The Metaphysics of Star Trek
Hanley (Richard)
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Amazon Book Description

  1. In the tradition of "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek", this book explores the philosophical ideas and dilemmas that abound in the Star Trek series.
  2. For the author, see Wikipedia: Richard Hanley.

Back Cover Blurb
  1. Join philosopher Richard Hanley as he considers:
    • Is artificial life alive?
    • Is Jadzia Dax identical to Curzon Dax?
    • Can a time traveler change history?
    • Aliens from Horta to Vulcans to Microbrains
    • Should we embrace Star Trek’s technological vision of the future?

Contents
    Acknowledgments – xi
    "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Introduction: The Philosophic Enterprise" – xiii
  1. Part I: New Life, New Civilizations – 1
    In which we investigate the nature and proper treatment of life, wherever it may be found.
    1. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Prime Suspects" – 3
      In which:-
      → We examine aliens, from the Horta to Vulcans to the Children of Tama.
      → Is it better to be ruled by logic or by emotion?
      → What does it mean to be human, or to be a person?
      → How do Starfleet personnel know new life when they meet it?
      → Are there cognitive and linguistic universals?
    2. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Insufficient Data" – 41
      In which:-
      → We examine computers, androids, exo-comps, nanites, and holograms, but especially Lieutenant Commander Data.
      → Is artificial life possible?
      → Artificial intelligence?
      → Could there be artificial persons?
      → Artificial humans?
      → What reasons are there for denying these possibilities?
      → What is a fair test of artificial intelligence or sentience?
    3. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Pro Creation" – 71
      In which:-
      → We reply to the many objections to artificial personhood.
      → Can a machine like Data have creativity, independence, or free will?
      → Can a machine understand natural language?
      → Or feel, or be emotional, or mistaken, or conscious?
  2. Part II: Matters of Survival – 121
    In which we catalogue and investigate the many unusual processes and transformations that people undergo in Star Trek.
    1. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: To Beam or Not to Beam?" – 123
      In which:-
      → We examine the transporter. What exactly does it do?
      → Is it rational for Kirk to undergo teletransport in the expectation that he, Kirk, will survive it?
      → Roger Korby, Vedek Bareil, and Janice Lester help us decide.
    2. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth" – 163
      In which we examine the exotic:-
      → Is Jadzia Dax identical to Curzon Dax?
      → What happened to Lieutenant William T. Riker when he “split”?
      → What happened to Tuvok and Neelix when they “fused”?
      → Is it rational to transform yourself in the transporter or on the holodeck?
      → What happened to Kirk when he “split”?
    3. "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Temporal Distortions" – 197
      In which we examine time travel.
      → Is it possible: Can a time traveler change history?
      → Can you meet your past or future self?
      → Does knowledge of the future destroy individual freedom?
    "Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Epilogue: The Future" – 235
    Bibliography – 239
    Index – 243
Book Comment

Basic Books; First Edition (18 Aug. 1997)


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Introduction: The Philosophic Enterprise"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Introduction


Notes


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Prime Suspects"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 1


Notes
  1. Contents1
    → We examine aliens, from the Horta to Vulcans to the Children of Tama.
    → Is it better to be ruled by logic or by emotion?
    → What does it mean to be human, or to be a person?
    → How do Starfleet personnel know new life when they meet it?
    → Are there cognitive and linguistic universals?
  2. Relevant PID Notes
    1. Persons2
    2. Human Beings3
    3. Life4
    4. Universals5
    5. Free Will6
  3. Books/Papers Cited7
    1. "Singer (Peter) - Applied Ethics (Oxford Readings in Philosopy)"
    2. "Quine (W.V.) - Word & Object"
    3. "Dennett (Daniel) - Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting"



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Prime Suspects")

Footnote 1:
  • Taken from the Book’s TOC
Footnote 7:
  • In the book’s Bibliography.


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Insufficient Data"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 2


Notes
  1. Contents1
    → We examine computers, androids, exo-comps, nanites, and holograms, but especially Lieutenant Commander Data.
    → Is artificial life possible?
    → Artificial intelligence?
    → Could there be artificial persons?
    → Artificial humans?
    → What reasons are there for denying these possibilities?
    → What is a fair test of artificial intelligence or sentience?
  2. Relevant PID Notes
    1. Computers2
    2. Androids3
    3. Life4
    4. intelligence5
    5. Persons6
    6. Human Beings7
    7. Consciousness8
  3. Books/Papers Cited9
    1. "Turing (Alan) - Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
    2. Joseph Weizenbaum - Computer Power and Human Reason, 197610



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Insufficient Data")

Footnote 1:
  • Taken from the Book’s TOC
Footnote 9:
  • In the book’s Bibliography.
Footnote 10:
  • Apparently a classic, but why such a dated book? Excruciatingly expensive, as out of print, though available on Kindle for £12.56 but supposedly badly formatted and unreadable.
  • I’ll wait to see why cited!


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Pro Creation"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 3


Notes
  1. Contents1
    → We reply to the many objections to artificial personhood.
    → Can a machine like Data have creativity, independence, or free will?
    → Can a machine understand natural language?
    → Or feel, or be emotional, or mistaken, or conscious?
  2. Relevant PID Notes
    1. Persons2
    2. Free Will3
    3. Language4
    4. Consciousness5
  3. Books/Papers Cited6
    1. "Stampe (Dennis W.) & Gibson (Martha I.) - Of One's Own Free Will"
    2. Elliott Sober - Core Questions of Philosophy7
    3. "Searle (John) - Minds, Brains, and Programs"
    4. "Boden (Margaret) - Escaping From the Chinese Room"
    5. "Cole (David) - Artificial Intelligence and Personal Identity"



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Pro Creation")

Footnote 1:
  • Taken from the Book’s TOC
Footnote 6:
  • In the book’s Bibliography.
Footnote 7:


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: To Beam or Not to Beam?"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 4


Notes – Chapter 4: To Beam or Not to Beam?
  1. Introduction
  2. Hamlet, Shamlet
    • Hanley references "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?" and contrasts his philosophical interests – ‘could anyone survive teleportation’ – with Krauss’s purely technical interest (‘is it realistic?’; the answer being that ‘no technology on the Enterprise is so utterly implausible’).
    • The point is not whether the technology is reliable: we will assume not only that it is possible, but that it is indeed reliable. If it is ‘travel’, then it is the safest way.
    • Reliable processes – guillotining, for example – can still be undesirable. The key issue here is whether the teletransportee remains the same person.
    • So, are those who refuse to use10 the teleporter wise or superstitious? Hanley says it depends on the answers to two questions:-
      1. What does the transporter do? And,
      2. What is personal survival?
  3. Working Hypotheses
    • Star Trek is inconsistent in its accounts of the workings of the transporter. There are two possibilities. The first is a matter transporter, more of which in a moment. We have to hold our breath for the other version, the Information transporter!
    • Matter Transporters
      • These work (supposedly) by scanning the subject, dematerialising it and sends the matter in energy form along with the scanned information which is used at the destination to rematerialize that individual. The transporter has to maintain the pattern of information needed to rematerialize the individual throughout this process.
      • There are quirks in the process11:-
        1. Hanley cites episodes in which the subject manages to change position during beaming but suggests that we ignore these as they are probably ‘unintended continuity errors’ – which I take to mean production errors in the making of the fictional episodes.
        2. There’s an episode in which the individual appears to be conscious throughout the ‘journey’ – and can even reach out and grab things in the matter stream – rather than – as Hanley and most of us would imagine – it being like the experience of a general anaesthetic, with the ‘voyager’ being unconscious until awakening at the destination. This is an entertaining plot device, but too implausible12 to be taken seriously, so will be ignored.
        3. Finally – in the ‘must be joking’ category – there’s the case where the voyager starts to rematerialize on the Enterprise before he’s completely dematerialised on the planet surface.
        4. More seriously, there are two cases of what might be termed ‘restorative therapy’.
          1. An individual suddenly suffers from accelerated aging13 supposedly caused by a DNA-altering virus, but is fully restored to her pre-illness relatively youthful condition by combining14 DNA from a non-infected hair with her teleported body.
          2. The second case is rather the reverse of this. A malfunction causes various crew members to be teleported as teenagers. They are restored when the correct DNA is supplied to the teleporter.
      • Hanley asks what we are to make of the last two cases?
        1. We’d expect restoration to be to the ‘aged’ version of the individual – albeit with corrected DNA to prevent further deterioration. DNA works with environmental conditions to produce its effects rather than producing them directly (or, at least, instantly). The plot explicitly denies that the transporter has a backup image of this individual prior to the supposed onset of the virus.
        2. In both cases, while the physical condition is restored, the psychological condition is preserved – they remember their misadventures. This implies that the physical and psychological patterns held independently by the transporter.
        3. But this contradicts what happens in an episode that was also discussed in "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?" - Lonely Among Us15. Picard cannot remember anything that happened to him on his ‘adventure’.
        4. Hanley tries to make sense of all this. He takes Picard’s ‘beaming out’ into the cloud as ‘energy only’ to imply that it’s as a matter / energy beam without the ‘pattern’. When Picard’s ‘energy’ returns, it’s reconverted to matter and reunited with Picard’s ‘pattern’. OK – but why is Picard’s memory also restored, since he can’t remember what happened to him? But Picard was ‘sensed’ to be still ‘out there’ in the cloud, which Hanley takes to be inconsistent16. Hanley admits that the emotional – and detectable – part of Picard’s psychology might have been sent out while the memory-part wasn’t; but, even so, this shows that the psychological and physical ‘patterns’ are considered to be separate.
      • Hanley thinks the (somewhat hidden) point of sending and retrieving the matter beam is to guard against reduplication (which will be considered later, in Chapter 5 (‘Personal Growth17’). However, this can’t be the case in the anomalous cases listed above, where extra matter needs to be made available to complete the rematerialisation. I skip the details. He notes that reduplication is otherwise commonplace – that’s how the Enterprise food and drink is generated from local unstructured matter.
      • There are three episodes that demonstrate that the Enterprise teleporters can recruit additional matter:-
        1. Kirk being split into his animal and cerebral personas.
        2. Riker being split into two qualitatively identical twins.
        3. Two characters being fused into one and then separated again.
      • Whichever way the duplication occurs, extra matter is required. Hanley notes the three possibilities:-
        1. The original matter is shared between the two individuals.
        2. One gets the original matter and the other gets newly-recruited matter.
        3. The original matter is discarded and both get newly-recruited matter.
    • Information Transporters
      • Since the transporter can – it seems – recruit local matter and since we have to send the scanned information anyway in order to effect the reconstruction, why not just send the information?
      • The first objection is that the ‘original’ is then left at home and – even if killed painlessly during the scan – we still have to dispose of the body. Hanley thinks that ‘vaporisation’ is how this works in Star Trek because that’s how phasers dispose of those shot by them. I gather that18 the ‘vaporisation’ is conversion into energy which ‘dissipates’ rather than into gas.
