 12 Goodman, notoriously, allows no genuine perfermance of a given work to diviate from the score by as much as one note; see Chapter V of Languages of Art, Bobbs Merrill, 1968. For a criticism of Goodman in the recent literature see N. Wolterstoff, Works and Worlds of Art, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. 13 Notice that my Saab, qua Saab, will probably not survive as a Volvo; nor, trivially, would even a S~ab 99 EMS survive, qua FMS, as a 99 GL. The 'probably' in the foregoing sentence is a hedge against the possibility that one day the Saab and Volvo design teams come up, independently, with r~utually indiscernible new models. 14 See Book I Chapter 7 of Aristotle's Phy~cs, W. Charlton (trans.), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970. 15 We need to be wary of ambiguity lurkingin the phrase 'Anthea's hammer'. As Murray MacBeath has pointed "out to me, a telecloned Anthea's hammer may well not be Anthea's at all - if I have paid a copyright f3e for the sole 'tele-reproduction' rights of her admirable design. 16 See volume 4, paragraph 537 of C. S. ?circe, Collected Papers, Hartshore et al. (eds.),

S U R V I V A L 3 6 1

Belknap Press, Canlbridge, MA, 1960. Compare J. Margolis, 'Nature, Culture and Persons', Theory and Decision 13, 1981, 311-29. 17 Frege himself makes no such declaration. Indeed, his ontology is such that his notion of object seems to be dependent on his notion of singular term. So if we accept that a given proper name is genuinely referential, then an object is what the referent of that proper name is. Put negatively: 'An object is anything that is not a function, so that an expression for it does not contain any empty place' (P. T. Geach and M. Black, Translations from &e Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1970, p. 32). However, that Frege's objects are not non-existent is an easy inference from remarks in, for example, 'On Sense and Reference'. Js Chapter 5 of Individuals, Methuen, 1959. 19 For a problem about beliefs and psychological autonomy see S. Stich, 'Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis', Monist 61, 1978, 573-91. 2o W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1960, § 46. 21 Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, p. 97. 22 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976, p. 30. 23 Perhaps some weakening of the condition that a would survive as c to the same degree as it survives as b might make the conditions start to look more plausible (here and in the text, a, b and c are taken to be distinct items). In real life, we are often content with processes that result in nearly as high a degree of survival of a in c as it has in b (consider the process of making photographic prints from photographic prints). An errors in replication may in many cases be just as acceptable as errors in musical performances (but see note 12). 24 I owe the example, and the associated proposal, to Neit Tennant who has also pointed out to me that telecloning might offer interesting possibilities for asexual reproduction. Given certain assumptions, genes which inclined their possessors to use Mark V teleclones might come to predominate over those whose possessors are inclined to stay with old-fashioned :sexual modes of reproduction. Blueprint modification could ensure genetic diversity, and simultaneous telecloning for a couple might enable us to carry out operations that are out of the body equivalents of meiosis and the other genetic processes. 25 The topics in this paper have been discussed with colleagues at Stifling to whom, jointly and severally, I am indebted for stimulation and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Murray MacBeath and Nell Tennant for their searching but constructive reading of an earlier draft.

Dept. of Philosophy University of Stifling Stifling FK9 4LA Scotland

Survival

Documents

Transcript of Survival