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2019 TOK General Introduction-Jenny Gillett.pdf

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ideas-roadshow-ibdp-portal/

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Ideas Roadshow's new IBDP Portal offers a comprehensive multidisciplinary database of more than 400 video and print resources tailor-made for the Diploma Programme, capturing uniquely accessible insights of over 60 top researchers to support teachers and students with TOK, the Extended Essay and 21 DP subjects.

For details about institutional and individual subscriptions please use the contact form.

The database is designed to be used in 4 primary ways:

THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

247 videos offering real-world examples of theory of knowledge in today's top-level research

Over 500 sample knowledge questions linked directly to video content

Comprehensive TOK Guides to assist both teachers and students

CONNECTING TOK WITH OTHER DP SUBJECTS

Detailed TOK Connections Guides for 21 DP subjects, highlighting specific overlaps with TOK

At least one sample knowledge question associated with every video

7 TOK Samplers, demonstrating TOK concepts within an interdisciplinary framework

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Extensive EE Student Guide for 21 DP subjects

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Overview videos highlighting content associated with different DP subjects

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Ideas Roadshow's new IBDP Portal offers a comprehensive multidisciplinary database of more than 400 video and print resources tailor-made for the Diploma Programme, capturing uniquely accessible insights of over 60 top researchers to support teachers and students with TOK, the Extended Essay and 21 DP subjects.

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The term 'fake news' has become commonplace. This lesson helps young people to think about how it applies to them and their lives.

The vast majority are using smartphones, tablets and laptops to access material across the web - some of which will be true, but some will be inaccurate, false and even fake.

Again, most students use social media, often having accounts long before the recommended age of 13 ( Children's Online Privacy Protection Act).

This lesson guides them through various types of false and fake news and explains:

The BBC's definition of false information distributed deliberately, usually for political or commercial purposes

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Lesson 1: Real versus fake news - BBC Academy

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The term 'fake news' has become commonplace. This lesson helps young people to think about how it applies to them and their lives. The vast majority are using smartphones, tablets and laptops to access material across the web - some of which will be true, but some will be inaccurate, false and even fake.

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Objective 1. To examine our interpretation of the world around us and knowledge of both the human and physical environment. Resources: Presentation - Click here Guardian Article - Click here BBC News...

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Merging of 2 perspectives does not necessarily translate to actual, objective reality. That which is real, in fact does not even need acknowledgement, it just is.

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worksheet & Vox Article on Cognitive Bias

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Links, articles, ideas and nonsense from and for the IBDP Theory of Knowledge course

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Cognitive bias, justified true belief, personal and shared knowledge, natural sciences. Attached is a worksheet.

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Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions.

"We're biased to preserve our sense of rightness," he told me, "and we have to be."

The author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Sloman's research focuses on judgment, decision-making, and reasoning. He's especially interested in what's called "the illusion of explanatory depth." This is how cognitive scientists refer to our tendency to overestimate our understanding of how the world works.

We do this, Sloman says, because of our reliance on other minds.

"The decisions we make, the attitudes we form, the judgments we make, depend very much on what other people are thinking," he said.

If the people around us are wrong about something, there's a good chance we will be too. Proximity to truth compounds in the same way.

In this interview, Sloman and I talk about the problem of unjustified belief. I ask him about the political implications of his research, and if he thinks the rise of "fake news" and "alternative facts" has amplified our cognitive biases.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

How do people form opinions?

Steven Sloman

I really do believe that our attitudes are shaped much more by our social groups than they are by facts on the ground. We are not great reasoners. Most people don't like to think at all, or like to think as little as possible. And by most, I mean roughly 70 percent of the population. Even the rest seem to devote a lot of their resources to justifying beliefs that they want to hold, as opposed to forming credible beliefs based only on fact.

Think about if you were to utter a fact that contradicted the opinions of the majority of those in your social group. You pay a price for that. If I said I voted for Trump, most of my academic colleagues would think I'm crazy. They wouldn't want to talk to me. That's how social pressure influences our epistemological commitments, and it often does it in imperceptible ways.

Sean Illing

This is another way of saying that we live in a community of knowledge.

Steven Sloman

That's right. I believe every thought we have depends on thoughts that other people are having. When I cross the street, my actions depend on the thoughts that are going through the mind of the driver's head. If I get on the bus, the success of my endeavor depends on the thoughts that are going on in the bus driver's head.

When I express an attitude about immigration, what am I really doing? What do I really know about immigration? I live in a very limited universe, and so I have to depend on the beliefs and knowledge of other people. I know what I've read; I know what I've heard from experts. I don't have any direct experience of the immigration problem; I haven't visited the border and studied it myself.

In that sense, the decisions we make, the attitudes we form, the judgments we make, depend very much on what other people are thinking.

Sean Illing

There are some obvious dangers here, right?

Steven Sloman

One danger is that if I think I understand because the people around me think they understand, and the people around me all think they understand because the people around them all think they understand, then it turns out we can all have this strong sense of understanding even though no one really has any idea what they're talking about.

Sean Illing

I'm trying to think about all of this in terms of our political circumstances. Most of us don't understand as much as we think, and yet we're all cocksure about a range of issues. So when we are arguing about politics, what are we really arguing about? Is it about getting it right or is it about preserving our sense of rightness?

Steven Sloman

I'm not sure there's a sharp distinction between wanting to get it right and wanting to preserve our sense of rightness. In the political domain, like most domains in which we don't just hear or see what's true, we rely on social consensus. So argument is about trying to convince others while we're trying to convince ourselves. Getting it right essentially means we're convinced.

Of course, we're biased to preserve our sense of rightness, but we have to be. If we weren't, we'd be starting again each time we approached an issue; our previous arguments would be for naught.

Nevertheless, people differ on this. Everyone has a compulsion to be right, meaning that they want the people around them to think they're right, and this is easily achieved by mouthing the things that the people around you say. And people who are more capable tend to be better at finding ways to interpret new facts in line with their community's preconceptions.

But some people do try to rise above the crowd: to verify claims independently, to give fair hearing to others' claims, and to follow the data where it actually leads. In fact, many people are trained to do that: scientists, judges, forensic investigators, physicians, etc. That doesn't mean they always do (and they don't always), just that they're supposed to try.

I like to live in communities that put a premium on getting things right even when they fly in the face of social norms. This means living with constant tension, but it's worth it.

Sean Illing

This phenomenon, the "illusion of explanatory depth," applies equally to people on the left and the right. This isn't a partisan problem; it's a human problem.

Steven Sloman

That's exactly right, and our data shows this clearly.

Sean Illing

How do you collect that data? What sorts of experiments have you done to tease out these tendencies?

Steven Sloman

I run experiments in my lab and over the internet. We try to find representative groups of Americans and ask them questions, mostly hypothetical questions. In the case of the illusion with political policies, we ask people to rate their attitude and their understanding of a policy, then ask them to explain the policy (what it is and how it would lead to specific consequences), and then they rate their own understanding and their attitude again. We find that the attempt to explain reduces their sense of understanding and also makes their attitude less extreme, on average.

Sean Illing

Is it necessarily a bad thing that we rely on other people for much of our knowledge? Is this just a response to our bandwidth problem? There's only so much we can know and learn for ourselves, so it seems we have little choice but to function as we do.

Steven Sloman

I think it's necessary. We have no choice. There's no way one head can master everything, so we have to depend on other people. This is a perfectly rational response to our condition. However, we don't have to live in an illusion. If we don't understand, we don't have to think that we understand. But I get that some people have to believe that they understand in order to get through life.

The problem is that too often our beliefs support ideas or policies that are totally unjustified.

Sean Illing

This is where we careen into troubling territory for me. Ignorance and confidence is a lethal cocktail. When someone's confidence scales with their ignorance, there's really no way to engage them.

Steven Sloman

That's absolutely right. This is a very dangerous kind of hubris. And our president is really example number one of this. But we have to think about the community that made this administration possible. As much as I hate hearing Trump lie, I get even crazier when I see that 44 percent of the American population put more faith in his words than in the mainstream media.

That's what makes me crazy, because that's what gives him his power.
[Author's note: a recent latest Quinnipiac Poll indicates that 37 percent of Americans trust Trump more than the media.]
Sean Illing

Well this is why the preponderance of "fake news" and "alternative facts" is so pernicious.

Steven Sloman

Absolutely. I worry about this on the right and, as you suggested, I worry about this on the left as well.

Sean Illing

Is there any evidence to suggest that we're getting better at reasoning? Are we gradually overcoming our cognitive biases?

Steven Sloman

My reaction to this is so different than it would've been eight months ago.

Sean Illing

I'm guessing you think the internet and our balkanized media landscape has made things worse.

Steven Sloman

It's very clear that we're even more in a bubble than we ever were. I've been shocked by how little I know about half the American population. I just can't get my head around the way they think at all. And that hasn't changed. Even though I make an effort, it's still the case that everyone around me sees things the way I do, and I'm sure nearly everyone in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sees things differently. But I don't talk to those people.

The internet is clearly making it worse in the sense that we can reach out and form these online communities of fellow believers. And the fact that our news is getting individualized makes it much worse. So, even if I want to understand what the other side sees, Google is constantly feeding me the things I want to see.

And that's bad for all of us.

Sean Illing

So do you have any thoughts in terms of practical solutions to this? How can we cultivate more self-awareness and less biased reasoning? How can we seek out wiser communities of knowledge?

Steven Sloman

People who are more reflective are less susceptible to the illusion. There are some simple questions you can use to measure reflectivity. They tend to have this form: How many animals of each kind did Moses load onto the ark? Most people say two, but more reflective people say zero. (It was Noah, not Moses who built the ark.)

The trick is to not only come to a conclusion, but to verify that conclusion. There are many communities that encourage verification (e.g., scientific, forensic, medical, judicial communities). You just need one person to say, "are you sure?" and for everyone else to care about the justification. There's no reason that every community could not adopt these kinds of norms. The problem of course is that there's a strong compulsion to make people feel good by telling them what they want to hear, and for everyone to agree. That's largely what gives us a sense of identity. There's a strong tension here.

My colleagues and I are studying whether one way to open up discourse is to try to change the nature of conversation from a focus on what people value to one about actual consequences. When you talk about actual consequences, you're forced into the weeds of what's actually happening, which is a diversion from our normal focus on our feelings and what's going on in our heads.

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Why we pretend to know things, explained by a cognitive scientist

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Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions. "We're biased to preserve our sense of rightness," he told me, "and we have to be."

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That black and white photo of the policeman’s dog lunging at the young Black man? Turns out it is not showing what we thought.

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Listen to "The Foot Soldier of Birmingham" Season 2 Episode 4 of The Revisionist History Podcast with Malcolm Gladwell.

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KQ: Is it necessary to read a book to know it?

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KQ: Is it necessary to read a book to know it?

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I recall, though my recollection may be faulty, a magnificent article by Giorgio Manganelli explaining how a sophisticated reader can know whether a book is worth reading even before he opens it. He wasn't referring to the capacity often required of a professional reader, or a keen and discerning reader, to judge from an opening line, from two pages glanced at random, from the index, or often from the bibliography, whether or not a book is worth reading. This, I say, is simply experience. No, Manganelli was talking about a kind of illumination, a gift that he was evidently and paradoxically claiming to have.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, is not about how you might know not to read a book but how you can happily talk about a book you haven't read, even to your students, even when it's a book of extraordinary importance. His calculation is scientific. Good libraries hold several millions of books: even if we read a book a day, we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we'll have read only 25,200. A trifle. On the other hand, any Italian who's had a good secondary education knows perfectly well that they can participate in a discussion, let's say, on Matteo Bandello, Francesco Guicciardini, Matteo Boiardo, on the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, or on Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian, knowing only the name and something about the critical context, but without ever having read a word.

And critical context is Bayard's crucial point. He declares without shame that he has never read James Joyce's Ulysses, but that he can talk about it by alluding to the fact that it's a retelling of the Odyssey, which he also admits never having read in its entirety, that it is based on an internal monologue, that the action unfolds in Dublin during a single day, et cetera. "As a result," he writes, "I often find myself alluding to Joyce without the slightest anxiety." Knowing a book's relationship to other books often means you know more about it than you do on actually reading it.

Bayard shows how, when you read certain neglected books, you realize you're familiar with their contents because they have been read by others who have talked about them, quoted from them, or have moved in the same current of ideas. He makes some extremely amusing observations on a number of literary texts that refer to books never read, including Robert Musil, Graham Greene, Paul Valéry, Anatole France, and David Lodge. And he does me the honor of devoting a whole chapter to my The Name of the Rose, where William of Baskerville demonstrates a familiarity with the second book of Aristotle's Poetics while holding it in his hands for the very first time. He does so for the simple reason that he infers what it says from some other pages of Aristotle. I'm not citing this passage out of mere vanity, though, as we shall see at the end of this article.