      • From now on in this Chapter the parameters of teleportation are taken to be two options only:-
        1. Matter Transport: scanning, dematerialisation, transmission of pattern & Matter and rematerialisation of the very same matter.
        2. Information Transport: scanning, destruction, transmission of pattern only and single rematerialisation using entirely recruited matter.
      • Two deviant forms of Information Transport are reserved until the next Chapter ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth"), namely:-
        1. Doubling, and
        2. Materialisation of a subject or subjects qualitatively different from the scanned subject.
      • We have now to answer two similar questions: is it rational to submit to Matter (or Information) transport on the assumption that you will survive it19.
  4. Admissible Evidence
    • Say you’re trying to decide which – if either – of the above options to take up. We assume that the destination is fine and the technology is flawless.
    • You are offered testimonials from hundreds of those who have made the trip: they remember entering the scanner and then waking up at their destination with the sensation of their recently-eaten breakfast, memories of their plans for the trip and a desire to return to their loved ones in due course. They were initially disquieted, but this dissipated when they woke up fine.
    • Those friends and loved ones didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with the teletransportees.
    • So which …? A bit of experimental philosophy reveals – says Hanley – that almost no-one would be willing to undergo Information Transport while only a slim majority would be willing to undergo Matter Transport.
    • The worry of the dissenters is that this is not ‘Transport’ at all, but a case where the individual does not survive20, but is replaced by a replica. Hence, the deliverance of common sense21 is that you wouldn’t survive Information Transport but might survive Matter Transport.
    • Hanley will now act as a Devils’ Advocate22 and argue that both deliverances of common sense are mistaken, ie:-
      1. There is no significant difference as far as personal survival is concerned between the two modes of Transport.
      2. There is no rational cause for doubting survival of either process.
    • His first23 strategy will be negative: he will charge common sense in this area with inconsistency with common-sense24 views about personal survival.
  5. Near Enough is Good Enough
    • In the normal case, personal survival involves personal identity over time. Hanley – at this stage at least – doesn’t ask ‘what we are’ but seems to assume that we ‘are’ persons (whatever that term means for him) who ‘have’ bodies and minds. He takes it that ‘personal identity’ does involve numerical identity.
    • He first considers ‘bodies’ (rather than ‘organisms’). If there’s such a thing as bodily identity, then you – if you persist – must have the same body now as you have always had. But this seems absurd, he posits, given that bodies change over time. Over a 7-year period, all your non-neuronal cells25 are replaced. So, after 10 years (say) your body has virtually nothing in common with what it was previously.
    • The same goes for psychological identity: we have virtually nothing in common psychologically with ourselves as 2-year-olds.
    • How to fix this – if neither body nor psychology suffices for our persistence? What about Souls? Alternatively our ‘Essence26’. He takes the Soul to be more than just the mind or psychology – something separate that is unchanging over time.
    • Hanley now has a paragraph that I didn’t understand: when Picard gets duplicated, a character recognises empathetically the duplicate as having Picard’s essence – more than just his thoughts and feelings. But that would have Picard’s soul as being duplicated. Apparently, Chapter 627 (‘Temporal Distortions’) discusses whether Picard and his duplicate are in fact identical, which sounds to me to be absurd.
    • But Hanley doesn’t think souls help with PID anyway – though this will be discussed later in the Chapter28.
    • To motivate an understanding of persistence, he considers ordinary material objects29. A watch remains the same watch as various small parts are replaced; maybe even when30 the face and back are replaced (in succession). Similarly, football clubs31 can persist after complete change of personnel.
    • Hanley now prepares to consider Robert Nozick’s Closest Continuer32 theory. To do so, he introduces two concepts:-
      1. An object-at-a-time or a time slice33 of an object (an object-slice, for short).
      2. Qualitative similarity.
    • So, …
      1. When we compare two things, it’s usually done at a time34 – so we compare time-slices: either of two individuals at the same time, or the same individual at different times.
      2. Qualitative similarity depends on the proportion of properties shared by two objects or object-slices. So-called ‘identical’ chairs or twins share a great proportion of their properties, so are relatively qualitatively similar, while time-slices of a person at very different ages may be qualitatively dissimilar, even though we take the ‘two’ individuals to be numerically identical. This is difficult and can be confusing to state. We have to beware of confusing identity-statements about object-stages (different stages of the same object are unlikely to be identical, though we can raise questions about stage-identity) and about objects (it may be the same object even though the stages under consideration are dissimilar).
    • Hanley now motivates continuers or causal dependents by considering a watch that has a spring replaced. The watch with the new spring is the continuer of the watch, not the old spring (he refers to watch-slices). The reason is that the watch with the new spring has much greater qualitative similarity to the pre-repair watch than does the old spring.
    • Hanley now gives three conditions for being the closest continuer:-
      1. We compare possible continuers of an object-slice at a time, not at different times.
      2. The closest continuer must beat others by a significant margin. He will return to this in Chapter 5 ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth").
      3. The closest continuer has to be close enough if we are to have numerical identity. A pile of ashes isn’t a sufficiently close continuer of a burnt up Ship of Theseus to be identity-preserving even though it is easily the closest continuer; the ship has been destroyed.
    • Hanley now makes a contentious claim35: that those who believe that when you die you cease to exist must admit that the corpse is the closest continuer, but deny that the corpse is identical to the pre-mortem individual.
    • The explanation for the above discontinuities is that the closest continuer has to be of the same primary king as its supposed predecessor; but the pile of ashes isn’t a ship and the corpse isn’t a person36.
    • We have persistence provided we have a causal chain37 of slices of the same kind with a high degree of qualitative similarity. The ‘time factor’ is not so much of an issue. If – per impossibile organisms recycled all their atoms every 7 seconds rather than every 7 years, this would be OK.
    • However, it was noted earlier – in the case of the child and the man – that the identity-condition can hold between individuals at different times even if there’s not much qualitative similarity between the slices at those two times. What is needed is a causal chain of object slices, each of which is the closest continuer of the preceding one.
