(Faust Amoyo/ Marcus Minkowski)
“No, I don’t believe in God.” Replied Marcus with his eyes starting to regain their cosmic spark. I just knew how to distract him.
“And as you told me when you were discussing the W.B.W, you believe that humans evolved?”
“That’s sure. Evolution is a theory and a fact.”
“But did our souls evolve as well?”
“Souls? I believe in no souls.”
“At a certain point I also was about to lose my faith in soul, but I found out that I had to believe.”
“Why?”
“Now look, you believe that consciousness is produced by the functional human brain, no?”
“That’s right.”
“And you believe that our personalities, emotions and memo-ries are all resulting from a certain arrangement of molecules?”
“I believe that all emotions and memories are stored some-how in our brains as matter. That’s why you may suffer memory loss if somebody hits your head. It’s all a question of matter.”
“Ok, Marcus, now comes the tricky part. Suppose that I have made another copy of myself, not by cloning or whatever, but by a certain machine. This machine scans my body atom by atom and assembles another body that resembles me in each and every atom. Now the other body must be alive, no?”
“The whole process looks ridiculous,” Marcus replied with a a sense of worry, “Our body is full of circulating blood. Mole-cules are in everlasting processes of tautomerism and quantum effects keep on playing with the atoms. But yes, if we theoreti-cally accept your suppositions. So what?”
“And he will think that his name is Faust, have my same memories, like what I like, hate what I hate and resemble me in each and every aspect?”
“Yes…so what?”
“Now if I close my eyes before the machine makes my clone, and then after the process is done I and my clone are guided to two different rooms, why will I still see the room in which my ‘real’ body is present? Why will I still be in my old body and not in the new one?”
Marcus sat quietly for a minute or two. I could only imagine the horrible processing procedures that were going on inside.
“Well,” he replied in a conserved manner, “Perhaps it is be-cause…no…”
“The Nature Watcher is in trouble.” I said in a taunting man-ner, pleased to see him totally forget about Roy.
“Wait a minute, smarty!” he replied in a triumphal tone, “What if we’d make you multiply like a DNA double strand? We’d first cut you longitudinally into two pieces and then build complementary halves and glue them. Now we will be left with two Fausts, each getting only a longitudinal half of you, that is, a half brain and half spinal cord. Now which room of the two will you see, sweetheart?”
“Eh…!” I replied wondering before what disaster I was sit-ting.
“Now that I think more, Faust,” said Marcus in a more grown up manner as he raised an eyebrow like skilful diplomats, “I re-member what Heraclitus said, that no body steps twice in the same river. In fact, Faust, in the first example you will not see any of the two rooms. Two different people each equally related to you will. And they will both be totally convinced that they are your ‘natural extension’ in time. And that doesn’t need your mystical machine. If you’d close your eyes and open them again, you will not see things, but another Faust will see things and be-lieve that he is you. Consciousness is in an everlasting flux. Things get equally bizarre even for objects. Do you know about the paradox of the ship of Theseus?”
“Wasn’t that titanic? Yeah! The song said: In the ship of The-seus, I see you, I feel you.” Said Loki with the world famous melody.
“Eh, No I don’t.” I said as I miraculously swallowed my laughter.
“It’s a ship that Greeks kept as a war memorial, as it aged and parts got old, they took away the old planks putting in new and stronger timber in their place. Now after a couple of decades not even a single piece of the ‘original’ ship was still in place. Now is this the same ship or not? And if we’d bring back all the atoms that made you, Faust, when you was ten years old, which Faust of the two will be the ‘real’ Faust?”
“Lord in heaven!” I said as I gazed in stupor, “So you are say-ing that all is in flux, that we are in a continuous state of becoming. But that’s exactly what Buddhism taught. It is strik-ing that Buddhist philosophers, as they rejected the notion of soul, could arrive to very similar conclusions with modern sci-ence.”
Marcus didn’t reply, he was too skeptic to affirm such con-clusions, yet he looked very excited and glad that he could solve my hard question.
“Now,” I added with great amusement, “I can see why por-traits, with their blurred edges fall much closer to the heart of the beholder than photographs with their well-defined edges. Por-traits have always given me the feeling of perceiving people as eternal or as manifestations of eternity, as if I have been familiar with them for the whole eternity that preceded my essence.”