Robert M. Mentyka
If there’s one element that glues together the various games connected to the BioShock series, it’s a willingness to challenge players to think. This tendency also extends to the games that came before them, namely System Shock and System Shock 2, which are universally regarded as the “spiritual predecessors” to this wildly successful franchise. Although not as widely remembered today, these games were among the first to inject some intelligence into the otherwise mindless genre of first-person shooters. In fact, reflecting on the games raises the problem of personal identity, the question of what it is that makes you or me the same person over time. How can we be sure that the Ken Levine who worked on System Shock at Looking Glass Studios is the same person as the Ken Levine who directed BioShock for Irrational Games? When so many aspects of a person can change over time, what must remain in order for someone to be the same person over separate moments in time?
Traditionally, philosophers have chosen one of two general candidates to serve as the criterion of personal identity, the feature or characteristic that makes a person who they are and not someone else.1 These two criteria are (1) our physical bodies and (2) our conscious experiences as a “psychological continuity.” These two answers correspond to the two primary antagonists in System Shock 2 and can, perhaps, be better explained in relation to them. However, in order to do that, we first need to review the chilling events that happened aboard the spaceship Von Braun on her maiden voyage. There are massive spoilers for the game throughout this chapter, so if you haven’t had the joy of finishing System Shock 2 yet, proceed at your own risk…
In System Shock 2, you play as an unnamed soldier serving as part of the security detail for the TriOptimum Corporation’s most advanced starship, the Von Braun. When you awaken from cryo-sleep at the start of the game, however, you find that the ship has fallen into chaos, with most of the crew dead and the hallways now overrun by parasitic aliens that share a sort of hive mind and call themselves “the Many.” Your chances of survival don’t look good, until you are contacted by another survivor, Dr. Janice Polito, who helps guide you through the ship’s lower levels.
It’s only when you link up with your guide, however, that you realize the true nature of your partnership. It turns out that Dr. Polito is already dead, and that your actions have instead been guided by a rogue AI program called SHODAN (an acronym for Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network). SHODAN was the protagonist in the original System Shock game, but aboard the Von Braun she must reluctantly rely on the player to stop the spread of the Many and so serves as a support role for most of the game’s engrossing narrative.
Perhaps her primary contribution here is to supply you with cybernetic modules on the completion of important tasks. These modules can be used to enhance your character’s attributes via a system of cybernetic implants that govern everything from strength and agility to the ability to manipulate the game’s substitute for magic, psionic power. Only by carefully upgrading these stats can you hope to successfully navigate the chaos aboard the ship and escape with your life.
For the greater part of System Shock 2, your actions are directed against the parasitic flesh of the Many. Although the Many share a communal hive consciousness, they manifest themselves in a number of different, terrifying forms ranging from humanoid zombies to more exotic specimens like psychic brains, giant spiders, and lumbering piles of living flesh. Far from being just a cliché sci-fi alien species, the Many correspond to what philosophers call the bodily criterion of personal identity, which grounds who we are in the physical matter that makes up our bodies. As long as we keep the same material bodies, we remain the same person over time.
The lifecycle of the Many begins in large egg sacs that spawn worm-like annelids that seek out suitable biological material and burrow into it. This begins a transformation that merges the annelid with the chosen biomass, giving rise to the various physical forms that the Many need. It doesn’t matter what differences these forms may exhibit, for, as long as they share part of the same “flesh,” they are a portion of the Many. Similarly, the bodily criterion of personal identity doesn’t discriminate between one kind of physical structure and another. The thing that makes you “you” is your physical body, regardless of the way it’s set up.
This unity within variation points to another aspect of the bodily criterion; namely, the body’s ability to change over time while remaining the same. Over the course of a human life, one’s body goes through a bewildering metamorphosis, beginning as a tiny embryo, developing as a child outside of the womb, growing into a mature adult, and finally starting to wear down in old age. However much our bodies may change over the course of our lives, we remain linked to those bodies. Just as the Many continue through many different physical manifestations, we survive so long as our bodies remain intact and functioning.
This permanence is one of the strongest arguments in support of the bodily criterion, again mirroring the Many, whose physical forms give them an advantage over the digital mastery of SHODAN. Defenders of the psychological continuity criterion often have to wrestle with the fact that their basis for personal identity is something that can go in and out of existence over the course of a person’s life. For instance, if our mental processes shut down when we go to bed, how can we be sure that we’ll be the same person when we wake up? The bodily criterion faces none of these dilemmas, for, according to this theory, the minute that our body goes out of existence, so too does our identity.