    • Hanley now makes a general claim that seems incorrect38, even in his own terms, that X2-slice is identical to X1-slice iff X2-slice is the closest continuer of X1-slice; where X is Mind, Body or Person.
    • Hanley now asks what Personal Identity over time consists in? He suggests that our intuition that matter transfer is less objectionable than information transfer in the transporter suggests that bodily identity over time is important and that there’s a strong analogy between39 people and ordinary objects.
    • Reverting to the watch – it survives disassembly and reassembly, but not if it is vaporised by a phasor and then replicated, even if the copy is qualitatively identical to the original. This – and the analogy just made – suggests that ‘matter matters’ in Personal Identity.
    • In the next section, Hanley is to test our intuitions in variety of TEs involving transplants (‘body-part replacements’). I all of these we are to imagine that all goes well. Everything seems to have gone fine, both from a first-person perspective – we wake up40 remembering our initial trepidation and with our psychology intact – and from a third person perspective – no-one who knows us spots anything remiss.
  6. Bodily Functions
    • We’re asked to consider several41 Star Trek story-lines involving ‘body-part replacements’, in ascendingly radical order:-
      1. Replacement of our heart by a fully-functional artificial heart.
      2. Replacement serially of all our major organs by artificial ones. A variant is the simultaneous replacement of all major organs.
      3. Transplant the brain (and – maybe – the CNS) into an artificial body.
      4. Replace the brain gradually by artificial – but functionally isomorphic – implants. A variant is to replace half (or all) the brain in one hit (having backed up and restored all psychological functions).
      5. Transference of the individual’s psychology into an android body.
    • Hanley has us agree that we would be willing to go along with these procedures (as the alternative is death). Also, that we wouldn’t say ‘enough is enough’ because – in the 24th century – all this replacement works fine and is pain-free.
    • There would be no problem with identity-preservation in the first two cases, he claims, but in the third case we have a dilemma. If it’s the body (which includes the brain) that’s essential for personal identity, then the brainless body is the closest continuer, so we don’t survive. However, there’s the alternative ‘brain matters’ view, in which case we do survive.
    • In the fourth case, things get more complicated. At each stage of gradual replacement – the alternative being certain death – we’d no doubt be willing to go along with the procedure. Hanley claims that this is consistent with the ‘brain matters’ view, as at each stage the – increasingly artificial – brain is a closer continuer than the discarded brain matter – and is still a brain (he implies). However, he thinks that in the variant of this case, the discarded brain – and not the artificial one that would be the closest continuer, and so we would not survive (on the ‘brain matters’ view).
    • There’s also some Star Trek mumbo-jumbo about preserving a ‘spark of life’ or otherwise ‘dying like a man and not a machine’. The question is – what kind is the post-operative individual – man or machine – and what would his experience be? It’s not supposed that he would be a zombie but – assuming a functionalist account of the mind42 – he would experience much what the pre-operative individual did but would be a numerically different person. This all sounds very muddled to me.
    • In the case of the android, that android individual claims to be identical to the original human individual – only better. His human self had suffered some catastrophe and only his brain was functioning prior to the ‘psychology upload’. However Captain Kirk is convinced that the original human individual is dead (as indeed he is – he did die after the ‘upload’) and that the android is not him. Hanley takes it that this procedure is nothing more than the sum of the other four options given above.
  7. Know Thyself … Not!
    • If the matter matters view is correct, then it’s possible to be convinced of who you are and yet be wrong. From the discussions above, both the android and the person with the artificial brain would be wrong in thinking who they were.
    • Hanley gives several Star Trek episodes that illustrate this point. I’ve abstracted them from their dramatic contexts:-
      1. An android has been created from a fatally-injured individua, but doesn’t know43 she’s an android.
      2. A fleshy replica thinks she’s the same person as the one who died and was ‘recreated’.
      3. An episode difficult to construe. An individual thinks that everyone else has been replaced by replicas when in point of fact it is he who is the replica. Presumably, the replication hasn’t been done very well, or no-one would know. Hanley’s ‘message’ from this episode is that anyone with your memories implanted in them would think they were you.
    • In all these cases the individual thinks they are the original person, but the matter matters view says they are incorrect.
  8. Mind Over Matter
    • Star Trek has an episode in which the ’essences’ of two characters (Captain Kirk and Dr. Janice Lester) are swapped so that their bodies portray the psychologies of the other. Considered from the first-person perspective, the person who woke up in Lester’s body (assuming they didn’t go mad44) would consider themselves to be Kirk, and vice versa (and – we are told – the Enterprise’s crew consider that the two have ‘swapped bodies45’). The Epigraph quotations at the head of the chapter seem to have the two denying that they have swapped bodies – which is odd. The Lester-body person claims that – while ‘it is very apparent46’ that she is not Kirk – ‘whatever makes Captain Kirk a living being special to himself is being held in47 this body’.
    • Hanley claims that clearly ‘Kirk-body person believes herself48 to be Lester’.
    • Hanley now says that he believes – in agreement with common sense –that we go where our psychology goes, and that this should be generalised – given functionalism – to allow continuity of identity for androids and artificial brain-recipients in previous sections. He dubs this the mind matters49 view.
    • This strikes me as a bad step in the wrong direction (given reduplication objections50). Maybe these will be adequately addressed in the next Chapter ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth").
    • Hanley claims that – while in common sense the Closest Continuer schema values both mind and matter – it values mind more than matter. So – in the Kirk-Lester case, while the body – including the brain – of Kirk-body person is identical to51 that of Kirk, pre-swap, we (on this view) conclude that Lester-body person is Kirk.
    • So – returning to teleportation – Hanley concludes that information transfer is no different to any of the cases above, and that the Closest Continuer (psychologically) is the individual made of recruited matter at the destination, at least when52 the ‘original’ is destroyed.
    • In the case of matter transport, Hanley sees no difference between this an ordinary day-to-day survival, at least if we grant that53 there is body identity between the dematerialised subject and the rematerialized subject.
  9. Life After Death
    • Hanley thinks the common-sense reflections above mean that we should broaden our conception of the possibilities of personal survival.
    • He illustrates this by considering the possibility of life after death, focusing on what he imagines to be the Christian view.
