Around Harvard Square by C. J. Farley

Author:C. J. Farley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2019-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

Let Down

As usual, Professor Hyacinth Bell’s lecture that day was unusual. The Chair stood in front of the class and pretended to slowly grind open a large, heavy door. “The philosopher Lefty Parfit poses this question: Imagine I’ve opened the gateway to a teleporter. Just like the teleporters you see in sci-fi movies and TV shows. This teleporter records the exact state of every cell in your brain and body, and in doing so, destroys it. The information is then transported at the speed of light to Mars, where your body is reconstructed like something issued from a 3-D printer. Would you step into this machine?”

“Hell no!” Lao called out.

“Is that the depth of your insight? Give us more. Why?”

“Because it wouldn’t be me. It’s new matter shaped to look like me.”

“Let’s adjust the parameters. What if the machine was able to deconstruct your body, cell by cell, and reconstruct it on Mars using those exact same cells?”

“Still no. Because I’d be dead during the time I was being transmitted—and I’m not sure I’d still be alive when my body was reconstituted on Mars.”

“So we have isolated a few important principles that could well be key to personal identity,” the Chair concluded. “One: matter matters. If we’re not in our own bodies, it’s not really us. Two: stream of consciousness matters. If there are interruptions in our consciousness, it calls into question our continuity—and identity.”

“That sounds about right,” Lao said.

“What if I told you that everything we discussed already happens to you every hour, every day, every year? Cells in your body, memories in your head, are continually replaced by new ones. There is not one cell in your body today that is the same as the ones that you were born with. Every time you sleep, there is a break in your stream of consciousness. You will have different atoms in your body, and different thoughts in your head, and many interruptions in your consciousness, from dreams or drunkenness or drugs, from the start of this semester to the end. Perhaps by senior year you will still consider yourself the same person you were as a freshman—but maybe you will be someone else entirely. This same shift can happen to communities and companies and countries. We are never who we were.”

“So are you saying that there’s no such thing as identity?” Meera asked.

“I’m saying that we’re all riding on a beam of light,” the Chair replied. “It’s an open question who we’ll be when we land on Mars.”

* * *

The Chair’s office was dark when I arrived after class. I peeked through the glass windows and the only light inside was the greenish gleam of a computer screen and the orange glow from the embers of a spliff in the ashtray. There were stacks of boxes on her desk and the floor. One of them read, Archives. Office hours had ended just five minutes earlier but the Chair was already long gone.

I left Emerson Hall and headed out into the Square.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.