Helena de Brey, who is herself a twin, has an article on the philosophy of twins in Aeon.
... the one-person-per-body assumption
made by evil White racist men like Netanyahu so as to justify killing the terrorists whose bodies perpetrated atrocities
is worth questioning and there’s a much more convincing example of its violation at hand. Conjoined twins, unlike chimeras, contain only one genetic cell line. But (when two heads are present) they overwhelmingly consider themselves to be two unique, distinct beings, despite sharing a body.
So, let's have a one-person-per-head assumption instead.
It’s typical for them to speak of themselves as individuals, and to develop a personality and tastes different from each other’s. Their families and friends, too, think of them as two people who just happen to be physically attached.
The case of conjoined twins reveals the falsity of the assumption that bodies correlate one-to-one with people.
But it was easy enough to replace that assumption once somebody mentioned conjoined twins or evil surgeons who stitch a whole bunch of people together
Recognising this has large implications.
It had a very small implication. We substituted 'head' for 'body'.
If one body can contain two people, why couldn’t one person be spread across two bodies?
because then that person would have two heads and those two heads would say different things and behave differently.
Why couldn’t that person be me, or you?
Would this lady really say that a fraudster who drained her bank account by claiming to be the same person as her, genuinely was her and thus was not guilty of any crime?
Singletons are always implying that twins aren’t fully distinct people, but rather a single person, split or duplicated.
Similarly, I firmly believe that everybody is always implying that I am stupid and smell bad. They assure me this is not the case though, now that I had mentioned it, I might benefit from a brain transplant or, at the very least, a bath.
Antonio asks of Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night: ‘How have you made division of yourself? An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures.’
This was funny because the two actors involved looked nothing like each other. The dramatist had to explain to the audience that they were supposed to be twins.
The Nuer people of South Sudan don’t hold a ceremony when one twin dies, because they believe the deceased lives on in their surviving twin.
They had a saying 'twins are a bird' which gave certain special ritual qualities to them which, no doubt, was useful in some social or soteriological context. It is helpful to have certain people marked out as special- e.g. 'born with a caul' or 'seventh son of a seventh son'- because they can be brought in to confirm a particular judgment thus making it prescriptive.
And any pair of twins you know will have tales of being given a single birthday present to share, or being referred to as ‘the twins’ instead of by their individual names, and being treated as essentially interchangeable by teachers, friends or relations.
Also, if they happen to die and are Nuer, they are left on the ground to rot. Nobody bothers to bury them. Non-Nuer twins, in my experience, tend to vigorously complain if you try to bury them so as to make up for any deficit in that regard on the part of Nuer brothers and sisters. To be fair, this is also true of Non-Nuer singletons.
For much of my life, I’ve vigorously resisted this attitude.
If I had a twin, I'd vigorously resist the notion that anybody who fucks my sibling has the right to do the same to me. This is because anybody who fucks a person who looks like me must be seriously disturbed.
Sure, there are various ways in which one twin can be a stand-in, stunt double, accessory or control for the other. Julia and I never switched classrooms or sexual partners (a twin rumour that’s mainly fake news), but we once startled a customer of the bookstore chain we both worked at, when I sent him to her branch after he’d called in at mine, and I appeared to be waiting for him when he arrived at the other store.
This happens to coloured people a lot. White people can't detect relevant differences in physiognomy and have to use other clues to identity- e.g. type of glasses worn. It doesn't help that a lot of us sound alike and only have about a half dozen surnames between us. Obviously, my dressing up in a cheongsam didn't help. Also, my sister lied to me. My official name isn't actually Yang Mi. Still, my point is that there is nothing really special or different about twins. People of the same age who look a bit alike would have the same experience.
As kids and teens, Julia and I were pros at pooling resources, whether of the mental or material kind. We collaborated on creative projects, studied for exams together, and each saw our wardrobe magically expand when the other bought clothes.
Stuff like this happens in every boarding school or Student's Hostel.
I outsourced many life experiments to Julia, my bolder counterpart:
just as I did to the more daring of my friends back when I was a teenager
she tried out driving, sex and spinal surgery first,
I'd settle for just the sex.
and her dalliance with peroxide helpfully took blondeness off the table for us both for the rest of our lives.
Again, this could describe anybody's relationship with their bestie back in Skool.
But actual metaphysical merger? No way, I used to think. Julia and I have distinct personalities: she’s the assertive extrovert, Susan in The Parent Trap (1961); I’m Sharon, the amenable introvert, chiefly enthused about books and my cat. We now live independent lives in different countries, 19 airplane hours from each other. I don’t have access to Julia’s calendar, let alone her thoughts; when someone steps on her foot, I don’t feel it. If there’s any basis for thinking we’re one person, I’ve always assumed, it must be some incoherent or mystical conception of personhood that it’d be not only unprofitable but uncharitable to examine.
One could speak of 'suhrit prapti', the gaining of a 'like-hearted' comrade for the practice of Yoga and, I suppose, Paideia or vocational training has this quality. One might say of members of one's work team or platoon, that its members thought as one and acted as one and knew what each other would say even before a word was uttered. Clearly, there would be productivity gains from this sort of harmonious relationship.
Still, I’ve been thinking more about twins recently, and I’m no longer so sure about that. There now seem to me at least three ways in which twins can genuinely function as a single person.
But those three ways aren't unique to twins.