    • Anecdotally, he gets the idea that the majority of people who balk at survival of either matter or information teleportation are Christians54, or others who believe that ‘death is not the end of us’.
    • For such people, death doesn’t result in the loss of personal identity, nor of psychological identity. One imagines survival with your psychology more or less intact. Normally – Hanley claims – death doesn’t involve loss of bodily identity55 (in the short term, at least; vaporisation may be an exception). So, Hanley claims, the ‘normal Christian view’ is that death normally doesn’t involve the non-persistence of anything.
    • He thinks this view is best understood as the separation of the person and his psychology from the body. How is this cashed out? There are two basic alternatives:-
      1. Platonism: you exist disembodied. Hard to imagine, and – Hanley thinks – undesirable insofar as it can be imagined. His analogy56 is of storing your psychology permanently on computer disk. The problem Hanley sees is how can one engage in action without a body.
      2. So, the alternative is re-embodiment. He doesn’t mean a terrestrial body – ‘immaterial’ or other bodies will do – nor need these bodies be anthropomorphic. He quotes 1 Corinthians 15:44-49, which has claims ought to be Christian orthodoxy. God extracts your psychology from your terrestrial body and inserts it into your heavenly one.
    • Either way, neither body nor brain is primarily what matters in personal identity, concludes Hanley. He also concludes that life after death is analogous to information transport, so belief in the former ought to induce belief in the latter.
    • He adds a very odd rejoinder: ‘… only in the case of information transport is there the added assurance of (uncontroversial) testimonials from those “on the other side”’. What57 is this supposed to mean?
    • He now considers a couple of difficulties with certain understandings of the Christian concept of resurrection, taken as involving the rematerialisation of our actual terrestrial bodies.
      1. Which ‘body-slice’ is God going to restore? If a nice healthy one it’ll not be the closest continuer58 of you at death. The ‘last’ one would be sub-optimal.
      2. Recruitment of new matter would still be required as much of ‘your’ matter – of whatever slice – has been or will have been part of other59 to-be-resurrected individuals.
    • Does this add weight to Hanley’s proposal that the correct closest-continuer schema prioritises mind over matter? He thinks this approach sits nicely with the functionalist view60 of the mind.
    • Hanley points out that Functionalism allows for the multiple realisation of the mental. Therefore, there’s no reason to reject the idea that a qualitatively identical61 mind might be instantiated in different media – brains or silicon – terrestrial or ‘heavenly bodies.
    • So the mind over matter view states that the person survives provided there’s enough causal connection of mental states across some adventure (such as teleportation by information transfer).
    • The final three sections of this Chapter consider three objections to this view.
  10. The Principle of Independence
    • This principle is the same as the one I know as the Only X and Y Principle62. The idea is that – say – if the original body of the teleportee isn’t destroyed, the ‘transported’ one isn’t identical to the original, otherwise it is. While this is taken to be absurd by many philosophers, Hanley doesn’t share this antipathy for two reasons:-
      1. He just doesn’t share this Intuition63, which requires argument64.
      2. If we accept this principle, there are two alternatives65:-
        1. Return to the matter matters view, but there are counter-intuitive consequences (says Hanley, citing the Kirk / Lester case above). Also – to preserve the Principle of Independence we’d need to adopt a majority matter matters view to avoid the same problem. To avoid for possible or actual competitors, we’d need at least 50% of the matter – of one’s body or brain, according to preference) to ensure personal identity. But then we get borderline effects: someone with 49% brain persistence doesn’t persist but would have if they’d had 2% more. Hanley takes this to be no less absurd66 than the situation in the mind matters schema.
        2. Reject the Closest Continuer paradigm altogether. Hanley takes this as implying that we should also reject the idea that personal identity depends on either67 bodily or psychological continuity and revert to the Soul or Essence view.
    • Following on from the above, Hanley picks up on a point I’d raised earlier – that the standard Christian view is that God transplants your Soul and places it in your resurrection body. He says that God transplants your psychology as well, but surely the standard Christian view is that your soul is the bearer of your psychology (interacting with your brain in some way)?
    • However, Hanley doesn’t think this helps with accounting for personal identity.
    • He notes that – on some views of the soul – continuity of soul is orthogonal to psychological continuity.
      1. Reincarnation doesn’t seem to require any psychological continuity, so we can have sameness of soul without sameness of psychology.
      2. It would also seem to be possible – since neither continuity of body or of psychology is definitive of personal identity – on this view – but soul is, that different souls can ‘inhabit’ an individual at different times and we’d never know. So, we could have sameness of psychology without sameness of soul.
    • Hence, Hanley rejects the soul view68 and sticks with the mind over matter view.
  11. Data’s Objection
    • I don’t think the Star Trek specifics need detain us, but the underlying issue seems to be a critique of Functionalism, which Hanley accepts but Data the Android seems not to, for absurd reasons to do with not knowing about bluffing in Poker despite supposedly having read everything about it. Hanley points out the absurdity but uses it as a springboard to introduce the Knowledge Argument69. This is all very difficult, and not something I want to pursue here70, nor is it worth repeating Hanley’s potted version thereof.
    • But the point of it all seems to be the suggestion that the rematerialized individual will lack something that the transportee initially had – some essence, say. But I see no reason to think this at all likely, and it has nothing to do with functionalism as the ‘traveller’ is of the same material structure – exactly similar – before and after. We’re agreed that the ‘arrived’ individual is exactly similar to the one who set out. The question is whether his is identical or a copy, albeit a fully functional one.
    • Hanley has left open the possibility that the phenomenal character of experience might differ between intelligences instantiated in different media. I don’t doubt this, but I can’t see the relevance71 to teleportation.
  12. The Exclusion Principle
    • This is a rather strange section, of interest because of its opposition to aspects of "Krauss (Lawrence M.) - The Physics of Star Trek: Atoms or Bits?".
    • Hanley’s ‘exclusion principle’ is the assumption that – for all we know – unexpected events may occur in things we haven’t designed, but won’t occur in those we have (provided we can manipulate them reliably). But he applies this principle in a very odd way. He claims that:-
      1. We accept72 the body-swap in the Kurt/Lester situation above
      2. We are suspicious of the gradual body and brain replacement by inorganic matter.



