Tales from the Third Lobe - Persistence of Identity

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

Look at my hand. We'll, okay, you probably can't do that right now. So, assuming you might have a hand of your own—and if you don't, you're ahead of the story, so please wait for the rest of us to catch up—you may look at your own hand.

At the very end of the long skinny bits there are probably these whitish translucent scales we extrude called, for some reason, nails—though, for them to actually look like nails, we probably would have to slide a considerable distance back down the evolutionary tree and climb up another branch. Yours might have been painted over or mislaid or confiscated because you refused to talk, but ordinarily they would be there, pretty much as I've described them.

If you have nails, then you are probably aware that they frequently change length, gradually getting longer and then quickly getting shorter. If they didn't get shorter periodically, they'd drag the ground when you walked and get slammed in car doors and when you went to pick your nose, you'd pick your brain. Or even someone else's brain if they were standing too close. You'd have to put your contact lenses in with a slingshot, hoping for a good bounce.

"Long" is a relative term. When we say that one's nails are long, we're probably still measuring them in millimeters, or centimeters at the outside. Longer than that, we have to modify the adjective "long" with the adverb "ludicrously".

So we amputate them. We cut them, lose them to pull-rings on top of soda cans, gnaw them off, and/or, possibly, wear them off on the sidewalk and/or slam them in car doors. We rarely hold funerals for them. We aren't lessened when they're gone, because in all likelihood, they'll be back. And eventually even grow to become annoying again, like deeply religious politicians.

If we were a certain category of small lizard, we could get rid of annoying lengths of our own spines. "Annoying", in this case, means "currently in the grasp of a predator", but the principle is sound.

Certain types of amphibians can replace even more than that. And then there are arthropods and other similar creatures that take advantage of the molting process in order to regrow lost appendages.

It's when we lose something we can't replace that we feel lessened. For instance, my tail, amputated at birth, never grew back. My foreskin hasn't either, but I hear that for that, at least, there are... procedures. They involve cumbersome things like clamps and learning to walk with a cinder block dangling on a cable between my legs for a month or two, but I think I'll pass on that for now.

It would be rather awkward socially. I'd have to get a tailor to adapt my interviewing suit.

Misfortune, cruelty, and poor judgment often relieve us of parts of us that don't grow back. If we don't die from our losses, we typically carry on....

But are we really less of who we once were?

How much do we have to lose before we're no longer who we were? How much more can we lose after that before we're no longer part of a family? Before we're no longer human? Before we're no longer alive?

Think about that for a bit, because the answers to those questions are going to change dramatically over the next few decades.

As medicine, technology, and engineering advance, we'll become more and more able to replace the lost bits, either with parts that perform the exact same function, so that it's impossible to tell that something was ever missing, or perhaps with something radically different. Or improved in some way.

Raise your hand—or hook—or stump—if you think you see where I'm going with this.

There's a mental equivalent to all this, too. You can forget something important. You can replace something you knew to be true with something that is truer. You can learn new mental tools, like some new form of mathematics or a language or scientific rigor. And you can remember forgotten things, sometimes out of nowhere, sometimes by stumbling across old photographs or journals or things in the back of the fridge.

How much forgetting or remembering or learning or relearning does it take to change who you are? How much do you have to forget before you are destroyed? If you somehow miraculously remember all of it again later, have you come back from the dead?

If you trim too much off of your identity, will it regrow?

And about here I lose interest. I mean, seriously. Pointless abstractions.

You are who you are right now, a collection of all of the parts that make up you and, as such—get this—subject to change without notice, physically, mentally, or otherwise. The only reason you think you're the same person when you wake up as you were when you went to sleep is habit. Social convention. Expectations of others.

Your identity is no kind of object for the toddler-lesson of Object Persistence to apply to. It's a phantom.

The identity that gets stolen in the crime of Identity Theft is a set of interfaces to your financial data and purchasing power. You can have a hundred different identities like that and wear whichever one suits you at the moment. I expect this to just get stranger in the future.

For instance, I've written stuff using a bunch of different identities, most of which are identified (ahem) by the name I use and occasionally a set of styles, themes, and/or subject matters. If someone were to ape the style and typical content from one of those identities well enough, the only person who would know that it wasn't me writing would be myself. And, under certain circumstance, even I might be fooled.

But writing is a behavior, and behaviors are governed by personalities. So basically, I have whole personalities—or substantial fragments thereof—that I can put on or take off like clothes. Or pick up and use like tools, more accurately. Tools for interacting with others.

Abstractions like identities and personalities are merely intellectual property. With enough sophistication, I can encode them and transmit them to others. Like corporations. Which, with respect to a certain set of interactions with the world at large, are legally people. Except they have the right to be utter bastards to ordinary people, which is it's own kind of class-crime.... And the crimes are committed by a detachable (and often detached identity (or personality, if you will). With no real body or soul behind it.

You have a different identity or personality for every dimension of interaction—among friends, among family, at work, at school, among fellow hobbyists, and probably six or seven more for use only online. You can sprout a horde of different identities that you keep until you discard them—or until someone else takes them away from you with pliers.

Don't like your identity? Buy a new one on eBay. Get a transcript of past transactions so you can get a feel for the history and personality, get a list of usernames and passwords for various chat rooms, and go have fun. Just be warned that you might not have exclusive use.

How long do we have before this is available for bodies? Any idea? Raise your hand.

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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy .