Tomo a liberdade de compartilhar com o grupo uma mensagem que acabei de enviar a um grupo de discussão sobre a filosofia de Karl Popper, do qual participo há uns cinco anos, chamado "Critical Café". Só peço desculpas por não ter traduzido a mensagem para o Português. Mais tarde quem sabe eu traduza.

O titulo da mensagem e "Identidade Pessoal e Computadores (Impessoais)". Eu começo citando a mensagem de um outro participante. A discussão sobre esse tema vem acontecendo há uns dez dias. Essa linha de discussão está contida no primeiro capitulo de minha autobiografia (infelizmente parada há mais de um ano). Há cerca de seis meses (ou mais um pouco) eu apresentei uma palestrinha sobre o assunto no Restaurante Daly, aqui de Campinas, de propriedade de meu amigo de cerca de 40 anos, Rubem Alves. Uma noite por semana ele promove um sarau filosófico das 18 as 20 horas no restaurante, em que alguém apresenta uma palestrinha sobre um tópico qualquer de interesse filosófico, ainda que meio fora das preocupações centrais da filosofia acadêmica.

Eduardo Chaves
eduardo@chaves.com.br

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> (McD: The questions of personal identity seem bizarre in that it would seem that most people do not ask them & that they arose as part of Locke's writings, followed up by Butler & others. It also appears in odd theories in  psychology like Erik Eriksson or the nationality theories A. D. Smith  & the Oxford David Miller. The whole line of thought has an air of unreality about it.) <

I have been reading bits and pieces of the discussion re: personal identity, computers, etc. and decided to say a few things because the two main topics of the discussion have interested me for quite a long time.

I don't see why "th[is] whole line of thought" should have "an air of unreality about it" and I will try to show why.

I think Locke was basically right when he asserted that our personal identity is dependent on our memory. There is a basic sense in which, if we lose our memory (as in severe cases of amnesia), we cease being who we are. What Locke suggests (in his story of the prince and the cobbler) is that, should there be a way in which we could lose our set of memories and acquire a set of memories which belonged to someone else, we would somehow change identities and become the other person. (Locke's purely theoretical suggestion acquires "an air of reality" when we are reminded that the brain is the physical basis of memory and that it is possible that brain transplants are one day feasible from a technical point of view. Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear no Evil is an interesting discussion of the philosophical, ethical and legal problems which would emerge in this case).

But going back to Locke's main thesis, there seems also to be a case for the claim that what we don't remember, because we forgot, ceases being a part of our history, and consequently cannot define our identity. I know that Freudians would disagree, saying that our identity is shaped as much by the things we repress into our unconscious as by the things we consciously remember, but we can disregard this thesis in this Popperian context [or at the very least "bracket it out"]. It also makes sense to imagine that our "invented memories" -- things we come to believe to have really occurred, but that, indeed, never did -- also shape our identities. Invented memories can occur when we become somehow crazy (thinking we are Napoleon, for instance) or when we somehow create a past for us and after a while really come to believe that it was, in fact, our past. In either case, despite its falseness, this invented past (this acquired set of memories) does seem to shape our identities.

I know there are lots of people who don't accept this account of memory and personal identity, but it does seem to me to make a lot of sense.

Coming now to computers. Among other things, computers are clearly extenders of our memory today. I think Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart were the first ones to think of the computer in this form: Bush called it a "memex" (memory extender) and Engelbert called it an "augmenter" (of our memory and of our other mental capacities). [Never mind that they were referring to software and not to hardware: software IS the computer, as Bill Gates precociously discovered -- and this discovery made him only the richest man on earth].

It is clear to me that, when we have a powerful "secondary memory", as the computer is for us today, we somehow "delegate" to it the remembrance of lots of things about ourselves that we would otherwise have to remember ourselves. Why keep it in our memory, somehow "stuffing" it, when we can "store" it in the computer and then "retrieve" it whenever we want?

If this can occur (and I have no doubt that it is more and more occurring), and Locke's thesis about memory and personal identity is defendable, then the conclusion that the original IMpersonal computer becomes somehow PERSONAL by sharing our memories, and so in our identity, starts being not only interesting, but feasible... The computer is not personal in itself: it becomes personal to the extend that it shares our memories, and so our personal identity.

This thought became strikingly real to me when, on April 26 of this year, a virus destroyed, at midnight, the BIOS and the hard disk of my home computer (fortunately a backup computer) and I spent the rest of the night thinking that it might have done the same to my main computer, in my office, which stays on all the time. During this night (nightmare), in which I tried to evaluate what I would do if my work of the last 30 years and my correspondence of the last 15 years were suddenly gone (except for some things backed up here and there), it dawned on me that I would no longer be entirely the same person, if my cherished (even though computer-stored) memories were to go forever.

During this period of self-reflexion, I understood why a man, who was part of the initial microcomputer revolution, and who came to spend more and more of his time in front of his personal computer, committed suicide when, one day, his disks were erased. From that moment on, he apparently felt, an important part of himself had already gone -- so
why not let the rest follow suit? Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the man, but I have the story in an old issue of the now defunct Popular Computing magazine.

So, it maybe that this whole thing has an "air of unreality" about it. But I doubt. I think we are dealing with real issues here.

Eduardo Chaves
Professor of Philosophy
University of Campinas
Sao Paulo/Brazil
eduardo@chaves.com.br
www.chaves.com.br

25/06/2003 10:31