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: To Beam or Not to Beam?")

Footnote 1:
  • This list will need revising when I’ve completed reading / reviewing the Chapter.
Footnote 10:
  • Hanley also makes the enigmatic statement ‘Is it rational to use the teletransport on the assumption you will survive it. What does he mean by the underlined phrase. Is he using ‘survival’ in Parfit’s sense, in which it doesn’t imply persistence or identity-preservation?
Footnote 11:
  • I’ve ignored the references to the specific Star Trek episodes that Hanley cites.
Footnote 12:
  • It sounds to me a bit like a wormhole muddled up with a matter stream (which would be unnecessary in that case, I would imagine).
Footnote 13: Footnote 14:
  • Hence an advantageous version of The Fly.
Footnote 15: Footnote 16:
  • Why can’t he have been sent out with the pattern, just not fully rematerialized, and then completely restored (overwriting any changes) on his return?
Footnote 17: Footnote 18:
  • This is my understanding of what Hanley says. Both options are absurd. The amount of energy in a human being is about 1,000-megaton H-Bomb’s-worth, which can hardly ‘dissipate’ (though, coming to think of it, it might be converted into non-interacting matter, such as neutrinos. This possibility is relevant to the other ‘technical’ discussions: "Science Unbound - Teleporters: The Death Machines You Don't Want" and other works cited therefrom).
  • Converting a human being to gas would also be explosive, though less so than the H-Bomb.
Footnote 19:
  • Again, ‘Survival’ just means that the process works as intended. It doesn’t imply that you persist.
Footnote 20:
  • Tut tut. I wish Hanley would be careful about the use of ‘survival’.
Footnote 21:
  • I can’t see how ‘common sense’ can deliver anything on this topic, which requires considerable thought.
  • There are two obvious objections: that a material thing cannot survive total destruction; and reduplication objections founded on the logic of identity.
Footnote 22:
  • I’ll be interested to find out what Hanley’s real views are!
Footnote 23:
  • I will need to watch out for his ‘second’ strategy!
Footnote 24:
  • Again, are there any universal ‘common sense’ views about ‘personal survival’? Isn’t ‘common sense’ informed by whatever we were taught by our mothers, and doesn’t this depend on the religious tradition (or lack thereof) in which we were raised?
Footnote 25:
  • This oft-repeated claim is false (see Snopes: Does The Human Body Replace Itself Every Seven Years?): some cells are replaced more frequently, others – not just neurons – persist throughout our lives.
  • However, the general point that our bodies seem to survive a major turnover of cells is fine; though the metaphysical import of this is less clear.
Footnote 26:
  • It’s not often clear by what is meant by an ‘essence’ – it’s just a term bandied about in everyday speech.
  • However, I presume philosophically it’s what we essentially are – namely, what we could not exist without – whether this is a set of properties or something ontological (some special part of us, like a soul).
Footnote 27:
  • So, I’ll need to read that Chapter ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Temporal Distortions") as well!
  • As the chapter ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Temporal Distortions") is on time travel, the question is asked whether someone can meet their former self.
  • If they can, then presumably these selves are identical; and if this is the case, then the two Picards can be identical.
  • All this seems to add argument to the case that time-travel into the past is absurd.
  • Come to think of it – isn’t the same true of traveling into the future? Not like with the ‘twin paradox’ – where there’s only one ‘you’ present, just younger than you would have been had you stayed at home. But if you ‘time travelled’ into the future there could be two of you present, the time traveller being younger than the stay-at-home. Seems absurd, but not as absurd as with the ‘grandfather paradox’ of preventing your own existence. If you are killed in the future, you just never return.
Footnote 28:
  • I need to watch out for this!
Footnote 29:
  • ‘Just what are ‘ordinary material objects’? Hanley’s first example – a watch – is an artefact with clearly-defined parts. Maybe easier and less arbitrary than – say – a stone or a mountain.
Footnote 30:
  • We need to watch out for a reductio ad absurdum here, as with Trigger’s Broom. See my discussion under Ship of Theseus. Hamley cites this ship and is confident that it persists despite the complete replacement over time of all its planks.
Footnote 31:
  • The persistence of organisations is complex, and the conditions will be legal or conventional. It is not at all clear what relevance this has for the persistence of individual people.
Footnote 33:
  • I don’t think Hanley is considering doctrines of temporal parts at this stage.
Footnote 34:
  • Of course, it depends what the comparison is for. If we’re comparing Hitler and Stalin, say, it’s their careers as dictators we’re comparing. Their careers overlapped and interacted, but this need not be so (take Plutarch’s Lives, which compared Greek and Roman heroes from different times and places to draw moral parallels).
Footnote 35:
  • This is interesting.
  • It is allied to the Corpse Problem for Animalism, at least for those Animalists who say we are not identical to our corpses (because corpses have different persistence conditions to organisms).
  • But some who say that there is no life after death (such as Shelly Kagan) say that we are identical to our corpses (as far as I remember; for instance, a butterfly-collection is a collection of what, exactly?).
Footnote 36:
  • Hanley doesn’t use the ‘primary kind’ terminology so beloved of Lynne Rudder Baker, but he does use the term ‘kind’ other terminology (as well as ‘slices’).
  • His use of the term ‘person’ might be indicative of the PV, but the Animalist could agree with ‘Animal’ or ‘Organism’ substituted.
Footnote 37:
  • He doesn’t mention what sort of cause at this point.
Footnote 38:
  • I didn’t think that qualitatively-different slices were ever identical to one another, though the individuals they are slices of can be. But maybe this is a terminological muddle that doesn’t affect the main argument.
Footnote 39:
  • There’s much that needs clarifying and commenting on here, but I’ll hear him out before doing so.
Footnote 40:
  • This may beg the whole question at issue. It may appear to the person who wakes up that he is me, but this may not be so (especially if this moves on to teleportation).
Footnote 41:
  • Hanley says ‘four’, but I’m not sure how to count them to end up with only four! Nor do I care.
Footnote 42: Footnote 43:
  • This seems highly implausible, but I suppose it depends on what the android is made of.
Footnote 44: Footnote 45:
  • This is entirely analogous to Locke’s ‘Prince and the Cobbler’ TE.
  • There – according to Locke – everyone would agree that the Cobbler-body informed by the Prince’s mind (or soul – analogous to the ‘essence’ in Star Trek would be the Prince.
  • See also the even less likely story Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
Footnote 46:
  • Hanley takes ‘apparent’ in the sense of ‘appearances can be deceptive’; but, ‘very apparent’ sounds more like an emphatic assertion.
  • Hanley’s exegesis often sounds rather dodgy to me, but none of this really matters.
  • What matters is that we get the most out of these TEs and interpret them how we will so to do. It doesn’t matter what fictional characters are said to believe. What matters is what it would be rational for individuals (and third party onlookers) caught up in these events to believe.