An intriguing aspect of this book, which is less paradoxical than it might seem, is that we also forget a very large percentage of the books we have actually read, and indeed we build a sort of virtual picture of them that consists not so much of what they say but what they have conjured up in our mind. So that if someone who hasn't read a book cites nonexistent passages or situations from it, we are ready to believe that they are in the book.

Bayard is not interested so much in people reading other people's books, as in the idea-and here is the voice of the psychoanalyst rather than the professor of literature-that every reading or nonreading or imperfect reading must have a creative aspect, and that, to put it simply, readers have to do their own bit. And he looks forward to the prospect of a school where students "invent" books they don't have to read, since talking about unread books is a means to self-awareness.

Except that Bayard demonstrates how, when someone talks about a book he or she hasn't read, even those who have read it don't realize what he or she has said about it is wrong. Toward the end of his book, he admits he has introduced three false pieces of information in his summaries of The Name of the Rose, Graham Greene's The Third Man, and David Lodge's Changing Places. The amusing thing is that, when I read them, I immediately noticed the error regarding Graham Greene, was doubtful about David Lodge, but didn't notice the error in my own book. This probably means that I didn't read Bayard's book properly, or alternatively, and both he and my readers would be entitled to suspect this, that I merely skimmed through it. But the most interesting thing is that Bayard has failed to notice that, in admitting his three intentional errors, he implicitly assumes that one way of reading is more correct than others, so that he carries out a meticulous study of the books he quotes in order to support his theory about not reading them. The contradiction is so apparent that it makes one wonder whether Bayard has actually read the book he's written.

Excerpted from Chronicles of a Liquid Society by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon. Copyright © 2016 by La nave di Teseo Editore, Milano. English translation copyright © 2017 by Richard Dixon. Reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor.

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I recall, though my recollection may be faulty, a magnificent article by Giorgio Manganelli explaining how a sophisticated reader can know whether a book is worth reading even before he opens it.

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When you say the word "me," you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It's one of the things you're cleareston in the whole world-something you've understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, "Who amI?" but what you're figuring out is the who am part of the question-the I part is obvious. It's just you. Easy.

But when you stop and actually think about it for a minute-about what "me" really boils down to at its core-things start to get pretty weird. Let's give it a try.

We'll start with the first thing most people equate with what a person is-the physical body itself. The Body Theory says that that's what makes you you. And that would make sense. It doesn't matter what's happening in your life-if your body stops working, you die. If Mark goes through something traumatic and his family says, "It really changed him-he's just not the same person anymore," they don't literally mean Mark isn't the same person-he's changed, but he's still Mark, because Mark's body is Mark, no matter what he's acting like. Humans believe they're so much more than a hunk of flesh and bone, but in the end, a physical ant is the ant, a squirrel's body is the squirrel, and a human is its body. This is the Body Theory-let's test it:

So what happens when you cut your fingernails? You're changing your body, severing some of its atoms from the whole. Does that mean you're not you anymore? Definitely not-you're still you.

How about if you get a liver transplant? Bigger deal, but definitely still you, right?

What if you get a terrible disease and need to replace your liver, kidney, heart, lungs, blood, and facial tissue with synthetic parts, but after all the surgery, you're fine and can live your life normally. Would your family say that you had died because most of your physical body was gone? No, they wouldn't. You'd still be you. None of that is needed for you to be you.

Well maybe it's your DNA? Maybe that's the core thing that makes you you, and none of these organ transplants matter because your remaining cells all still contain your DNA, and they're what maintains "you." One major problem-identical twins have identical DNA, and they're not the same person. You are you, and your identical twin is most certainly not you. DNA isn't the answer.

So far, the Body Theory isn't looking too good. We keep changing major parts of the body, and you keep being you.

But how about your brain?

Let's say a mad scientist captures both you and Bill Clinton and locks the two of you up in a room.

The scientist then performs an operation on both of you, whereby he safely removes each of your brains and switches them into the other's head. Then he seals up your skulls and wakes you both up. You look down and you're in a totally different body-Bill Clinton's body. And across the room, you see your body-with Bill Clinton's personality.

