Upsetting Our Sense of Self
Imagine that you’ve been fatally injured in a car wreck, and your doctor offers to implant your brain in another perfectly healthy body. When you wake up from the operation, who will you be? Yourself, with a new body? Or the person whose body you inhabit--with memories of being someone else?
Or think about this: You are told that tonight your brain will be transplanted into someone else’s body, and that person’s brain will be implanted in yours. Tomorrow, one of the two will be tortured. If you had a choice, which would you want tortured: the other body with your transplanted brain, or your present body with the other person’s brain?
Your answer will depend on whether you think the self is embodied in the body, or is mainly in the brain.
Many people believe it is neither, but some overarching personal essence that ties body and soul together. But even scientists can’t put a finger on it.
Ever since Scottish researchers cloned a sheep from an adult cell, everyone from the president to the guy next door has been wringing their hands over what such a technology might mean for the cherished human sense of “self.” Thinking about clones seems to plunge people into identity crises far worse than anything brought on by adolescence or midlife.
After all, if identity is written into genes, and those genes can be copied, then what becomes of the self as a unique creation?
“It [cloning] scares people because it makes people worry about what it is about themselves that is their own,” said scholar Hillel Schwartz, author of “The Culture of the Copy.” “If what is unique about us is not the body, then what is it? That’s a terrifying question.”
As creepy as human clones may seem, they would be far less alike than identical twins. Both clones and twins share the same genetic blueprint. But twins also grow side by side in the same womb, awash in the same maternal juices, listening to the gurglings of the same maternal gut and the regular rhythms of the same maternal heart.
And yet they manage to emerge as intact, independent individuals. So identity crises are unlikely to arise in the real world.
Still, philosophers have long worried about the essence of the self, and concerns about identity and soul preoccupy thinkers from theologians to mathematicians:
* What does it mean to be the same as something or someone else?
* Where does the self, and soul, reside?
* How much of who we are is contained in our DNA, and how much is shaped by forces outside ourselves?
* Is a copy of a person an individual in his own right?
* Who, exactly, are a clone’s rightful mother and father?
Even if cloning does not mean that our identities are in danger, the issue does hit us where we live. The problem is figuring out exactly where that is.
The Same, but Not Identical
One thing is certain: The answer is not in the atoms.
Every atom in the human body gets replaced within a seven-year period, according to conventional scientific wisdom. If your “self” is the atoms that make you up, then you become someone else every seven years. You’re not even yourself from one day to the next, or even from moment to moment.
“If O.J. [Simpson] had tried to get off by mounting appeals for seven years, then saying: Gee, you’ve taken so long to convict me, I’m not the same person, that would be bull. . . ,” said Stanford philosopher John Perry, who specializes in the study of identity. “We’re not [trying] the atoms. We’re [trying] the person.”
But suppose, the philosophers say, that you could somehow replicate each and every atom in your body. Would that other “you” be the same? It turns out that’s not a simple question.
Identity means uniqueness, not sameness, explains Perry. “Identity means there’s only one.” Identical twins are not identical, but only the same--and there’s a major difference.
Even things that are physically exact copies are not necessarily the same. Imagine that someone is able to make perfect counterfeit money, in every way exactly the same as real money printed at the mint. Is it the same?
No, says logician Keith Devlin of St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga. Context matters. History matters.
“Even if there were no property that allowed you to distinguish the [fake] money [from the real money], it would still be counterfeit because it wasn’t produced in the right social environment. It wasn’t produced by the government. Identity is not in its intrinsic properties. It’s in context.”
A Picasso isn’t a Picasso unless it can be traced to Picasso’s hand. Similarly, a clone cannot be traced to a traditional mother and father, so it isn’t the same as a child conceived in the normal way. Indeed, says Caltech Vice Provost David Goodstein, a clone is more like a delayed twin than a child. The ewe that donated the DNA to make the famous Dolly is not Dolly’s mother. “It’s Dolly’s sister,” said Goodstein, a physicist.
The clone’s odd ancestry creates conundrums for theologians. “These new medical advances [including surrogate mothers] have been the occasion for a lot of Rabbinic rulings,” said Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff, rector and professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
For example, Dorff said the Conservative movement’s committee on Jewish law and standards has ruled that an infertile couple may use the new technologies, but they must get counseling to become aware of some of the psychological issues involved for them and for the child. In addition, the ruling declares that if the woman who bears the child is Jewish, the child is Jewish, no matter where the egg came from. If she is not Jewish, the child is not Jewish even if the egg came from a Jewish woman.