Footnote 47:
  • This is symptomatic of ‘essence’ transfer, whatever an ‘essence’ is supposed to be – presumably a soul.
  • The statement of Kirk-body person sounds a bit odd: (said to Lester-body person): ‘As I understand it, you claim to be Captain Kirk?’ It would depend on the tone of voice, but it could be said by Kirk (or Kirk’s essence) disputing with a rival claimant.
Footnote 48:
  • When this Episode was screened it would doubtless have raised eyebrows to suggest that someone in a male body would consider anything of ‘herself’; less so today when it seems we can identify as whatever we like.
  • But it’s difficult to speak of such things in a coherent manner.
Footnote 49: Footnote 50:
  • Given that these objections can be overcome – in principle – by adopting perdurantism, objections to branching and other curious cases where identity is said to be preserved without the usual causal structure might be better resisted – from the psychological perspective – on the grounds of asking what continues our sense of self forward in time and that avoids the ‘big nothing’ from which we never awake.
Footnote 51:
  • In what sense is ‘identical to’ used here, especially as it includes the brain?
  • It sounds as though it’s used primarily in the sense of ‘exactly similar to’ rather than ‘numerically identical to’, though the latter is also assumed.
  • But – assuming that psychology is brain-based, Kirk-body’s brain cannot be exactly similar to Kirk’s pre-transfer brain.
  • I’m not sure what is assumed of brains in these TEs. Are they thought of as digital computers – where the computer memory stays the same chip despite what’s stored in it – however its bits are flipped. That chip persists through change. OK.
  • So do brains – they evolve over time and their structure changes. It’s not entirely analogous to a computer chip, where the gross structure stays the same.
  • However, in a ‘psychology swap’ the gross structure of the brain might have to change all in one hit, which might not be identity-preserving. I’m not sure.
  • As I’ve often complained about Brain Transplants, brains are very closely coupled with their bodies, and can’t be swapped without a mismatch. I suppose in this TE we’re supposed to imagine that it’s only psychological states that are swapped and not motor-control functions.
Footnote 52:
  • This ‘rider’ doesn’t provide much defence against reduplication objections as ‘information’ can be used to create an indefinitely large number of exactly similar individuals using recruited matter.
Footnote 53:
  • It looks to me that – by Hanley’s arguments – matter transport is less likely to be identity-preserving than information transport. For the latter, only psychological identity is required, whereas for the latter we need to agree that a human organism can persist through total destruction and reassembly.
  • However, maybe the ‘information’ route is considered under the ‘mind matters’ paradigm and the ‘matter’ route under the ‘matter matters’ paradigm.
Footnote 54:
  • Surely, this is because most Christians believe in immaterial souls, which – one presumes – won’t be picked up either by information scanning or matter transfer.
  • Of course, Christian Materialists or members of the sect I used to belong to don’t believe in the existence of immaterial souls, but you don’t meet many of these when doing your experimental philosophy.
Footnote 55:
  • There’s a dispute over whether your corpse is you, as noted above.
Footnote 56:
  • This is an analogy for those who think of death – prior to resurrection – as analogous to dreamless sleep, but not for those who believe in souls.
Footnote 57:
  • Firstly ‘only in the case …’. Well, we’ve not had incontrovertible assurance from the dead, but we’ve not had that from teleportees either, as it’s – practically, and – possibly – nomologically and metaphysically – impossible!
  • Secondly, testimony from teleportees would be begging the question.
Footnote 58:
  • Agreed. Also, he’d need to impose on it some version of your ‘mind’. Again, not your elderly demented one. But an earlier ‘mind-slice’ would miss off all you’d learnt and experienced in your later years.
  • But that’s not the only option open to God. He could – as far as this objection goes – resurrect your corpse and then rejuvenate it in some way. The same might go for your mind.
Footnote 59:
  • Hanley mentions this is an old problem, but doesn’t give specifics.
  • Before cellular turnover was understood, the problem for the medieval mind was the case of cannibalism. It was circumvented – absurdly – by suggesting that humans couldn’t metabolise human flesh.
  • I’m not sure what they did concerning eating the bird that ate the worm that ate the human corpse. The same argument?
Footnote 60:
  • I’m unenthusiastic about unrestricted functionalism (I don’t believe that tins and string – however complexly connected – would ever be conscious.
  • We just don’t know enough how consciousness arises – whether it is a quantum phenomenon, say.
  • But it might be – for all I know – that other radically different physical structures might be conscious. Cephalopods are a case in point. But not everything that acts as though it’s conscious will be. That seems to be what unrestricted functionalism claims.
  • All this is orthogonal to the question whether the Closest Continuer schema has anything to do with our persistence or whether one conscious being really does continue the consciousness of another.
Footnote 61:
  • Well, yes. But the question is whether a numerically identical mind might be so instantiated.
Footnote 62: Footnote 64:
  • Presumably argument is supplied by those who – like me – hold to this intuition?
  • It seems almost like a rule of logic. In which case it ought to be held by everyone by default, it being up to nay-sayers to explain and defend their objections.
Footnote 65:
  • The second of these two alternatives isn’t very well signposted. I’ve done my best for the second one.
Footnote 66:
  • This is a different sort of absurdity, if it is one.
  • It is absurd, because the Closest Continuer idea is absurd.
Footnote 67:
  • I’d though that the Closest Continuer view could just be brushed off, but there are problems even for Animalism.
  • Certainly, it affects the Brain View because of multiple part Brain Transplants.
  • For Animalism, if we’re rigorous, we’re not worried by Brain Transplants since brains aren’t organisms. But it’s a difficult intuition to resist.
Footnote 68:
  • I’m no friend of the soul view, but Hanley seems a bit quick in rejecting it. Maybe I’ve been a bit quick in summarising his argument.
  • As Hanley notes, there are various accounts of what souls are. He seems to jumble them all together when rejecting them.
  • I note that Locke seems to allow souls to be passed between different persons without taking their consciousness with them, but this isn’t the Cartesian or standard Christian view.
Footnote 69:
  • Hanley cites "Jackson (Frank) - What Mary Didn't Know".
  • See my Note on the Knowledge Argument.
  • The KA is an – ineffective – argument against physicalism, not specifically functionalism. You can be a physicalist without accepting functionalism. Also – I think – you can accept functionalism without accepting physicalism.
Footnote 70: Footnote 71:
  • Hanley ends the section – which I found very confusing – by discussing how phenomenal experience might differ in an individual from one age to another. I wasn’t sure of the point of this either.
Footnote 72:
  • Do we?


