My two best friends in the world are identical twins. I met them the week of September 11th, 2001 at Notre Dame and we bonded almost instantly after that. Right now they are studying at Columbia University in NYC to be dentists.
Here's a philosophical question: The Roman Catholic Church does not officially claim to know the exact time a human body is infused with an eternal spirit. The event is shrouded in mystery. But the RCC says that people should not interfere with the life-giving process, banning all forms of contraception (except the Timing Method, aka Vatican Roulette). Additionally, the Vatican considers abortion to be murder in all cases. Such teachings would lead to the conclusion that body and spirit are fused upon conception, the joining of sperm and egg. Biologically, it is an amazing occasion and a lot of really cool stuff happens. But why is the soul thing tricky?
Wells and Pippen, affectionate nicknames for these dudes, were conceived in only one event. The meeting of a single female gamete with a single male gamete. I know this because hundreds of people (including me) get them confused very often. [Fortunately there are tricks to tell them apart. Wells has a mole between his eyes and Pippen has a scar on his left eyebrow.] The point is, for a very short time these two gentlemen were one organism. By some mystery one became two. Was the fertilized ovum enfused with two souls? Were their spirits granted after the separate lives became apparent? Is a spirit something attached to the stuff of the earth that moves and changes, grows and splits? Was the fertilized egg a non-person phase in the same way that egg and sperm are human life but not human persons?
I don't know the answers to the questions, but they really drive at the heart of the idea of an individual.
Another case of our complex biology is beginning to make its way into the American legal system. It has long been known that chimeras exist: organisms with two very similar but still distinct sets of DNA. Happens in plants all the time. It also rarely happens in animals. Guess what? Human chimeras can have blood types different from the DNA collected for evidence by police, because some very special people have more than one set of human DNA. It has been observed in different animal species that the fusion of fraternal (or sororital) twins can create a chimera. This kind of fusion may be the way human chimeras occur, but to my knowledge it has not been observed in humans. However it has been documented that some individuals have two sets of DNA. Kinda changes the legal definition of an individual in this day, when our courts use DNA evidence to find out whodunnit.
If these human chimeras were once (approx. nine months before their birth) two organisms, do they have two souls? Again, I'm simply not smart enough to know the answer to this question.
What I really want to get at, is can we define individual in a satisfactory way? Scientists agree that once you've seen one electron, you've seen them all. Same goes for protons, they're all interchangeable. Every Carbon atom with 6e, 6p and 8n is like every other C atom with the same set up. The benefit of Quatum theory was that it helped physicists explain why atoms don't fly apart, but the cost was that all of the sudden, my electrons are mingling with yours, and yours with mine. It's very unlikely, but the possibility is still too great to have distinct electron orbits, like the Dalton model. Now we have electron clouds shimmering around nuclear clouds, but every now and then an electron shimmers really close to or really far from its nucleus. We're always mingling with our environment and vice versa. Wells' electrons are partying with Pippen's electrons and so on.
So it breaks down on the tiny scale. So what?
I think there are deep consequences to how i think about individuals, or the inability to define them in classical terms, the messiness of counting. Maybe my thinking runs back to grade-school when i read a cheesy sci-fi. In "My Teacher Flunked the Planet", Bruce Coville writes that humanity, of all the intelligent species in the Galaxy, is special because "there is only one of them." We appear to be different individuals, but it is only the consequence of a defense mechanism for an emerging mind. There is a strong bond or connection that binds us so closely, and we're almost ready, almost mature enough to break down the walls that separate us. In the book the bond is expressed as mental/spiritual. That's part of what I was getting at in my post earlier today about "Inner Light" and "Flame Imperishable".
How different would the world be if we all stopped thinking in terms of us v. them, and began using more fluid ideas?