Immortality (18 page)

From that moment on, things begin to go badly wrong. The poor abandoned monster, in search of his creator, attempts to befriend Frankenstein’s five-year-old brother but accidentally kills him when the boy screams out. Shortly afterward monster and creator confront each other in the mountains above Geneva. The creature offers to quit the world of man and leave Frankenstein in peace if only he creates for him a companion—a female just as hideous who would provide him with some affection and sympathy. The scientist, torn between guilt, pity and revulsion, consents, and begins again what has become for him the “most abhorred task” of creating life.

But with his work already advanced, he begins to have doubts:
the female monster might be even more wicked; together they might breed, and “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth.” Overcome with revulsion at these ideas and “trembling with passion,” he tears the half-finished woman apart. The monster, feeling betrayed once again, swears that he will be avenged, and so he is. The scientist returns to Geneva and attempts to resume his life, marrying his childhood sweetheart. But on his wedding night, while securing the house, he hears a scream from the bedroom. By the time he arrives, his bride is “lifeless and inanimate”—murdered. Frankenstein might have acquired the power to create life, but his abandoned creature still has the power to take it away.

Victor Frankenstein swears at all costs to destroy the monster and sets off in pursuit of his creation and archenemy. The chase takes them across Europe, into Russia and north to the Arctic Circle, the monster taunting his creator as he eludes him but leads him on. Eventually, worn out and adrift on an ice floe, the scientist is picked up by the ship of an explorer. Seeing in him a fellow spirit, Frankenstein recounts his adventure. But just as the ship is set to return to England, the young scientist dies of exhaustion and fever; that evening the explorer enters the cabin to find the monster standing over his creator’s body and lamenting, torn between triumph and grief. Vowing to take his own life, the creature springs from the ship and disappears into the darkness.

T
HIS
, then, is Mary Shelley’s portrayal of the modern man of progress who believes he can conquer nature: reckless, self-obsessed and liable to bring destruction on himself and all those around him. In daring to usurp the powers of nature, Victor Frankenstein, the arrogant young scientist, becomes defined by his act of creation, his fate bound to that of his creature. His dream of conquering death takes on a literal life of its own in the form of the monster that he is unable to control and that in the end destroys him.

Mary Shelley was well placed to write this critique: both her
father and her husband were just such “men of progress,” and she had suffered from their egotism and willingness to sacrifice the interests of others in pursuit of their principles. Her message is that it is an illusion to think we can become like the gods, able to rule over life and death; we are a part of nature, not her master—and if we violate her she will destroy us. It is the perspective of an insightful young woman on the male-dominated world of scientific adventure.

Equally, the nameless monster is also defined by his relationship to his creator—to such an extent that in popular culture, he is often referred to, mistakenly, as “Frankenstein.” His unnatural birth leaves him without parentage, role or identity; he is forced to stalk his maker in the hope of finding some kind of meaning or sympathy. After repeated rejection, his goal becomes solely his maker’s destruction. When that is complete, there is nothing left for him, as he exclaims over Frankenstein’s corpse: “The miserable series of my being is wound to its close!”

The lasting impression is not of the dumb monster of film legend but of a thinking being in search of itself. Its entire journey throughout the book is spent confronting the questions it poses as soon as it learns to formulate words: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”

T
HE
monster’s questions are profound and challenging. He was stitched together from the rotting matter of the charnel house, created from parts that were once human but whose owners were now dead. What was his relationship to these others who once inhabited his body? Was he somehow all of them born again, or one of them, or someone new? This is the fundamental question that hangs over the prospect of resurrection—the question of the identity of the deceased and the risen again. It is the question we must
answer in assessing whether there is any plausibility to the Resurrection Narrative.

As we saw in
chapter 4
, if you die in the expectation of resurrection—whether by an act of God or of science—then you expect that it really will be
you
who rises again. But we saw when looking at the traditional Christian version of resurrection—the Reassembly View, in which God reassembles you atom by atom—that this is not as straightforward as it might seem. That view suffered from three major worries: the Cannibal Problem, which asked what would happen if your matter had also belonged to someone else; the Transformation Problem, which asked how you could both be put back together exactly as you were yet at the same time be made invulnerable and immortal; and the Duplication Problem, which asked what would happen if God re-created both the child and the adult you.

These problems partly stem from having to gather the particular atoms that composed a person on his or her deathbed. But we might anyway ask what difference it could make if we use one particular carbon atom or oxygen atom instead of any other. It is difficult to see how it could be important whether a particular oxygen atom in your resurrected body was once in your original body—an oxygen atom is an oxygen atom. Atoms do not acquire special tags or magical properties from once having formed part of a particular human. The resurrectionist might therefore conclude that we should abandon this troublesome idea of using particular particles: it is not individual atoms that matter but only how they are put together.

This view suits very well the visions of the cryonicists and others whom we met above. We saw that many people believe that what is essential for them to survive into the future is that their mind or psychology be preserved and that someone’s psychology can be seen as a set of data, as information about a person’s beliefs, memories and so forth. The immortalists who dream of uploading and downloading their minds do not worry about whether their new body will have
the same atoms as their previous body. In fact, we saw that they often dream of shiny
new
bodies made of much more reliable stuff than carbon-based flesh and bone. All they think matters is that a newly created brain has the right psychological “software” running on it.