Either way, a human clone would not be the same as its donor even if it were exactly identical in every way, simply because it did not come to be by the same process as the original.
Of course, sameness is not possible in complex systems such as people--simply because of the vast numbers of possible permutations. Considering the hemoglobin molecules (or any similarly complex molecule) in human blood, the probability of two being exactly the same in any single human body is close to zero. Chemist Roald Hoffmann, who discusses such issues in his book “The Same and Not the Same,” says the probability of two things being equal goes way down as the complexity goes up.
Clones cannot be physically the same down to the last atomic isotope. But the pattern encoded in the DNA--that is, the genetic blueprint--is the same.
As a result, clones will look a great deal alike--unless one becomes, say, a sedentary drug addict and the other runs marathons and sticks to a macrobiotic diet.
But exactly similar genes do not exactly similar people make. Any given person carries around the same genetic blueprints from the moment they are conceived to the day they die. Yet they hardly look, or feel, similar when they’re a fetus and when they’re 15 or 45. The person changes physically, emotionally, intellectually--even as the DNA stays the same. “We don’t give Nobel Prizes to babies,” said Devlin.
The genetic blueprints of a caterpillar and a butterfly are exactly the same. And yet one takes flight and the other crawls on the ground.
Amid so many drastic changes, where could the seemingly permanent sense of self reside?
Philosophers say it can be found in memory, in the sum total of a person’s experiences. “What we think is important about a human being is their mind--the memories and experiences they know firsthand,” Perry said. “It would be crazy to think of it any other way.”
A philosopher would definitely put the “self” in the brain, Perry said.
Yet even if identity is all in the mind, it is not clear how it stays permanent enough to account for the sense of self--because as people go through life, they change their minds continuously, and literally.
Aspects of personality may be inborn, but neuroscientists seem to agree that much of who we are is acquired through life’s experiences. If you took the DNA of Albert Einstein and placed it in the womb of a woman in Hollywood in the 1990s who breathed Southern California air, ate fast food and worked 16 hours a day on an assembly line, what would you get? What if Einstein had grown up watching MTV?
Conversely, what if Madonna’s DNA were placed in Einstein’s mother?
“We don’t just come as bodies, we come as bodies in a world,” said Philip Hefner, director of the Chicago Center for Religion and Science, who grew up in Denver in the 1940s. “If I had a clone raised on Chicago’s South Side in the ‘80s and ‘90s, even with my identical genes, you know that person is going to be different because he’s in a different world.”
The sense of self “clearly develops” as children grow up, says San Francisco State University neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who studies learning and memory in children. “It’s not that there aren’t inherited contributions. But evidence suggests that it [sense of self] changes throughout child development as much as any other factor.”
Just as a child learns to use its muscles, and shapes them through his activity or sloth, so the self evolves, he says.
The mind gets molded not only by the outside world, but also by the physical body itself. Eyes, ears, noses and fingers all filter our perceptions. Magic Johnson does not see the world in the same way as Tom Thumb.
Even the gut, according to recent research, seems to have a mind of its own, generating emotions that are felt in the brain, instead of vice versa. The stomach is packed with tiny nerve fibers to send information to the brain, and scientists think it communicates far more than hunger.
Much neuroscience of recent years has shown that the brain is surprisingly plastic. Amputees continue to feel pain or tickling in limbs that no longer exist. The brain reconfigures itself in response to rearrangements of the body.
All this would suggest that the body and “self” are inseparable partners. Alas, U.S. courts have consistently ruled otherwise. In perhaps the most famous and extreme case, the California Supreme Court decided in 1991 that a cancer patient named John Moore did not have a right to profits from UCLA’s use of his diseased cells to produce new drugs. According to the court, in other words, a patient does not own his own body.
Despite what the courts say, most people’s sense of self includes their body parts--even when those parts are artificial, or “borrowed” from another human or other species. Few worry that identity gets watered down in a heart transplant. The whole self is a lot more than the sum of its parts, experts say, so the way the individual parts are shuffled from day to day doesn’t seem to matter much to the integrity of the whole.