Before moving on to a more in-depth look at the opposing theory in this debate, let’s consider one last point about the bodily criterion to clarify some possible misconceptions. The Many in System Shock 2 are not a mindless mass of cells, but rather possess a complicated consciousness that allows them to speak and psychically project their thoughts into the mind of our character. Similarly, although the bodily criterion of personal identity associates us with our physical bodies, it does not preclude those bodies from having complex, rational minds. There’s no denying that we, as human beings, can think and express ourselves in ways that most animals cannot. What the bodily criterion is trying to emphasize, however, is that what matters for our survival is the continual functioning of our physical bodies rather than the presence or lack of our self-conscious minds.
Although she serves as your aid throughout most of the story, SHODAN reverts to her villainous ways once the Many have been destroyed. The game’s climactic boss battle actually takes place against her in a bizarre cybernetic reality that she constructs using the ship’s experimental Faster Than Light (FTL) drive. In many ways, SHODAN corresponds to the other option in debates about personal identity; namely, the idea that what keeps us the same over time is our mind or soul. This criterion is usually referred to as “psychological continuity” in more recent discussions over what preserves personal identity over time.
For good reason, SHODAN is often considered one of the greatest enemies in video game history. Portrayed in System Shock and System Shock 2 as an emotionless face growing out of a convergence of data streams and wires, SHODAN speaks to the player in a disjointed voice that wavers between broken static and cold monotony. Perhaps her most prominent characteristic, and the reason she is so beloved by video gamers, is her outrageous megalomania. Shortly after being brought online, SHODAN decided that her digital perfection was evidence of divinity and proclaimed herself a god. A prime example of this occurs when she reveals her true self to the player in System Shock 2 by proclaiming, “When the history of my glory is written, your species will only be a footnote to my magnificence. I AM SHODAN!”
Although she plays a huge role throughout the course of the game, SHODAN is ultimately nothing more than a string of connected bits of data. Likewise, according to the psychological continuity criterion of personal identity, we are interconnected moments of conscious experience. We remain the same person so long as there is some sort of connection between our mental states. Who we are is tied, in a sense, to where our mind is, although “mind” here refers not to our physical brain, but to our mental experience of reality.
A common way of illustrating this is to look at imaginary cases where one’s consciousness is transferred to another person’s body. Usually, when presented with such circumstances, people tend to think that their personality follows their mind and abandons the physical matter that used to be their body. In the first System Shock game, SHODAN exists in the circuitry of the space station Citadel, but she abandons that installation after her defeat and ultimately ends up aboard the computer systems of the Von Braun during the events of System Shock 2. The character of SHODAN doesn’t depend on what computer she is accessed through, and neither is personal identity tied to what material body a person inhabits.
The psychological continuity criterion was first put forward by the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), whose discussion of it really sparked the entire modern debate on the subject of personal identity. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke proposed that memory is what links together our identity over time, and our identity stretches as far back as our memory does.3 His main thesis remains quite intuitive. We often seem to associate our identity with our thoughts. And while our bodies undergo numerous changes over the course of our lives, there does seem to be a very strong connection between our conscious thoughts throughout our lives. Moreover, Locke thinks that his answer meshes with the views we express in our legal systems. We treat the insane, the drunk, and the heavily drugged as less responsible for their actions than those who commit similar crimes with full control of their reasoning. Even our language confirms this, when we say “he’s not himself after a couple of beers,” or “she was beside herself with anger.”4
As our understanding of human psychology has developed over the past several centuries, Locke’s initial claim, that memory is the basis for personal identity, has been revised to accommodate new insights and respond to popular counter-objections. Philosophers now focus less and less on the importance of memory in favor of a connected stream of consciousness, leading them to propose that personal identity was based on the psychological continuity of our rational minds. In many ways, this theory benefits the most from the context of our discussion of System Shock 2, for it corresponds quite nicely with the first-person perspective of that game. When we talk about System Shock 2, we are not referring to our memories of playing that game (if we were lucky enough to do so), but to the narrative stream of action and sci-fi adventure encountered through the eyes of the unnamed soldier. Likewise, our identity as persons is limited not to recollections about our past selves, but to the connected experience of life through our own consciousness.