The modern resurrection-hopefuls therefore believe that a person can be created anew if the right blueprint exists, even if that person’s original body was completely destroyed in some terrible catastrophe. Let us call this the
Replication View
of resurrection. It says that you could be resurrected by replicating your psychology, regardless of the materials used. So it would not matter if the original you was eaten by lions, who were then eaten by cannibals, who were then atomized in a nuclear explosion. A new, resurrected you could still be made of brand-new atoms, or St. Paul’s imperishable stuff, or silicon, or anything else; what would matter is only that this stuff be put together in the right way so as to create a person with your memories, quirks and opinions. If this view really does describe a way in which you can survive death, then you would have good reason to join the optimists and take out a cryonics insurance policy: the only obstacle to your one day living again would be the technical one of developing the immortality factory that can scan you and churn out your replica—a mere engineering problem, as the transhumanists might say.

Whether or not we can be resurrected by simply following a kind of blueprint is a hot topic in modern philosophy, as the answer tells us a great deal about just what kind of things we really are. Serious thinkers defend both sides of the argument. But even those who believe that replication can guarantee survival admit that it forces us to accept some unpalatable and troubling consequences. We will focus on just one of these, as it is the most telling: it is the Duplication Problem, which we met when looking at the Reassembly View.

We saw that in the Reassembly View, God could theoretically create both the five-year-old you and the eighty-year-old you because they could be made of different particles. This is a problem, but at
least in the Reassembly View the problem is limited by the need to have a complete separate set of particles from the old you in order to make a new you—God could not create two eighty-year-old versions of you, because there is only one set of particles that made up the eighty-year-old you. In the Replication View, however, this problem is much worse. This view says that individual particles don’t matter—it is only the blueprint that counts. So our future immortality factory, which stores the latest scan of your brain, could in theory churn out any number of duplicate yous. Each one would believe himself to be the real you just as much as you now believe yourself to be the real you.

This is a big problem. Let us take a candidate for high-tech resurrection called Frank. He dies in a dramatic midair explosion while crossing the Atlantic. Luckily, an automatic transmitter immediately alerts the immortality factory back on land, which within minutes produces a single new replacement—Frank 2, based on his latest brain scan. Frank 2 thinks, walks and talks just like Frank—apart from amnesia about his recent flight, but that is probably no bad thing. Frank 2 is told that the last version of him was killed in the plane and thinks, “How lucky that I did that brain scan just before leaving for the airport. But perhaps I’d better stay on land for a while, as having to be replicated is terrible for my no-claims bonus. Now best get back to the wife and assure her I’m okay.” His friends and family quickly accept that, despite the midair mishap, Frank is back—that he has in fact been resurrected.

But imagine instead that the factory malfunctions. The instructions for a new Frank get sent to more than one of its many assemblers, and as a consequence the factory churns out two new versions—a Frank 2a
and
a Frank 2b. We can call this the
Duplicate Case
. Now, in this case, who is Frank?

It is tempting to say that they both are. But that cannot be right. For a start, it would violate a fundamental rule of logic (called the transitivity of identity) that says that if Frank 2a is the same person
as Frank, and Frank 2b is the same person as Frank, then Frank 2a must be the same person as Frank 2b. Yet this is clearly not the case, as the two new Franks are in fact two separate individuals, perfectly capable of going their separate ways.

And if we look at it from the original Frank’s perspective, it is even clearer that he cannot be both of them. Imagine he sees one of the plane’s engines catch fire and knows he is about to die. He remembers that he has recently been scanned and so thinks that he need not worry about dying high over the ocean, as his psychology will simply be transferred to a new brain and body. He is reassured, believing he can reasonably look forward to waking up in the new body, just as he might look forward to waking up from a night’s sleep—that, after all, is what we would usually expect if someone told us that we were going to live on.

But the factory has produced two new Franks. We can imagine that Frank 2b on emerging from the factory is shocked to see a mirror image of himself on the other side of the road and accidentally walks into an oncoming car, causing terrible pain and injury, while Frank 2a looks on. If it were true that Frank
is
both Frank 2a
and
Frank 2b, then this means he would experience
both
being hit by a car, as happens to Frank 2b,
and
seeing the collision from the other side of the road, as happens to Frank 2a. But there is no person having
both
of these experiences. Indeed, these experiences are mutually exclusive—one cannot simultaneously both be in terrible pain and not in terrible pain.

So Frank cannot be both of his replacements. Is he, then, just one of them? But how could this be? The relationship between Frank and Frank 2a is just the same as the relationship between Frank and Frank 2b. Both new Franks have just the same claim to be the original—there is no reason to think Frank might
be
one of them rather than the other. The immortalist could perhaps try to argue that Frank is whichever was produced first—but we can just as easily
imagine that the factory produced them simultaneously, so this argument won’t work either.

Yet if Frank is not both of them and not either of them, then he must be
neither
of them. In other words, he has not really survived at all. It looks very much like the immortality factory has not actually resurrected Frank but just produced two duplicates of him. It is as if someone made two new versions of a Vincent van Gogh painting that had been burned to ashes: no matter how true to the original they were, we would not think that van Gogh’s work had come back into existence. And if someone tried to claim that the two new paintings really
were
the original, we would consider that person a fraudster.

To make this problem for the Replication View even clearer, let us imagine a slightly different malfunction: the message is sent to the immortality factory that Frank is about to die, but then the plane suddenly rights itself, and he does not die after all. But the factory has already started producing Frank 2, who duly rolls out of the machine based on Frank’s latest brain scan. Now Frank has survived his flight, and he has not even noticed that a replica was being produced of him in the distant factory—it has had no direct impact on him at all. Frank might not find out that he has been replicated until he returns home from his travels to find Frank 2 in bed with his wife. In this case, in which the original Frank still exists, it is clear that the factory has just made a copy of him—so let us call this the
Copying Case
.