Final Part 5: Epithet

"'I could tell you my adventures — beginning from this morning,' said Alice a little timidly: 'but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'"

4.Doubles/Doppelgang: Beginning with our first novel, The Invention of Morel, the theme of doubles or copies has been coming up again and again. First, explain how you see the notion of the double in each of the thematic sections of the course:

1. The photographic double: Morel, The Ticket that Exploded, Film in general
2. The biological double: the clone, the splice, the twin
3. The double achieved through other means: brainwashing, time travel, pataphysics

Using these three types as a departure point explore how the concept of the double changes with the technology that produces it. Does the notion of just one double hold in the twenty-first century?

I see the photographic double as having already overthrown us. What I mean is this, when determining the authenticity of one’s identity we turn to look at our photographic double. For example, most of us who do not look over 30 are carded when we buy alcohol at the store. We show the cashier our driver’s license and the cashier is supposed to look at our birth year, but more importantly our picture and make sure it looks similar enough to us to ensure that these aren’t fake credentials. That picture is not who you are now, it is a recording of your past self, captured and made timeless, ageless. Nevertheless, for everyone else it has become you, and for any of your official social or legal dealings you will need to behave and look enough like your past self for people to believe that you are really you.

The biological double is the mirror image come to life; the fear that we all have that one day we will look into the mirror and our reflection will no longer be mimicking us is actualized. People approach us who we don’t know and recall things to us that we did not do and we have to wonder if we really did those things or not. Perhaps this type of double is related to the chemically or psychologically induced double: a terrifying discontinuity in our psychic time lines. What is particularly irksome though are the biological doubles who become more successful than us. We can argue that others have had more luck with genes or familial relations, but when it is our exact copy doing the things that we did not do there are no more excuses and we cannot deny our own laziness or lack of willpower and determination.

There are probably too many types of doubles to list, but it seems like many of them follow the formula of a disconcerting space-time disconnect. The time-travel double is an interesting one. Future selves are particularly adept at overthrowing; after all, devise any plan to avoid being overthrown by your future double and he/she will know it too. In a way though, they do not actually have to travel in time to do this. Remembering past events is a way in which you can become your past’s double and overthrow him/her; if you remember any events of your childhood, chances are when you are remembering them you are thinking the way you do now, thus overthrowing your former self’s consciousness.

The pataphysical I still believe can reduce to the metaphysical, but this does not make it any less troubling. In metaphysics, discussions of modal concepts like necessity, contingency, and possibility are usually talked about in terms of “possible worlds.” Most people visualize possible worlds the way they visualize the Universe: smaller than it really is. If the Universe “looks like” a huge sphere with tiny points of light representing the super galaxy clusters, then we just imagine many of these spheres to get other possible worlds (the nothingness in between the worlds may be visualized the same way as visualizing what it “looks like” beyond the edge of the Universe). Possible worlds are much, much more though. Strictly speaking, a possible world can be represented as a set: a set of all true and consistent propositions in that world. This unimaginable, continuum-size set contains not only the way everything has been, is, or will be, but also an infinite number of abstract truths like 1+1=2. Other possible worlds, then, are merely sets that contain certain propositions that are not true in this world (which is referred to as the actual world not because it is in any way better or “truer” than other possible worlds, but because it happens to be the possible world we inhabit) but still consistent with the rest of the propositions in the set. This also gives us a continuum-many number of doubles who are cross-worlds identical to us just so long as statements like “you could have done otherwise” hold true (because in another possible world you did). Modal Realists like David Lewis believe that these other possible worlds do in fact exist (although they are not “actual” in the sense mentioned earlier because they are outside of our possible world), and that this fact is what makes statements like “you could have done otherwise” true. Thus, although your possible world doubles are unable to come to this possible world and overthrow you, what they do still affects what you could and could not have done. If you are not moved by Frankfurt cases and believe that what you could and could not have done in some particular case or another affects your moral praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, then these doubles directly control your moral character.

In many cases our concept of the double, specifically how it can affect us, is significantly changed by our level of technological development. Photographic doubles did not exist prior to the invention of the camera or were at most only realized in the comparatively benign mirror or reflection in the water double. Future doubles existed only in our memories until physics was sufficiently advanced to inform us that time-travel was theoretically possible. I wonder if, given extremely advanced technology, we might not be able to break down even the borders between Universes (as happens in Postsingular) and make the threat of the possible world double actual. On the other hand, some conceptions of the double do not seem particularly dependent upon technology. The biological double has always been realized in the case of identical twins, and though genetic engineering allows us the possibility of cloning, these are still imperfect copies. The nature vs. nurture debate aids us here: even among identical twins very different personality types emerge. At best we get an imperfect impersonator whom we cannot disprove even with DNA evidence. The biological double can replace us but only by faking; it never becomes us.

In the past there was at most only a handful of doubles: tales of the doppelganger, the mirror or reflection in the water, the occasional impersonating twin, perhaps a rare case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Technology has drastically added to our ability to copy ourselves, making it in many ways automatic. But we are in many ways still unable to comprehend, morally or otherwise, the full extent of the consequences of being replaced by the perfect copy.