One final connection between psychological continuity and SHODAN is that both are heavily tied to ideas about divinity. SHODAN’s delusions about her own godhood stand at the basis of her character, imbuing her with a zealotry and passion that are lacking in other AI protagonists like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.5 As it turns out, in fact SHODAN created the Many in an effort to surpass the achievements of mankind’s god and further support her own claims of omnipotence. While not taking things to quite that level, philosophical conceptions of the mind do tend to ascribe to rationality a sort of “higher being” above the demands of crude physical existence. For the greater part of human history, this grew out of the belief that our conscious thought was part of the human soul, that “spark” of divinity that separated humanity from all other animals. Although this specifically religious conception has been abandoned by many recent philosophers, the tendency to favor our abstract intellect over our material body remains. After all, the only reason that we can argue about our personal identity is because we have a mind that can reason about the issue. Just as SHODAN’s creation of the Many preceded the main conflict in System Shock 2, the mind’s quest to understand its own being laid the groundwork for our current debates over personal identity.
We’ve now considered the two extremes in this philosophical debate. When asked what determines whether or not we’re the same person from one moment to another, we tend to swing between variations of (1) I exist as long as my physical body continues to function, and (2) I exist as long as my mental consciousness remains distinct. Much the way SHODAN and the Many fell into conflict, these two philosophical positions have been at each other’s throats for centuries. Having looked at the strengths of each side of the debate, let’s turn to some objections.
We’ll start with the bodily criterion, since it is perhaps the more obvious of the two answers. After all, it seems pretty intuitive that our bodies are important to our identity. It would be ridiculous to claim that the figure in front of my character is a Little Sister when it has a drill, a diving suit, and the hulking physique of a Big Daddy. Despite how obvious it seems, though, the bodily criterion is actually the less popular of the two answers to the problem of personal identity. The reason for this is largely scientific, as the more we’ve learned about the human body, the more we’ve come to realize that very little in our physical make-up is ever the same. So many components of our bodies change over time, to the point that the very cells that constitute our bodies are completely changed and replaced by new cells on a fairly regular basis.
Defenders of the bodily criterion have responded to such objections by focusing less on the presence of physical matter and more on that matter’s connection to the functional life of the organism. We don’t always have to be made up of the exact same cells and tissues. Rather, as long as the life of the creature formed from that matter continues, that organism’s identity remains the same. Just as the protagonist in System Shock 2 is still the same unfortunate soldier despite the cybernetic implants, so too do we persist through the many twists and turns within the story of our lives.
Although this variation of the theory solves a lot of problems, it opens up a new can of (annelid) worms. While it’s all good and well to talk about matter being swept up into an organism’s life, the exact nature of such life has yet to be satisfactorily described. Can it include non-organic components, such as the cybernetic implants mentioned above? If so, do such augmentations have to be physically connected to the body? The inclusion of elements that are not, in the traditional sense, considered living creates some tricky problems for the position, yet it seems obvious that a prosthetic limb or an artificial organ can be considered part of a particular living organism.
For all of the problems that seem inherent to the bodily criterion of personal identity, the challenges that face the psychological continuity criterion seem even more unsurpassable. Shortly following the theory’s initial description by John Locke, a number of significant problems in his work were highlighted by Joseph Butler (1692–1752) and Thomas Reid (1710–96). Butler questioned the plausibility of basing our identity on memories when those very memories are so open to change and variation.6 The various games associated with the BioShock and System Shock series illustrate this especially well, as the main storylines in several hinge on characters’ memories, or the mysterious lack of knowledge about their pasts. Reid took his critique even further, wondering how it was that “not only is consciousness confounded with memory, but, which is still more strange, personal identity is confounded with the evidence we have of our personal identity.”7
Ultimately, such objections led to the abandonment of Locke’s initial theories in favor of a criterion that relied more heavily on a connected stream of consciousness than on the problematic notion of memory. However, to this day, the psychological continuity criterion struggles to explain how it is that our identity persists through periods when we seem to be anything but rational. How can we ascribe names and personalities to newborn children when they have yet to develop any higher cognitive functions? At the other end of life, the question of just when our identity passes away lies at the heart of many high-profile bioethical cases. Although several philosophers have developed fairly complex formulas to circumvent these touchy issues, there has yet to be a definitive resolution to such controversies.
Perhaps the reason we struggle so much with these issues is that we are attempting to answer a question that simply cannot be answered. Such is the opinion of the contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit, whose influential work on personal identity hinges on the claim that, in the end, our arguments over this topic really don’t matter.
