Once Upon A Time...

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a very messed-up young girl. At seventeen, she went off to college. She was haggard and tired of her life and felt so old. She felt so old that she was blind to how naive she really was.

           

She had always been a daddy’s girl. She had yet to realize that the things her father did with her weren’t quite right. She didn’t realize that her father was a little too loving. She didn’t know how profoundly it had compromised her, wouldn’t know for many years.

           

She got to college and found freedom. She had been used to such confines that she was overwhelmed. Everyone else takes that same journey their freshman semester. She was one of those destined for particularly trying times.

A few weeks into the semester, she met a man. He was a few years older, had been at college a few years longer. He was recently out of a relationship considered famously disastrous around the campus. He set his sights on her and she was deeply flattered.

She wasn’t really ready for a boyfriend. He told her that he wouldn’t share her with anyone else. They spent the night together.

He was just so into her. She was confused by that, flattered and disarmed. They spent a lot of time together – she didn’t know how to navigate college yet and he wanted her.

Time passed.

They ended up in a de facto relationship. Her roommate had gotten fed up with being locked out of their room for sex and she offered to switch rooms with the man.

He confessed things to her.

“I was arrested for threatening my ex and her new boyfriend with a gun. Does that scare you?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sure she could handle this. She’d handled worse. And, after all, he told her he loved her. Surely that meant everything would work out. Surely.

The girl was not just metaphorically tired of life. She was always exhausted. After a couple months, when she tried to beg off his sexual advances, he stopped being kind.

Not long after, he became cruel.

“I’m too tired, I just want to go to bed,” she whined.

“Why won’t you ever fuck me?”

“I’m tired a lot. I just can’t tonight.”

He leaned in close in the dark. “I’m not letting you sleep until you fuck me.”

She turned over and faced the wall shrugging the blankets closer to her face. He kept picking away at her, getting louder and louder.

“If you’re a dyke, just tell me you’re a dyke. Then we can tell all of your friends you’re a fucking dyke and then I’ll let you go to sleep. Are you a dyke?”

“No,” she said, tears in her eyes.

“Then fuck me,” he shouted.

Eventually, inevitably, she would let him do what he wanted.

Exhausted, trying to not audibly sniffle her nose or shed any tears, she would let him.

Four, five o’clock in the morning with classes fast approaching, after hours of trying to maintain her own dignity, she would let him.

Numbing herself, slipping away in the dark, she let him.

Almost every night, she let him. She always tried to resist. She tried to exert some power, some agency in the relationship. He was never too tired to grind her down into compliance – he had seemingly limitless energy for that.

Eventually, she needed some sexual release that wasn’t emotionally crippling. All she had was herself. He found out and flew into a rage.

“You want to masturbate but you don’t want me? What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you fucking broken?”

The only answer she could come up with was “Obviously.”

She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t yet know what the word “coercion” meant, and she’d never heard it paired with “rape.” Rape was rape, getting beaten up or tied down or drugged. What they had was “relationship problems.”

           

She tried leaving. He would always pull her back in somehow. She didn’t know how to leave. She had no idea how to even talk about what was happening. She was consumed by shame. She felt like an ingrate, as if literally anyone else would be lucky to have a man who wanted her as much as he did. She felt frail and flawed – a failure.

           

She couldn’t let go of trying to be happy. She was stupid and stubborn. She believed that she was an adult, not a barely eighteen year-old idiot with a martyr complex. She fucked up her second semester, hard. Over the summer, she went home while he stayed at the college. He visited her a few times when he could get away from work. All they did was fight.

The next school year started and they moved back in together because she didn’t know how to say “no.” But that was sort of the theme of her life. They picked up right where they left off. No end in sight.

Any time friends would come over to their dorm room, she would put on this huge smile, afraid that if she didn’t perform he would take it out on her later. She always tried to keep the friends over as long as possible, to delay the inevitable. He could always outwait her.

Towards the end, he stopped making her have sex with him. And she, fucking idiot that she was, took it personally! She actually got self-conscious, thought she wasn’t pretty anymore! Can you believe this moron?

At the end, it was almost a foregone conclusion that they were done. She had fucked up school pretty bad and was going to be kicked out. He, well, who knows what was going on with him. He never seemed to go to classes. He was always just there, waiting.

She wasn’t sure if she had tanked school as a way to get away from him or because she just didn’t have anything left to work with. Either way, she was leaving and they were done, whether he wanted to accept it or not.

The dorm they lived in had separate rooms. The night she finally had enough, she locked her door. After an hour and a half of him banging on her door, she snuck out her window and walked around the campus.

It was early winter in Florida. A cool, clear night. She walked to the large center court and stared at the few stragglers wandering through under the dim orange lights. She said her goodbyes to the college, the first place that she had, however briefly, known freedom. She berated herself for squandering it. She resigned herself to the fact she would forever regret fucking up her full ride to college because she made the wrong choice in a person.

But she was done.