Now, are you still you? Well, my intuition says that you're you-you still have your exact personality and all your memories-you're just in Bill Clinton's body now. You'd go find your family to explain what happened:

Consider this-

Philosopher John Locke's memory theory of personal identity suggests that what makes you you is your memory of your experiences. Under Locke's definition of you, the new Bill Clinton in this latest example is you, despite not containing any part of your physical body, not even your brain.

This suggests a new theory we'll call The Data Theory, which says that you're not your physical body at all. Maybe what makes you you is your brain's data -your memories and your personality.

We seem to be homing in on something, but the best way to get to concrete answers is by testing these theories in hypothetical scenarios. Here's an interesting one, conceived by British philosopher Bernard Williams:

Situation 1:The mad scientist kidnaps you and Clinton, switches your brain data with Clinton's, as in the latest example, wakes you both up, and then walks over to the body of Clinton, where you supposedly reside, and says, "I'm now going to horribly torture one of you-which one should I torture?"

Situation 2:The mad scientist captures you and Clinton, except he doesn't do anything to your brains yet. He comes over to you-normal you with your normal brain and body-and asks you a series of questions. Here's how I think it would play out:

Mad Scientist: Okay so here's what's happening. I'm gonna torture one of you. Who should I torture?

You: [pointing at Clinton] Him.

MS: Okay but there's something else-before I torture whoever I torture, I'm going to wipe both of your brains of all memories, so when the torture is happening, neither of you will remember who you were before this. Does that change your choice?

You: Nope. Torture him.

MS: One more thing-before the torture happens, not only am I going to wipe your brains clean, I'm going to build new circuitry into your brain that will convince you that you're Bill Clinton. By the time I'm done, you'll think you're Bill Clinton and you'll have all of his memories and his full personality and anything else that he thinks or feels or knows. I'll do the same thing to him, convincing him he's you. Does that change your choice?

You: Um, no. Regardless of any delusion I'm going through and no matter who I think I am, I don't want to go through the horrible pain of being tortured. Insane people still feel pain. Torture him.

So in the first situation, I think you'd choose to have your own body tortured. But in the second, I think you'd choose Bill Clinton's body-at least I would. But the thing is- they're the exact same example. In both cases, before any torture happens, Clinton's brain ends up with all of your data and your brain has his-the difference is just at which point in the process you were asked to decide. In both cases, your goal is for you to not be tortured, but in the first situation, you felt that after the brain data swap, you were in Clinton's body, with all of your personality and memories there with you-while in the second situation, if you're like me, you didn't care what was going to happen with the two brains' data, you believed that you would remain with your physical brain, and body, either way.

Choosing your body to be the one tortured in the first situation is an argument for the Data Theory-you believe that where your data goes, you go. Choosing Clinton's body to be tortured in the second situation is an argument for the Brain Theory, because you believe that regardless of what he does with your brain's data, you will continue to be in your own body, because that's where your physical brain is. Some might even take it a step further, and if the mad scientist told you he was even going to switch your physical brains, you'd still choose Clinton's body, with your brain in it, to be tortured. Those that would torture a body with their own brain in it over torturing their own body believe in the Body Theory.

Not sure about you, but I'm finishing this experiment still divided. Let's try another. Here's my version of modern philosopher Derek Parfit's teletransporter thought experiment, which he first described in his book Reasons and Persons -

The Teletransporter Thought Experiment

It's the year 2700. The human race has invented all kinds of technology unimaginable in today's world. One of these technologies is teleportation-the ability to transport yourself to distant places at the speed of light. Here's how it works-

You go into a Departure Chamber-a little room the size of a small cubicle.

You set your location-let's say you're in Boston and your destination is London-and when you're ready to go, you press the button on the wall. The chamber walls then scan your entire body, uploading the exact molecular makeup of your body-every atom that makes up every part of you and its precise location-and as it scans, it destroys, so every cell in your body is destroyed by the scanner as it goes.

When it's finished (the Departure Chamber is now empty after destroying all of your cells), it beams your body's information to an Arrival Chamber in London, which has all the necessary atoms waiting there ready to go. The Arrival Chamber uses the data to re-form your entire body with its storage of atoms, and when it's finished you walk out of the chamber in London looking and feeling exactly how you did back in Boston-you're in the same mood, you're hungry just like you were before, you even have the same paper cut on your thumb you got that morning.

