Audiences of the movie Avatar are asked to accept that, by means of a vaguely-described technology, Jake Sully’s mind is transferred into the body of a blue-skinned, nine-foot native of the moon Pandora. And they do accept it, with ease – even I, who consider myself attuned to issues of personal identity, bought the story without thinking about its strangeness until later.
The strange thing is that it’s not strange. We have no trouble at all accepting that the able-bodied Pandoran is the paraplegic Marine. Why? Because the personality, memories, desires, and so on, of the human are transferred to the Pandoran. There is no physical connection between the man, motionless in a pod, and the alien who is learning Pandoran ways; the two are linked only by the flow of information. The fact that this does not bewilder viewers is strong evidence that they – we – regard this psychological connection as identity. We follow Jake through interleaved episodes as human and Na’vi, convinced that it is one person’s story.
The movie can be seen as a giant psychological experiment on its audience, who might have reacted differently. Continue reading “Phantom Self at the movies – Avatar”
Imagine, in the early days of books, a small library consisting entirely of original manuscripts. Some of them are very old, and have been attacked by mice. Some have deteriorated so much that their pages crumble to dust when the custodian of the library tries to read them. He mourns the loss of these books, and contemplates the inevitable decay of the remaining books with sorrow. To be sure, new manuscripts are occasionally added to the library, but they cannot replace the volumes that are lost forever. This goes on until, one day, the young assistant librarian has an idea. “This book will be unreadable in five years,” he tells his elder. “But I can read it now. If I copy the words of this book onto sheets of new vellum, and bind them in a strong new binding, we will be able to read it for many decades to come.” The old librarian tenderly strokes the cracked spine of the crumbling volume, and shakes his head. “What good is a copy? It wouldn’t be the same book.” 
Part Three of