Fourteen years later, she’s friends with him on Facebook. Because she feels that she has to be. Because it might seem petty of her to not forgive. Because not forgiving might mean weakness. Because – well, fuck if anyone knows.

 -----------------------------------------------------

This is how I failed out of college. And this is why it matters so much to me that I am graduating in two weeks, fourteen years after the fact.

I couldn’t write this with the proper genders, because the rape of men by women is still minimized and scoffed at. Especially when it can be qualified and diminished as something like "coercive rape." 

I still feel like a worthless thing when I think of her. I am still friends with her on Facebook, because I feel like I would be less of a man if I weren’t – however that makes any fucking sense.

I’d prefer if no one showed this to her. I’m still, despite all my growth, afraid of her.

The Ghost and the Machine

The Ghost and the Machine

Identifying Lockean Problems Through Science Fiction

John Locke’s empiricism explores a number of notions on identity that may not be as fleshed out as one might hope. Many other philosophers have attempted to clean up untidy ends, while others pull at the loose strings to unravel his ideas even further. One of the key points foundational to his system is the parsing out of various types of being. He offers accounts for what  he believes constitutes identity over time for vegetables, animals, men, and persons. His division between “man” and “person” is perhaps one of the trickiest and most important concepts, a space in which many debates rightfully take place. In order to examine and intellectually test the implications of Locke’s system, one must engage in thought experiments that defy conventional laws of nature. There is no better arena to explore these notions than science fiction. This paper will examine Locke’s notions by discussing the conceptual integrity of identity through John Crichton’s “twinning” in the television show Farscape and the process of teleportation in Star Trek.

In order to rigorously examine these experiments, some criteria must be determined to establish on what identity can be based. Vegetables, the simplest changing life forms, require material organization that allows for the change from one form – such as a seed – to another – a tree. It must also have a story of continuity, a “continuity of insensibly succeeding parts united to the living body of the plant” (Locke, 210). Animals are a step up the chain in that they possess perceptive abilities. Man possesses the capabilities of the “lower” forms, but not much more than that – Locke discusses the possibility for a soul, but assigns no empirical value to it. The identity of man is judged by his place in space and time, so there must be spacio-temporal consistency, just as with the vegetable and animal. These notions combined can be discussed as part of bodily continuity theory.

Alternately, there must be psychological continuity theory. In this, Locke explains the nature of identity for the person, a very different organized being than man. The person is the conscious, perceptive being that can reflect upon his self. The primary identifier of the continuity of consciousness is memory, the self’s ability to maintain a personal story connected through time. This is where the ground becomes shaky, as memory is a deeply unstable notion. Harold Noonan states “if memory and consciousness are together regarded as logically necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity then forgetfulness ensures the loss of, or an interruption in, personal identity, and this is surely implausible. That is, it is implausible to hold that my past identity as a person should depend on the present vagaries of my memory” (173). Another concern is that “Memory could not be logically sufficient for continued personal identity because memory is only ever partial, what is remembered is only ever a subset of what the individual was actually conscious of at the time that is remembered” (Helm, 184). However, for the sake of argument, it can be said that memory acts as an imperfect informant from one period of time in a person’s life to the next. This imperfection should in no way undo Locke’s entire project, but does allow for many reasonable challenges.

With this framework established, the boundaries must be tested. Under the restrictions of this rather humdrum universe, there are seldom significant outliers to the traditional human experience which shed light on the “normal” notions of identity. Mental illness can offer some perspective, especially those individuals afflicted by multiple personality disorders, persistent vegetative states, or fugue states. These human organisms do not properly synch with the expected one-to-one ratio of man to person. However, Locke has provided at least some answers to these cases. The truly difficult cases lie in speculative fiction. These thought experiments allow for hypothetical conclusions to be drawn from a variety of interesting – if unlikely – situations. Through these reflective exercises, Locke is put through his paces to see just how well he would hold up in the case of unlikely situations.

The first unlikely situation is pulled from the science fiction television show Farscape. At a certain point, the main character, John Crichton, is subjected to a process called “twinning.” It is described as “the splitting of Crichton into two identical beings; neither of the Crichtons can be called a copy and neither is the original; they are both equally John Crichton” (“John Crichton”). This is an example of a hypothetical situation referred to by Sydney Shoemaker as “branching.”

The very instant that Crichton experiences fission, there seem to be two versions of the John Crichton. Both have equal, legitimate claim to be called Crichton in the historical sense of identity through memory and retrolineal spatio-temporal continuity. However, from that point on, they are both experiencing different subjective realities and, as such, each can only be referred to as a John Crichton. Crichton A and Crichton 1, named so for the purposes of this paper, experience almost all forms of continuity required to maintain personal identity as John Crichton. Each is thereafter exposed to different environmental and interpersonal stimuli, resulting in slowly diverging behavior patterns, which would also fit rather well with Locke’s notions of tabula rasa and its implications for the empirical development of identity. This is a source of great distress for the Crichtons, as each one considers himself to be the original and the other to be a usurping pretender.