The whole process, from the time you hit the button in the Departure Chamber to when you walk out of the Arrival Chamber in London, takes five minutes-but to you it feels instantaneous. You hit the button, things go black for a blink, and now you're standing in London. Cool, right?

In 2700, this is common technology. Everyone you know travels by teleportation. In addition to the convenience of speed, it's incredibly safe-no one has ever gotten hurt doing it.

But then one day, you head into the Departure Chamber in Boston for your normal morning commute to your job in London, you press the big button on the wall, and you hear the scanner turn on, but it doesn't work.

The normal split-second blackout never happens, and when you walk out of the chamber, sure enough, you're still in Boston. You head to the check-in counter and tell the woman working there that the Departure Chamber is broken, and you ask her if there's another one you can use, since you have an early meeting and don't want to be late.

She looks down at her records and says, "Hm-it looks like the scanner worked and collected its data just fine, but the cell destroyer that usually works in conjunction with the scanner has malfunctioned."

"No," you explain, "it couldn't have worked, because I'm still here. And I'm late for this meeting-can you please set me up with a new Departure Chamber?"

She pulls up a video screen and says, "No, it did work-see? There you are in London-it looks like you're gonna be right on time for your meeting." She shows you the screen, and you see yourself walking on the street in London.

"But that can't be me," you say, "because I'm still here."

At that point, her supervisor comes into the room and explains that she's correct-the scanner worked as normal and you're in London as planned. The only thing that didn't work was the cell destroyer in the Departure Chamber here in Boston. "It's not a problem, though," he tells you, "we can just set you up in another chamber and activate its cell destroyer and finish the job."

And even though this isn't anything that wasn't going to happen before-in fact, you have your cells destroyed twice every day-suddenly, you're horrified at the prospect.

"Wait-no-I don't want to do that-I'll die."

The supervisor explains, "You won't die sir. You just saw yourself in London-you're alive and well."

"But that's not me. That's a replica of me-an imposter. I'm the real me-you can't destroy my cells!"

The supervisor and the woman glance awkwardly at each other. "I'm really sorry sir-but we're obligated by law to destroy your cells. We're not allowed to form the body of a person in an Arrival Chamber without destroying the body's cells in a Departure Chamber."

You stare at them in disbelief and then run for the door. Two security guards come out and grab you. They drag you toward a chamber that will destroy your cells, as you kick and scream...

__________

If you're like me, in the first part of that story, you were pretty into the idea of teletransportation, and by the end, you were not.

The question the story poses is, "Is teletransportation, as described in this experiment, a form of traveling? Or a form of dying?

This question might have been ambiguous when I first described it-it might have even felt like a perfectly safe way of traveling-but by the end, it felt much more like a form of dying. Which means that every day when you commute to work from Boston to London, you're killed by the cell destroyer, and a replica of you is created. 1 To the people who know you, you survive teletransportation just fine, the same way your wife seems just fine when she arrives home to you after her own teletransportation, talking about her day and discussing plans for next week. But is it possible that your wife was actually killed that day, and the person you're kissing now was just created a few minutes ago?

Well again, it depends on what you are. Someone who believes in the Data Theory would posit that London you is you as much as Boston you, and that teletransportation is perfectly survivable. But we all related to Boston you's terror at the end there-could anyone really believe that he should be fine with being obliterated just because his data is safe and alive over in London? Further, if the teletransporter could beam your data to London for reassembly, couldn't it also beam it to 50 other cities and create 50 new versions of you? You'd be hard-pressed to argue that those were all you. To me, the teletransporter experiment is a big strike against the Data Theory.

All of this seems like very good news for Body Theory and Brain Theory. But let's not judge things yet. Here's another experiment:

The Split Brain Experiment

A cool fact about the human brain is that the left and right hemispheres function as their own little worlds, each with their own things to worry about, but if you remove one half of someone's brain, they can sometimes not only survive, but their remaining brain half can learn to do many of the other half's previous jobs, allowing the person to live a normal life. That's right-you could lose half of your brain and potentially function normally.