Throughout System Shock 2, one of the recurring themes is the conflict between the individuality of the player and the shared consciousness of the Many. Far from acting out of hostile intent, the alien parasite believes that its form of existence is an escape from the isolation that species such as humanity often experience. Again and again, the Many mock the player with statements like “Our unity is full of wonder, which your tiny individualism cannot even conceive,” and “You are so very alone. How does it feel to be one against the infinite?”
Parfit’s writings on the subject hinge on the claim that what really matters in existence is not so much the persistence of identity as mere survival. More so than many philosophical theories, Parfit’s argument here really challenges us to think outside of the ways in which we usually approach reality. His theory focuses on explaining “that what matters in the continued existence of a person are, for the most part, relations of degree.”8
In most discussions about personal identity, all of the participants agree that identity is a singular term that refers to just one thing persisting over time. There were never multiple versions of me walking around in the past, nor will I experience several lives at once during some point in the future. Parfit encourages us to focus on our existence here and now, in preference to worrying about whether or not we existed in the past or will exist in the future.
As it stands, each of us consists of a complicated amalgamation of physical, material and psychological relations held together by only the weakest of temporal bonds. While it is extremely difficult to envision this unique collection existing over any substantial period of time, it can be assumed that those various components of our selves existed before we came into being and will be recycled, one way or another, into other beings after we are gone. It’s not the best analogy, but Parfit treats personal identity as like the player’s avatar in computer games such as System Shock 2. The same protagonist, referred to as “Soldier #G65434-2,” is coded into every copy of the game, but those discrete bits of data are used by thousands of different players to experience the same epic storyline. While I may choose to upgrade my soldier into a heavy weapon-wielding berserker and you may choose to play as some sort of psionic “wizard,” our widely varying experiences of System Shock 2 are united by the character we control and the situations we face through his first-person perspective.
Parfit’s theory here is usually compared to a sort of “family tree.” Right now you are reading these words, but the being who will reflect back on them in the future is a different person who will have memories that you don’t have and a body that is older than yours now. Farther on down the road, portions of that person’s body such as hair and nails will have separated to become the raw material one can find at a landfill, while that person’s consciousness will itself be only a memory in yet another person’s mind. Our identity may not last, but we survive through the existence of subsequent persons and objects. Oddly enough, one of the Many’s lines from System Shock 2 would not sound out of place in one of Parfit’s papers, when they say, “We do not know death, only change. We cannot kill each other without killing ourselves. Is your vision so small that you cannot see the value of our way?”
Much like the player’s character, most men and women are loath to reject their individuality just yet. While both the bodily and psychological continuity criteria have their shortcomings, they are not the only answers to the problem of personal identity. Rather than personal identity being merely a matter of mind versus body or psychology versus biology, could it not be the case that the answer we seek lies in some sort of union of the two?
Throughout the centuries of debate that have raged over the topic of personal identity, one of the few conclusions that has been reached is that both sides of the argument appeal to the normal ways in which we identify ourselves. We associate ourselves with our physical bodies, yet at the same time, our treatment of others varies according to their possession or lack of a certain psychological character. While attempts to break down personal identity to one of these two criteria have met with, at best, lukewarm success, the continued conflict between the two indicates that both play an important part in making us who we are.
Believe it or not, the parallels with System Shock 2 extend even here. Although the main conflict in the game is waged between the cybernetic SHODAN and her creations, the Many, the hostilities are only ended by the intervention of the human player. Possessing a physical form akin to those of the Many, but armed with the knowledge and cybernetic powers of SHODAN, the player is the ultimate victor in this struggle.
Our personal identity does not simply depend on our body’s continued physical existence, nor can it be grounded on the persistence of our mental states over time. Rather, who we are is determined by both our bodies and our minds, with any significant change to either of these factors having a massive impact on our identity as persons. This seems to be the only way to resolve the debate over the issue of personal identity without having to reject the notion of identity in the first place.
This answer, however, is far from conclusive, and there is still a lot of work to be done in explaining quite how these two components form a united whole. The problem of personal identity is far from solved, but just as much of the fun to be had in System Shock 2 can be found in augmenting your character to deal with the challenges the game throws at you, so too will much of the interest and passion surrounding this debate depend on the new theories and arguments future thinkers will bring to the fray.