Paul Helm would not agree that either have a legitimate claim to Crichtonhood, saying “Given Locke's criterion of identity no divided consciousness could be identical with the undivided consciousness since there is another consciousness spatio-temporally continuous with the original but distinct from the other consciousness... Locke's criterion of identity seems to require us to say that upon division the original consciousness went out of existence” (183). Helm argues that a consciousness must be connected with itself forward through time, not simply backwards through memory, in order to maintain continuous personhood.

In his discussion on the identity of vegetables, Locke states that a plant must exist as organized matter “constantly from that moment both forwards and backwards” to be considered the same plant (210). This also applies to both animals and men, but not necessarily to the person. Locke says of person that “as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person” (211). It must then be the case that, at least to John Locke, John Crichton the man died the moment he was divided, though Crichton the person could arguably have lived on in the forms of Crichton A and Crichton 1. Bodily continuity is destroyed while psychological continuity diverges into two persons growing ever more unique.

The other hypothetical situation is the concept of identity and the use of transporter technology from the classic show Star Trek. As a means of near-instantaneous long distance teleportation, a transporter dematerializes an individual and rematerializes him or her at another location. This is a process of total destruction and recreation, as a person’s being cannot be physically transmitted through space. This concept is very similar to Sydney Shoemaker’s hypothetical “brain state transfer” procedure, in which “Precise details of your brain states will be recorded and then, simultaneously, your entire body will be destroyed and, in another location, exact duplicates of your brain states will be implemented in the blank brain of a body previously cloned from you” (Naylor, 390). In the case of Star Trek, an exact duplicate of one’s body is also created. On the show, characters are portrayed as calmly being atomically destroyed and remade with seemingly no disorientation or discomfort.

From the Lockean stance, a few problems arise here. First and foremost, there is not just a gap in memory (as a night of drinking may produce), but a momentary gap in existence. For at least a few seconds, there is no Captain Kirk. His position in spacio-temporal continuity ceases entirely. This would eliminate the possibility for bodily continuity outright. Captain Kirk the man must no longer exist. Thus it remains, does Captain Kirk the person persist?

Andrew Naylor does not believe he does. Returning to the brain state transfer procedure example, a new clone “would not be you according to a properly formulated psychological continuity theory [because] the psychological states of the clone would date not from any times prior to the onset of the operation of the BST-device, but only from the time at which the device structured the brain states in which those psycho logical states are realized” (390). Naylor believes that the memory of doing a certain action, e.g. making out with a hot alien, must have been generated during the act of getting down with said alien.

While this may hold sway with the bodily continuity theorists, it does not seem to refute psychological continuity. It shouldn’t matter when the memories were created in the “new” mind. A strict empiricist should realize that it makes no difference that memories are newly instantiated in the mind – memories are not required to have developed immediately responding to external stimuli. One can never verify the inception of a memory empirically as it is impossible to return to the original stimuli to experience the memory being created. The knowledge of the development of memories itself lies in memory and is therefore hazy at best. The true empiricist should recognize that the only requirement is that the memory can be recalled. The only sensation that is able to be recognized is the immediate sensation of the act of remembering. One cannot verify the age of a memory, only place it within a temporal context relating to other memories. As such, memories are only situated relationally – they don’t come with fixed time stamps. The personal identity, the thinking, sensing mind that extends backwards to past actions must remain if the person carries with him or her the narrative of collected life events. Strictly speaking, the age of particular memories have no empirical value and should not could. This implies that the person persists, albeit with a fresh new man after every away mission.

Consciousness is constantly being interrupted, usually on a daily basis. Sleep interrupts personal continuity, and yet the person persists. Locke says “Socrates waking and sleeping are not the same person” (213), showing that these gaps in personhood are rather quotidian. Identities are continual, not continuous, and this is a source of no small anxiety for individuals and societies. People use connective narratives – “I was asleep/drunk/temporarily insane” – to avoid having to confront the possibility that, for at least one evening, they did not exist as the discrete individuals they claim to be. Over the course of a nap, a person ceases to exist, which can be a very troubling notion. The truth is not in the details for Locke, but in the overarching trends, just like identity. Each person is a chaotic advancement through time, not some imperious, unbroken line. While his system is in no way unimpeachable, it certainly offers a greater account for the unavoidable Heraclitean flux that people seem to experience as a necessary part of daily life.

Works Cited

Helm, Paul. “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 208 (Apr., 1979): 173-185. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

“John Crichton.” Farscape Encyclopedia Project. Farscape Encyclopedia Project. 2014. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

Locke, John. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Modern Philosophy.” Ed. F. E. Baird and W. Kauffman.4^th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. 173-239. Print.

Naylor, Andrew. “Personal Identity Un-Locke-Ed.” American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Oct., 2008): 387-396. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

Noonan, Harold. “Locke on Personal Identity.” Philosophy, Vol. 53, No. 205 (Jul., 1978): 343-351. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.