I think using the type-token distinction is a non-starter. The Shakespeare example illustrates why. A written text has a clear type-token distinction because writing is a system of convention. The information contained in a document is defined with reference to a set of public conventions. In the example there are two things about the document we might find valuable: that it is original and that it is complete. We would perhaps value completeness over originality under some circumstances, given the choice. But that we can value completeness is because we have a written document, a document created according to the public conventions of a language, a writing system, etc.
Consider that we discover an alien communications device somewhat analogous to a written note in human society. We know that this object is used to communicate information but we have no idea how the aliens communicate, how they encode that information in a permanent form, etc. We want to make a copy. How do we do it? The only thing we could do is to replicate the alien object in the somatic sense. We would have to be somaticists with regard to the alien object. Until we understood the public conventions underlying alien communication and the encoding of that communication there would be, for us, no such thing as merely copying the message contained in the device.
With a human being we’re in a similar situation except that there just aren’t any public conventions that would allow us to copy the “complete” human being in any other sense that the somaticist sense. So what sense can we make of the analogy between the contents of a document and the continuity of our psychological faculties? Take the example of the Vorlons copying us every day. This story is rather misleading since it assumes the psychological account from the outset; that there’s a story about people being replaced every night, rather than a story about being 1-day old and being faced with the bizarre situation where a string of unrelated 1-day old people with false memories have preceded you. The situation really isn’t any different, from a somaticist perspective, to being told we were all created last night and everything we remember is a fabrication. It seems to me that the continuity of our psychological faculties is a question of their reliability rather than their contents and clearly if my memories are the product of Vorlon manipulation, rather than some reliable process, then they are fake regardless of whether the Vorlons have created other such beings in the past.
I think these kind of bodily copying and destruction scenarios are just the sort of thing that undermines the reliability and hence continuity of our psychological faculties, so I’d argue that somaticism is true and of a necessary but not sufficient flavour and that the psychological account is necessarily dependent on bodily integrity over time. The two approaches are thus inseparable: to value psychological continuity is to value bodily integrity.
I think using the type-token distinction is a non-starter. The Shakespeare example illustrates why. A written text has a clear type-token distinction because writing is a system of convention. The information contained in a document is defined with reference to a set of public conventions. In the example there are two things about the document we might find valuable: that it is original and that it is complete. We would perhaps value completeness over originality under some circumstances, given the choice. But that we can value completeness is because we have a written document, a document created according to the public conventions of a language, a writing system, etc.
Consider that we discover an alien communications device somewhat analogous to a written note in human society. We know that this object is used to communicate information but we have no idea how the aliens communicate, how they encode that information in a permanent form, etc. We want to make a copy. How do we do it? The only thing we could do is to replicate the alien object in the somatic sense. We would have to be somaticists with regard to the alien object. Until we understood the public conventions underlying alien communication and the encoding of that communication there would be, for us, no such thing as merely copying the message contained in the device.
With a human being we’re in a similar situation except that there just aren’t any public conventions that would allow us to copy the “complete” human being in any other sense that the somaticist sense. So what sense can we make of the analogy between the contents of a document and the continuity of our psychological faculties? Take the example of the Vorlons copying us every day. This story is rather misleading since it assumes the psychological account from the outset; that there’s a story about people being replaced every night, rather than a story about being 1-day old and being faced with the bizarre situation where a string of unrelated 1-day old people with false memories have preceded you. The situation really isn’t any different, from a somaticist perspective, to being told we were all created last night and everything we remember is a fabrication. It seems to me that the continuity of our psychological faculties is a question of their reliability rather than their contents and clearly if my memories are the product of Vorlon manipulation, rather than some reliable process, then they are fake regardless of whether the Vorlons have created other such beings in the past.
I think these kind of bodily copying and destruction scenarios are just the sort of thing that undermines the reliability and hence continuity of our psychological faculties, so I’d argue that somaticism is true and of a necessary but not sufficient flavour and that the psychological account is necessarily dependent on bodily integrity over time. The two approaches are thus inseparable: to value psychological continuity is to value bodily integrity.