This holistic view of self fits nicely with the philosophers’ view of identity. A person has identity in the same way as the Mississippi River has identity, Perry says. The Mississippi has clear identity because there’s only one Mississippi, even though it changes continually, and sometimes drastically. Standing in one spot on the river, new water molecules drift by, different varieties of fish float through, kingdoms of microorganisms live and breed and die, and sands shift, changing the river’s form.
In a sense, the only thing that doesn’t change is its identity.
The same is true of other things that we cannot put our fingers on, even though they are clearly unique and self-contained--a baseball game, for example, or an ant colony. A specific game or ant colony retains its integrity no matter what happens to individual players or ants.
Indeed, the largest living organisms are just such communal beings. Depending on which group of researchers you believe, the winner of that honor is either a 106-acre quaking aspen grove in Utah, or a fungus in the forests of Michigan that weighs more than a blue whale.
If one tree or one fungus cell dies, it does not affect the integrity of the organism.
A Society Fascinated by Copies
The idea that self is more than the sum of parts, brains or DNA is one that clerics use to dismiss the idea that Jesus was the first clone. He had a father, but no mother, the argument goes. He got his DNA only from God.
“No doubt there will be some sermons preached on Jesus as the clone of God,” said theologian John B. Cobb, now retired from Claremont School of Theology. “I hope my pastor doesn’t do it.”
Since Jesus is viewed as both God and man, however, the clone theory breaks down. There is also the problem that “God doesn’t have a physical body. [That] would make it qualitatively different from a clone,” said Scott B. Rae, associate professor of biblical studies and Christian ethics at Biola University in La Mirada.
In the end, our obsession with our own uniqueness may not be a good thing, Schwartz says. The Greek word for private person, idion, came down to us as “idiot,” and for good reason. An idiot is a person so private he becomes unintelligible, Schwartz says.
“We would be idiots if each of us only spoke a private language,” he said. “If one insists exclusively on private, personal rights, then one ends up with an idiotic society.”
Indeed, despite a 300-year-old tradition in the West that exalts the individual self above all else, he says, we are a society obsessed with making copies of ourselves. The way we “prove” that we are who we are is by showing someone a copy--a picture on a driver’s license, a copy of our fingerprints. Important people are copied endlessly in the media: Their words and images become more real than the originals, sometimes even to the originals themselves.
“One could make the outrageous argument that cloning is the way we prove who we are,” Schwartz said. “Rather than threaten our identity, it becomes the greatest affirmation of our identity.”
There is a danger here, of course. Copies fade. Copies of copies of copies degenerate even more.
Every child has to struggle to create a separate identity from their parents, said Rabbi Dorff. Cloning, he said, would make creating “the child’s identity all the harder.” Not only would the child be a chip off the old block, the chip’s genes would be exact duplicates of the original.
On the other hand, growing up as a copy doesn’t have to create psychological burdens. As physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein points out, nature has already produced experiments far more drastic than cloning in the form of Siamese twins, who seem to suffer no higher incidence of mental illness than the rest of the population.
“Imagine not only being identical, but being attached to your identical twin for life,” he said. “Cloning seems tame by comparison.”
Thoughts on the Self
Know thyself.
--Plato’s “Protagoras”
*
This above all--to thine own self be true,...
--Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”
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Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
--”Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll.
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It is a poor center of a man’s actions, himself.
--Francis Bacon in “Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self”
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A man is least known to himself.
--Cicero, from “De oratore”
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Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction.
--The Frog and the Ox by Aesop, circa 550 B.C.
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It is as easy to deceive oneself without perceiving it as it is difficult to deceive others without their perceiving it.
--La Rochefoucauld, from “Maxims”
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He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.
--”Poor Richard’s Almanack” (1739) by Benjamin Franklin.
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There will be other songs to sing, another fall, another spring, nut there will never be another you.
--Popular song from 1942 by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren.
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Where I seek myself, I find not myself: and I find myself more by chance than by the search of mine own judgement.
--Montaigne, from “Essays”
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He that teaches himself has a fool for a master.
--17th century proverb
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To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
--”An Ideal Husband” by Oscar Wilde.
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To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
--Albert Camus in “Notebooks 1935-1942”
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No person...shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.