So say you have an identical twin sibling named Bob who develops a fatal brain defect. You decide to save him by giving him half of your brain. Doctors operate on both of you, discarding his brain and replacing it with half of yours. When you wake up, you feel normal and like yourself. Your twin (who already has your identical DNA because you're twins) wakes up with your exact personality and memories.

When you realize this, you panic for a minute that your twin now knows all of your innermost thoughts and feelings on absolutely everything, and you're about to make him promise not to tell anyone, when it hits you that you of course don't have to tell him. He's not your twin-he's you. He's just as intent on your privacy as you are, because it's his privacy too.

As you look over at the guy who used to be Bob and watch him freak out that he's in Bob's body now instead of his own, you wonder, "Why did I stay in my body and not wake up in Bob's? Both brain halves are me, so why am I distinctly in my body and not seeing and thinking in dual split-screen right now, from both of our points of view? And whatever part of me is in Bob's head, why did I lose touch with it? Who is the me in Bob's head, and how did he end up over there while I stayed here?"

Brain Theory is shitting his pants right now-it makes no sense. If people are supposed to go wherever their brains go, what happens when a brain is in two places at once? Data Theory, who was badly embarrassed by the teletransporter experiment, is doing no better in this one.

But Body Theory-who was shot down at the very beginning of the post-is suddenly all smug and thrilled with himself. Body Theory says "Of course you woke up in your own body-your body is what makes you you. Your brain is just the tool your body uses to think. Bob isn't you-he's Bob. He's just now a Bob who has your thoughts and personality. There's nothing Bob's body can ever do to not be Bob." This would help explain why you stayed in your body.

So a nice boost for Body Theory, but let's take a look at a couple more things-

Body Theory (and Brain Theory) would point out that the only difference between Boston you and London you was that London you was made out of different atoms. London you's body was like your body, but it was still made of different material. So is that it? Could Body Theory explain this too?

Let's put it through two tests:

The Cell Replacement Test

Imagine I replace a cell in your arm with an identical, but foreign, replica cell. Are you not you anymore? Of course you are. But how about if, one at a time, I replace 1% of your cells with replicas? How about 10%? 30%? 60%? The London you was composed of 100% replacement cells, and we decided that that was not you-so when does the "crossover" happen? How many of your cells do we need to swap out for replicas before you "die" and what's remaining becomes your replica?

Something feels off with this, right? Considering that the cells we're replacing are molecularly identical to those we're removing, and someone watching this all happen wouldn't even notice anything change about you, it seems implausible that you'd ever die during this process, even if we eventually replaced 100% of your cells with replicas. But if your cells are eventually all replicas, how are you any different from London you?

The Body Scattering Test

Imagine going into an Atom Scattering Chamber that completely disassembles your body's atoms so that all that's left in the room is a light gas of floating atoms-and then a few minutes later, it perfectly reassembles the atoms into you, and you walk out feeling totally normal.

Is that still you? Or did you die when you were disassembled and what has been reassembled is a replica of you? It doesn't really make sense that this reassembled you would be the real you and London you would be a replica, when the only difference between the two cases is that the scattering room preserves your exact atoms and the London chamber assembles you out of different atoms. At their most basic level, atoms are identical-a hydrogen atom from your body is identical in every way to a hydrogen atom in London. Given that, I'd say that if we're deciding London you is not you, then reassembled you is probably not you either.

The first thing these two tests illustrate is that the key distinction between Boston you and London you isn't about the presence or absence of your actual, physical cells. The Cell Replacement Test suggests that you can gradually replace much or all of your body with replica material and still be you, and the Body Scattering Test suggests that you can go through a scatter and a reassembly, even with all of your original physical material, and be no more you than the you in London. Not looking great for Body Theory anymore.

So could it be that we've been off the whole time pitting the brain, the body, and the personality and memories against each other? Could it be that anytime you relocate your brain, or disassemble your atoms all at once, transfer your brain data onto a new brain, etc., you lose you because maybe, you're not defined by any of these things on their own, but rather by a long and unbroken string of continuous existence?

A few years ago, my late grandfather, in his 90s and suffering from dementia, pointed at a picture on the wall of himself as a six-year-old. "That's me!" he explained.

