I saw the latest Star Trek flick the other day. Like so many "purists" out there, I really wnated to hate it. Something to do with messing with a hallowed tradition, or some BS like that. I really wanted to leave the theater seething and declaring that Gene Roddenberry would be rolling in his grave at the travesty that passes itself off as a Star Trek movie. But I liked it. Not just moderately, but really liked it. Too bad. I was looking forward to a good rant. Now, if only someone would get hold of Star Wars... What I noticed, and liked, was the fact that it didn't have that typical/traditional Star Trek bash you over the head philosophic grandstanding that's usually passed off as "undertones" or "subtext". I found that a relief. But, a funny thing happened. The philosophic question just came. I was there, sitting in the darkened theater, and my mind started thinking. My brain actually started to look for some philsophic subtext to the plot. And eventually, I found one. Because of a slight time travel problem ( it wouldn't be Star Trek without some time travel, would it?), there results a pair of Spocks -- one older and one younger. Now, I thought, while munching on my sneeked in food, there are two Spocks, are they the same person? If I stuck the duo side by side and said something like, "Spock=Spock", would I be correct? Is this fact that I am putting forth analytically true? Putting age aside, the Spocks are the same genetically: they are both the son of the human woman Amanda and Vulcan Ambassador Sarek. They are the same, I presume, on the quantum level. And anything that is the same on the quantum level is identical, that is, itself. So, I would be forced to say yes, they are the same person. I'm not sure, since I'm no physicist, that there isn't some additional requirement that the Spocks have to occupy the same space to be exactly the same, or if the fact that they are not the same age makes them similar, but different. I don't know. But, even without considering any additional questions or possibilities, I feel that they, despite their quantum similarities, are not the same person. I know, from reading Quine, that if say, one spock was missing his left index finger, that we could easily say that the spocks are not the same person. Strikingly similar, but indeed not the same (as one is missing his left index finger). Like I said, I'm not sure if age functions the same as a missing finger. But, when we think of things like what makes us who we are, we tend to look beyond our physicality. We are, we say, more than our DNA. (Master Yoda says that we are more than "this crude matter". Yes, I mixed franchises. I am sci-bi after all.) We are made up of many things that comprise who we are: our experiences, our environment, our beliefs, thoughts and feelings all have to do with what makes us us. Our physical bodies may suggest something, but taken as a whole, we are something else -- that is, our bodies say what we are, but there is a matter of who we are ( and I don't think that the Existentialists are alone in suggesting this). In the much maligned Star Trek: Nemesis ( I still think this is one of the better flicks, despite the fact that they totally ignored the fact that Dr. Soong created more androids than data and B4), the explanation that Dr. Crusher gives to Captain Picard as to why he and Shinzon are not the same person is that their life experiences made them different people. Shinzon, for those who haven't seen the movie -- and plenty didn't, since it only grossed $43 million -- was a clone of Captain Picard. That means that Shinzon was an exact duplicate of the Captain. But, they had different lives. Picard grew up on earth, the son of a winemaker. Shinzon was raised on the Romulan moon Remus, where he was enslaved and mistreated by his Romulan captors. They shared the exact same DNA, but in essence, they were not the same person. The idea of essence has is connected to the fact that we do see personhood as something beyond the mere physical. "Person" is a loaded term. Being a person, as opposed to being a mere being, conveys a a uniqueness, perhaps even something transcendent within all of us. It is something that is unique to us as individuals that differentiates us from all others, including identical twins of clones. So, using this idea, I could say (spoiler alert) that one Spock , the younger one, lived in a timeline wherein he saw the death of his mother, the destruction of his homeworld Vulcan, and knew that James T. Kirk's father was killed before Kirk was born. The other, older Spock lived in an alternate timeline where Kirk shared his story about how his father watched him graduate from Starfleet Academy, and where his homeworld still existed (presumably), or at the very least his mother wasn't killed when Vulcan was destroyed. Their experiences make them different. It's not beyond the possibility that experiences make us physically different as well. We know that we can influence ourselves physically with our own minds. anyone who has ever thought himself sick or worried about a midterm to the point of puking knows this. We know that what we think can change ourselves internally. A brain of a person suffering from depression looks different from a person who does not. A brain that is injured by accident or drug use or whatever else looks different from a healthy brain. So, one might postulate that it may be possible to tell which Sopck is which from looking at their brains. The older Spock might, due to his life experiences (ones that the younger Spock did not have), show differences on an MRI that we would not see in the younger Spock. If this is so, then we have additional physical evidence to say that they merely look alike, but are not the same person. OK, I know. I know that this one wasn't supposed to lay on the heavy philosophic stuff. This one isn't supposed to lead to heavy philosophic discussions, and I should accept that this one is a early summer action flick. So, I'll end on this note: the special effects were great (especially the scene when the Enterprise comes out of warp speed in the middle of a debris field), and Zachary Quinto's Spock -- totally hot.
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