Complex Numbers

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Another link courtesy of Elisa the Bunny Stik today. I promise I have way more of my own than ones I've been pointed to, but such are the vagaries of the random number generator, peace be upon it.

So we begin June with a rather depressing -- but fascinating -- article.

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder  
Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. Then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.

I would never have heard of Cloudflare until just now, except that I have a script blocker installed to help prevent popup ads and some tracking. Usually, it's unobtrusive. Sometimes, some actual content gets blocked and I have to figure out which of the scripts are causing that, which requires research and experience. Point being that Cloudflare is a recurring one that I know it's safe to, at least temporarily, disable.

Ironically, per my script blocker, this source, Wired, doesn't seem to use Cloudflare.

Now. I'm not going to quote much from the article today. It's very long and, in the tradition of the rambling New Yorker style, it pops back and forth between anecdote and meat. Honestly, the story of Cloudflare, or even Lee Holloway, is background to me, mostly just the example used to anchor the information about the medical issues involved.

Because it's long, I realize it's unlikely most of my readers will take the time to actually delve into it. So, if you're going to read it, do it now, because I'm about to spoil the plot.

Ready?

Here we go.

Dude helps start a tech company that both does good things and makes money (rare). He shows signs of going off the rails. His first wife leaves him, taking the kid. After getting married again (which could also be taken as a sign of mental issues), and having another kid (ditto), and going further off the rails, he gets diagnosed with a rare (though not as rare as a company that both does good things and makes money) form of early-onset dementia for which there is no cure.

Having dealt with different forms of dementia in both my parents, in addition to my abiding interest in philosophy, I was interested mostly in the underlying discussion. It's not that I don't feel for the guy, or his family; it's just hard for me to work up too much sadness for people I don't know.

This central question is expressed in the article, after the first part of the anecdote I mentioned.

What makes you you? The question cuts to the core of who we are, the things that make us special in this universe. The converse of the question raises another kind of philosophical dilemma: If a person isn't himself, who is he?

And that's what I'm focusing on here.

I've had occasion to hang out with people, many of whom are very nice so this isn't a cut on them, who airily declared things like, "You are not your body."

I disagree.

I mean, okay, in the ultimate case, sure. I have, fortunately, rarely had occasion to look at a real live dead body (okay, you know what I mean), but when you see such things in movies, people are like, "That's Joe. Poor guy." Well, it's not Joe, is it? It's Joe's body. Joe's left the building. It's a bit like when you look at a photograph or painting of someone and say "That's Joe."

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.  

But a living person has continuity, not just of mind as the article mentions, but also of body -- though even that is more of a pattern continuity than a matter continuity.

Still, the existence of dementia (or other brain issues) points, in my opinion, to the inescapable conclusion that insofar as you can say "I am" at all, you are your body, which perforce includes your brain.

The "You are not your body" crowd is expressing, as I understand it, a form of mind-body duality, the idea that the mind, or spirit, or soul, or something, exists independent of the physical form, perhaps even persisting beyond death.

But when my parents, first my mom followed by my dad, fell ill, I seriously began questioning such things. Not that I ever fully accepted an afterlife, but it's such a pervasive belief that I never really argued about it, either.

If the mind persists beyond death... which mind? By the time my father died, his brain had deteriorated to the point where he was largely nonfunctional. If I met his ghost, would I meet the one with Alzheimer's? His spirit from ten years earlier, before he had to go to a nursing home for it? From 40 years earlier, when I was a child? Or the one from when he was a teenager, running away from home to go to sea? Or something else entirely (at which point I couldn't really say he was "Dad").

The point being that the brain changes all the time, and these changes are reflected in the mind. We can call disorders of the brain "mental illness" or "dementia" or whatever, but that's just a way more obvious change. It's a label we put on so that people can understand that something the affected does is an illness with physical signs, not just them being weird.

Some might argue that it's not the mind, but the soul, whatever that is, that persists. Okay, I'm not going to try to shatter any closely-held beliefs here, but if "you" are the sum of your experiences, tethered to an ever-changing mind tethered to an ever-changing brain, which "you" survives? If you don't have your memories, you're not really "you." If you don't have a neural network to shape your thoughts, or a body to keep running and send signals back and forth to, who or what are you?

From my surface understanding of information theory, which, oddly, seems to be a good candidate for explaining Everything, I've heard that no information can truly be destroyed. So in one sense, we live on, in echoes, having affected people and things along the journey.

But personality? That's inextricably tied to the material. Might as well ask "what happens to a candle flame after it's snuffed out?"

Anyway. That's my philosophy for the day, inspired by the story of a guy whose work echoes in most every corner of the internet.