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 5


Notes
  1. Contents1
    → Is Jadzia Dax identical to Curzon Dax?
    → What happened to Lieutenant William T. Riker when he “split”?
    → What happened to Tuvok and Neelix when they “fused”?
    → Is it rational to transform yourself in the transporter or on the holodeck?
    → What happened to Kirk when he “split”?
  2. Relevant PID Notes
    1. Fission2
    2. Fusion3
    3. Teletransportation4
    4. Parfit5
  3. Books/Papers Cited6
    1. "Parfit (Derek) - Reasons and Persons"
    2. "Lewis (David) - Survival and Identity"
    3. "Martin (Raymond) - Identity, Transformation, and What Matters in Survival"
    4. "Sperry (Roger W.) - Hemisphere Deconnection and the Unity in Conscious Awareness"
    5. "Nagel (Thomas) - Mortal Questions"
    6. "Puccetti (Roland) - Two Brains, Two Minds? Wigan's Theory of Mental Duality"
    7. Ernest R. Hilgard - Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action, ‘expanded edition’, 19867
    8. "Humphrey (Nicholas) & Dennett (Daniel) - Speaking for Our Selves: An Assessment of Multiple Personality"



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Personal Growth")

Footnote 1:
  • Taken from the Book’s TOC
Footnote 6:
  • In the book’s Bibliography.
Footnote 7:
  • Only the 1977 edition is available on Amazon.
  • Why such a dated book?


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Temporal Distortions"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Chapter 6


Notes
  1. Contents1
    → Is time travel possible: Can a time traveler change history?
    → Can you meet your past or future self?
    → Does knowledge of the future destroy individual freedom?
  2. Relevant PID Notes
    1. Time2
    2. Time Travel3
    3. Free Will4
    4. Lewis5
  3. Books/Papers Cited6
    1. "Lewis (David) - The Paradoxes of Time Travel"
    2. John Earman - Implications of causal propagation outside the null cone. Not available free on-line. I have other papers on this topic by Earman.
    3. "Dennett (Daniel) - Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting"



In-Page Footnotes ("Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Temporal Distortions")

Footnote 1:
  • Taken from the Book’s TOC
Footnote 6:
  • In the book’s Bibliography.


"Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek: Epilogue: The Future"

Source: Hanley (Richard) - The Metaphysics of Star Trek, Epilogue


Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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