Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

PHILIP'S PERIL: PRESENTING A PUZZLING PARADOX OF PERSON-NESS ROBERT N. GOLDMAN* It was a dark and stormy night. Philip slogged along the country road, the straps of his backpack beginning to uncomfortably cut into his shoulders. Afoot since morning, cold and tired, he had given up hope of coming to the comfortable inn that had been his goal. Any shelter from the drumming rain where he could take off his boots would now satisfy him. He must have taken a wrong turn sometime during the day, he thought glumly. He should have arrived at the Boar's Head, with its warm fire, hot dinner, and clean bed, hours ago. Spending his last vacation as a bachelor on a solitary walking trip seemed much more romantic a week earlier when he told Pam about it over martinis in a candle-lit white-tableclothed Soho restaurant than it did now. He peered ahead in the rain. Could that be a light toward the right? He stepped up his pace and his heart lightened as a gray stone country house slowly revealed itself. As he neared the gate, he saw an overgrown garden surrounding a decrepit structure which he would have thought abandoned were it not for a faint light showing through a dirt-streaked window. Philip hesitated. He was wet and weary; on the road ahead was only darkness and rain and shrieking wind. He approached the door and knocked. Philip tugged at the knots which clamped his wrists to the back of the chair, but it only caused the rough hemp to press more deeply into his flesh. He tried to move his legs, still in heavy hiking boots, but they too were tightly lashed to the chair. Though out of the rain, he thought grimly, he could not say that his situation had improved. The man who had welcomed Philip at the door, mild appearing * Address: 16661 Akron Street, Pacific Palisades, California 90272. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1972 | 131 in white jacket and rimless spectacles, entered the room. "Good, you are finally awake," he said to Philip with a slight smile as he seated himself comfortably in an old Morris chair. He leaned back, folded his hands, looked benignly upon his captive, and then went on talking in the voice of a practiced pedagogue. "Perhaps you would like to know why you find yourself in this somewhat awkward position. As you have now surmised, the hot tea which you accepted so gratefully contained a fast-acting drug that put you unconscious long enough for me to tie you securely. Permit me to tell you of myself. I am a mad scientist. I am investigating the nature of the 'self—that peculiar attribute that tells each person he is himself rather than someone else. Where does this feeling of selfness lie? Metabolism studies show that the protoplasmic matter of which brain cells are composed is always undergoing change. Is selfness then in the organization of the brain's matter? If so, an artificially manufactured brain with identical organization should have the same 'selfness.' "You are a fortunate young man because you are about to play a most essential part—that of the subject—in an experiment to clarify the problem. Please excuse the manner in which I have elicited your involuntary cooperation. We mad scientists must operate on tight budgets. The funds made available to us are scandalously small, and my request for additional funding to hire a second research assistant was turned down." "Did you say second research assistant?" Philip interrupted in a weak voice. "What about the first?" "I will tell you about him," the mad scientist' smiled. "It's a trifle embarrassing. You see, I have built a machine for fabricating an exact duplicate of any human body—including the brain—complete with memories, habits, and idiosyncracies of behavior. Recent advance in cryonics has made it possible. The technique consists of temporarily stilling life processes by freezing the body, making a frozen copy, and then thawing both the original and the copy. "Now I had just put your predecessor, a most promising graduate student, in the machine and had started the process when I...