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The Shattered Self by Pierre Baldi, MIT Press, £16.95/$24.95,
ISBN 0262025027

I AM unique. I don’t mean to be boastful, but I am. And so are you. Or
possibly not. What if you are an identical twin? Are you unique, or are you one
of two copies? This issue, argues Pierre Baldi in The Shattered Self,
will soon be as challenging to our notion of self-importance as was Galileo’s
insistence that the Earth isn’t the centre of all things, or Darwin’s
demonstration that we are just a minuscule twig on the evolutionary tree.

Baldi is concerned not so much with twins as with clones. What if human
cloning became mainstream? Imagine sitting in a room with a thousand identical
copies of yourself. This, the author suggests, would seriously do your head in.
How could you possibly retain a sense of self, of individual value?

And it’s not just cloning. Genetics, medicine and computer science are now
progressing so rapidly that shortly, in Baldi’s future world of putatively
achievable science, natural pregnancy will be a thing of the past as artificial
wombs end up taking the strain and sex becomes unnecessary. Computers will be so
powerful that all that we are in terms of human experience and genetics will be
stored on a hard drive. We will be reduced to bits of information. We will have
lost our uniqueness and much of our usefulness.

While these conjectures make for provocative reading, the central argument of
The Shattered Self is too diffuse and too poorly developed to make for
an entirely satisfying read. We get neither the razor-sharp analysis of the best
of philosophy nor an adequate discussion of the technological hurdles. How, for
example, are we to overcome the problem that cloning has a high mortality and
abnormality rate?

The problem with Baldi’s world, then, is that it slips all too easily into
the realm of science fiction, only without a plot. The author conjectures, for
example, that we will be able to store the lifelong activity of all the neurons
in our brains on a computer disc. As if. I found it hard to get worried about an
impending philosophical crisis when the putative cause was in the land of the
fairies.

Even supposing such a device could exist, I don’t see how it would remove a
sense of individuality. It would record rather than replace experience, and the
end result doesn’t seem so very different from the realisation that we are just
a bunch of chemicals. Such an understanding doesn’t stop me enjoying
myself—or indeed being myself.

But the cloning could have a serious impact on our psychology. As the author
notes, if identical twins are raised together, they see themselves as more
different from each other than they do if raised apart. This suggests a sense of
uniqueness is important to us, but might also suggest that clones could cope. I
think the bigger psychological problem for a clone would come from the
motivation for their creation. If parents tried to replace a dead child with a
clone, for example, how would the clone feel? More farmed than fathered?

So Baldi’s claim that a cataclysmic rethinking of who we are is pending
shouldn’t frighten us unduly. Though Galileo and Darwin have chipped away at
that Renaissance notion of humans as the measure of all things, it hasn’t
deprived us of the will to live.

It is as though we have two selves: one emotional, one rational. No matter
what the rational self may decide, the emotional one carries on the deception
that there is a meaning to it all. I don’t know if this deception is an
adaptation, but it seems like excellent protection for an organism aware of its
own mortality. If we can live happily after Darwin, we can live happily with a
family of very close relatives.