--U.S. Constitution, Amendment V (adopted Dec. 15, 1791)
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Self-respect--The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.
--H.L. Mencken from “Chrestomathy 618”.
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I’ll face the unknown, I’ll build a world of my own. No one knows better than I, myself, I’m by myself, alone.
--Popular song from 1937 written by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz
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Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
--Samuel Butler, from “Remains,” 1675.
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Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.
--Eric Hoffler in “The Ordeal of Change”
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Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery!
--Matthew Arnold, from “Self-Dependence”
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Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong, whether I find a place in this world or never belong, I’ve gotta be me, I’ve gotta be me, what else can I be but what I am?
--Popular song from 1967 written by Walter Marks
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Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.
--Shakespeare, “Henry V”
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Go far; come near; you still must be the center of your own small mystery.
--Walter de la Mare, from “Go Far; Come Near”
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Self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood.
--Shelley, from “Prometheus Unbound”
Sources: “Dictionary of Quotations” by Bergan Evans; “Familiar Quotations” by John Bartlett; “Who Wrote That Song?” by Dick Jacobs.
Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times
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Famous Duplicates
The dream of having a clone to keep you company, play tricks on people or do your bidding has a long literary history. The following are some examples of famous doubles and the messages they carried.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”--two sides of the same doctor, one beneficent, the other monstrous, good contrasted sharply with evil. It raises the spectre of evil clones: What if someone wanted to clone Hitler or Jack the Ripper?
“Frankenstein” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley--Young Dr. Frankenstein tries to create life in his own image from spare parts and winds up with the monster who destroys him. Another warning against the dangers of playing God.
Mark Twain’s classic children’s tale “The Prince and the Pauper” turns on the human desire to change places with someone else to see how the other half lives--something having human clones would allow.
Bette Davis in “A Stolen Life,” a 1946 film about twin sisters, one good, one evil. The evil twin kills the good twin and takes her place with the man they both love. Once again, the moral is the inherent danger of an evil clone.
In the words of the theme song of “The Patty Duke Show”: “Cousins, identical cousins all the way. One pair of matching bookends, different as night and day...” The episodes of in the early 1960s were about shifting roles to discover new experiences or to trick people.
Hayley Mills in the 1961 Disney movie “The Parent Trap” played identical twins who’ve never met before but who join forces to reunite their divorced parents. What better way to use a clone?
Gemini, the astrological sign of the twins. The symbol in the zodiac of the flexible, multifaceted personality, Geminis do many things at once, just as many clones of one person could.
Elvis impersonators--Elvis Aaron Presley himself was actually an identical twin; his brother Jesse Garon was stillborn just minutes before Elvis was born alive. Why is this rockabilly singer still imitated so often, when other beloved stars are not?
Which Twin has the Toni Home Permanent? Clones for advertising--in this case, touting the benefits of a product that produces curls so natural you can’t tell them from the real thing.
As portrayed by Tony Curtis in the 1960 film “The Great Imposter”, Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., a real-life imposter who succeeded in a variety of professional guises, including a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy and a Trappist monk. A real-life clone of sorts who got away with playing many roles.
In the 1996 comic film “Multiplicity,” Michael Keaton played a character who has himself cloned in order to better handle the many responsibilities in his life. Trouble ensues when each of his clones turns out to have distinct--often clashing--personalities. The fourth clone is a copy of a copy--a stumbling shadow of the original. Could we ensure that human clones would always be exact replicas?
Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times
ON THE WEB: Graphics, photos and stories from “In Our Own Image” are available on the Los Angeles Times World Wide Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/cloning/
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About This Series
The cloning of a sheep named Dolly sent shockwaves throughout the world this year. But that is only one of a host of advances in biotechnology. The revolution is touching virtually all corners existence, from conception to nutrition to disease control. The genetic engineering advances also raise basic questions about how society will deal with these newfound abilities, who should control their use and how far research should be allowed to proceed.
Sunday: The biotechnology revolution--the future has arrived.
Today: What is the “self” and can it be cloned?
Tuesday: The U.S. government’s reluctance to regulate reproductive technology raises some thorny issues.
Wednesday: The quest to map the human genome leads down some unusual roads.
Thursday: Barnyard biotech--of cows with medicinal milk and pigs with human-like organs.