He was right. But come on. It seems ridiculous that the six-year-old in the picture and the extremely old man standing next to me could be the same person. Those two people had nothing in common. Physically, they were vastly different-almost every cell in the six-year-old's body died decades ago. As far as their personalities-we can agree that they wouldn't have been friends. And they shared almost no common brain data at all. Any 90-year-old man on the street is much more similar to my grandfather than that six-year-old.

But remember-maybe it's not about similarity, but about continuity. If similarity were enough to define you, Boston you and London you, who are identical, would be the same person. The thing that my grandfather shared with the six-year-old in the picture is something he shared with no one else on Earth-they were connected to each other by a long, unbroken string of continuous existence. As an old man, he may not know anything about that six-year-old boy, but he knows something about himself as an 89-year-old, and that 89-year-old might know a bunch about himself as an 85-year-old. As a 50-year-old, he knew a ton about him as a 43-year-old, and when he was seven, he was a pro on himself as a 6-year-old. It's a long chain of overlapping memories, personality traits, and physical characteristics.

It's like having an old wooden boat. You may have repaired it hundreds of times over the years, replacing wood chip after wood chip, until one day, you realize that not one piece of material from the original boat is still part of it. So is that still your boat? If you named your boat Polly the day you bought it, would you change the name now? It would still be Polly, right?

In this way, what you are is not really a thing as much as a story, or a progression, or one particular theme of person. You're a bit like a roomwith a bunch of things in it-some old, some new, some you're aware of, some you aren't-but the room is always changing, never exactly the same from week to week.

Likewise, you're not a set of brain data, you're a particular data base whose contents are constantly changing, growing, and being updated. And you're not a physical body of atoms, you're a set of instructions on how to deal with and organize the atoms that bump into you.

People always say the word soul and I never really know what they're talking about. To me, the word soul has always seemed like a poetic euphemism for a part of the brain that feels very inner to us; or an attempt to give humans more dignity than just being primal biological organisms; or a way to declare that we're eternal. But maybe when people say the word soul what they're talking about is whatever it is that connects my 90-year-old grandfather to the boy in the picture. As his cells and memories come and go, as every wood chip in his canoe changes again and again, maybe the single common thread that ties it all together is his soul. After examining a human from every physical and mental angle throughout the post, maybe the answer this whole time has been the much less tangible Soul Theory.

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It would have been pleasant to end the post there, but I just can't do it, because I can't quite believe in souls.

The way I actually feel right now is completely off-balance. Spending a week thinking about clones of yourself, imagining sharing your brain or merging yours with someone else's, and wondering whether you secretly die every time you sleep and wake up as a replica will do that to you. If you're looking for a satisfying conclusion, I'll direct you to the sources below since I don't even know who I am right now.

The only thing I'll say is that I told someone about the topic I was posting on for this week, and their question was, "That's cool, but what's the point of trying to figure this out?" While researching, I came across this quote by Parfit: "The early Buddhist view is that much or most of the misery of human life resulted from the false view of self." I think that's probably very true, and that's the point of thinking about this topic.

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Related Wait But Why Posts
- Here's how I'm working on this false view of self thing.
- And things could get even more confusing soon when we have to figure out if Artificial Superintelligence is conscious or not.

Sources
Very few of the ideas or thought experiments in this post are my original thinking. I read and listened to a bunch of personal identity philosophy this week and gathered my favorite parts together for the post. The two sources I drew from the most were philosopher Derek Parfit's book Reasons and Persons and Yale professor Shelly Kagan's fascinating philosophy course on death-the lectures are all watchable online for free.

Other Sources:
David Hume: Hume on Identity Over Time and Persons
Derek Parfit: We Are Not Human Beings
Peter Van Inwagen: Materialism and the Psychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity
Bernard Williams: The Self and the Future
John Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Chapter: Of Identity and Diversity)
Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach
Patrick Bailey: Concerning Theories of Personal Identity

And a fascinating and related video
For a while now, my favorite YouTube channel has been Kurzgesagt. They make one amazing five-minute animated video a month on the exact kinds of topics I love to write about. I highly recommend subscribing. Anyway, I've spoken to them and we liked the idea of tag-teaming a similar topic at the same time, and since this one was on both of our lists, we did that this week. I focused on what the self is, they explored what life itself is. Check it out:

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When you say the word "me," you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It's one of the things you're cleareston in the whole world-something you've understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, "Who amI?"