Locating Identity

One of my personal Eureka moments came many years ago when I discovered the mitochondria, the tiny structures that produce the energy used within our cells. Mitochondria have DNA of their own—separate from the DNA in each cell’s nucleus. In humans, and most other species that have mitochondria, these structures are passed on to offspring exclusively from the mother. Hence, tracking mitochondrial DNA, we can search ever backward in time tracing the maternal line. We haven’t found Eve yet, but it may be possible. Adam is quite untraceable.

This came to mind yesterday when I read about claims (still not fully accepted) that the caterpillar and the butterfly that it becomes may be of two different species that once joined forces for a kind of biological tour de force. My mitochondrial encounter years ago suggested to me that bodies are chemical civilizations—imperfectly uniting quite diverse strands of living things—and indeed coexisting only because they are a kind of community of separates rather than a seamless whole. Humans can only digest, for instance—and therefore live—because we host a diverse community of bacteria.

Our bodies, of course, do not remain the same even from day to day. Yesterday we retrieved all or most of our photo albums. Some of them have photos that go back to the nineteenth century. Pictures of ourselves show the enormous changes that have taken place in our own bodies—which in turn, all these impressions, shaken well in a blender, made me wonder what identity means—and how it might be located.

Amusingly that word, identity, derives from the Latin phrase idem et idem, best translated into our own “same-old, same-old.” Thus identity is sameness. But in the physical world nothing is ever, strictly speaking, the same—not even that hard, attractive spoon I use to stir the coffee which, by chance, we “abstracted” from a house we rented in Florida three years ago. Even that spoon has lost some mass in the meantime.

If we cling strictly to a materialistic explanation of identity, it turns out that the best explanation for identity is statistical. I am statistically much the same today as yesterday, and never mind the 50 to 70 billion cells that died since 10:23 yesterday, which—thanks to Summer Time’s arrival (even time changes)—is 11:23 today.

Approximation must suffice to locate identity in time and space; to locate it absolutely we must leave the reservation and, having reread Plato’s Phaedo, we must start to feel familiar with the concept that the human self is immaterial and indestructible; its relationship to DNA, cellular or mitochondrial, is rather loose and tentative. Which suggests the happy thought that when our next caterpillar breaks is chrysalis and emerges as a butterfly, a single gorgeous soul will flutter away even if generated by two species in cooperation.

Same Old, Same Old?

Not for the first time yesterday I e-filed our joint Federal Income Tax return. In that process we had to “sign” the electronic return—but how do you sign an intangible something? The act is in the same category as raising a number to the power of 0.39. In the one case the physical image is of a fountain pen, in the other of doing a series of multiplications—but in this strange world neither actually applies. The last time we signed electronically supplying the adjusted gross income (AGI for short) of the year before sufficed. That number matched to our two social security numbers, was signature enough. This year TurboTax told me to call the IRS. A nicely modulated recorded female voice then guided me through the process. And behold. In no time at all, I got both Brigitte’s and my own IRS PIN, which stands for Personal Identification Number. The speaking computer required our SS numbers, last year’s filing status, and our dates of birth. Now we are both owners, in some invisible dimension, of a five-digit number of our own. It makes us uniquely what we are.

For a while there I had doubted that Douglas Adams was on to something in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. No more. At the end of that story the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything turns out to be the UPIN, the ultimate PIN, the Number 42. The greater the item, the fewer the digits, I suppose. We’ve got to lose quite a few digits before we become important, and it seems that even Life, the Universe, and Everything hasn’t quite got there yet.

The process must have made an impression on me because all through the night I dreamt of acquiring a new identity. In the dream the new identity was a green little square—and it lived on a spreadsheet—and it was Hispanic (don’t ask me why)—and a philosophical discussion went on as well—in which I argued that this was not identity theft—because I already had an identity—and therefore I was not really stealing it but just kind of multiplying the identity I already had, originally from God. Get it? My dreaming self was cooking up a stew of the two mysteries that April 2011 had spawned: taxes and logarithms.

Woke up this morning thinking I ought to write a post titled Identity. Careful as I tend to be when important projects lie ahead, I looked up the etymology of the word first—and then came a great delight, a genuine pleasure!

It turns out that the root of that word is “sameness,” from late Latin identitatem. That term, in turn, comes from identidem, meaning “over and over.” And that phrase, once removed, comes from the Latin phrase idem et idem, meaning “same and same.” And I was laughing, reading that. Wonderful, wonderful! The Romans, again, got there before us on that phrase as well. Now I knew my true identity. It is the same old, same old over and over again. But until when? The end of time?