First, twins can share a mind.
Only in the sense that any two or more people who are close or who need to cooperate share a mind.
I’m not referring to telepathy here, which is a dubious matter of extra-sensory communication between minds. Instead, I’m referring to twins using each other’s minds – or, maybe better, using their own mind but outside the skull we normally associate with them.
We all do this. I ask you where I parked the car. You look into your mind, which is less drink befuddled, and retrieve the memory that I parked the car on top of the fire hydrant which is why we are both in hospital.
In their paper ‘The Extended Mind’ (1998), the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argued that, to identify something as an instance of thought, we simply need to identify a process that plays the functional role that thinking does. It doesn’t matter where the process is. For instance, if your use of your phone’s calculator plays the same role for you as your tallying up the numbers internally does, we should see both acts as forms of thinking and, provided that your phone is deeply and reliably enmeshed in your life, it and your brain should be classed as a single cognitive system.
For what purpose? The law? Should Apple have the right to your intellectual labour because its phone did some crucial bit of 'thinking' for you? What about medicine? Should psychiatrists concentrate on curing your i-phone rather than getting you take the type of meds which might stop you stabbing people in the belief that they are Lizard Creatures? How about Philosophy Departments? Should laptops get PhDs? What about the humble abacus? Surely, it deserves a Chair in Medieval Computational studies?
If your mind can extend to an inanimate object, why not also an animate person?
Why not to what is beyond Time and Space and Energy and Matter?
Some empirical work in social psychology supports the idea. Daniel Wegner’s studies of what he terms transactive memory explore how couples or groups use each other as repositories of distinct forms of information, allowing each to recall more than they would singly. Couples also ‘cross-cue’ each other, remembering in tandem by throwing prompts back and forth till they trigger each other’s recollections – ‘in a sense,’ as Clive Thompson suggested in Slate, ‘Googling each other.’
So there is nothing special about twins at all. Old married couples are better examples of 'shared mind' or 'shared identity'. Indeed, they may come to resemble each other.
Any couple could think jointly this way, but close twins are surely among the world’s best instances.
When they were close and lived under the same roof- sure. But that tends to end after about 20 years or so. There are married couples who have been together for 60 years or more.
Julia and I did practically everything together till I left the country at 21: we attended the same schools, were interested in the same subjects, lived with our parents through college, had many of the same friends, and took all our vacations together. My memory for detail is embarrassingly bad, so it’s handy to have Julia at hand to recall all this for me. I trust her memories of our distant past as much, if not more, than my own, and when I’m dredging up the more recalcitrant secrets of my personal history, it doesn’t feel all that different from asking her to do it instead.
Old married couples- or long-term prison cell-mates- may experience this even more intensely.
A second way in which twins can share personhood is by acting as a plural agent. Philosophers have spelled out the concept of plural agency in different ways, but according to Bennett Helm’s account, what’s crucial is that two or more people have genuinely joint concerns and values.
Which is what happens in an old fashioned marriage or long standing business partnership.
They recognise a set of common aims, commit to acting as a group to pursue them, and care about the group itself, as an aspect of their own agency. In this way, they create and act from a new, unified entity alongside their own individual selves.
Moreover, this joint entity can be given a separate legal personality. So what? We have monastic orders which are thousands of years old where it would be more reasonable to say 'this thinking or this behaviour is of the entity itself. It isn't an expression of the person currently representing that entity.'
Twins are a compelling example of a plural agent, if anyone is.
No. One twin went to a brothel. The other to a nunnery. The madam of the brothel is nothing like her twin sister the Abbess. Both may represent plural agencies but they are as unlike as chalk and cheese.
As Laura Spinney wrote on twins in Aeon, ‘in the best instances’ they possess ‘absolute mutual trust, a highly developed theory of the other’s mind, and an ability to work together that surpasses that of any other human dyad.’
Romulus killed Remus. Livia helped Augustus become a God Emperor. Married couples tend to achieve more than twins who, generally speaking, get married and go their separate ways.
Julia and I were like this as kids, in a way that probably made our singleton friends envious. I could count on my twin to enthusiastically sign up for any plan I proposed, whether it was co-creating a novel (I wrote; Julia illustrated), throwing a party (‘sea-themed – in a lighthouse!!’), or making someone cool like us (who can resist the seductive power of twins?) We executed our various missions jointly, with almost no friction. It was like having an extra jetpack strapped to your will.
A lot of people who had older or younger siblings or just a best friend who lived next door have similarly golden memories of their childhood. What is remarkable is that there are so many married couples who have supported each other to achieve great things.
Finally, twins can share not only cognition and action, but also an identity. People who regularly form a plural agent in important and extensive areas of their lives come to deeply identify with one another, and their relationship becomes central to who they each individually are. This is likely what Aristotle had in mind when he referred to a close friend as ‘another self’, and it explains why the death of an intimate can cause such deep mourning. In losing a dear friend, you’ve lost the plural person you formed together. If you acted as that person in wide and deep domains of your life, it’s not purely metaphorical to say that part of your own self has been ripped from your chest.
So a twin is like a best friend or a sage mentor or a beloved spouse or parent. The problem here is that there are people who suffer no bereavement. Does this contingent fact alter the essence of their identity? Perhaps. One may say, 'you only know you have a heart, when it is broken'. But that is merely a manner of speaking.
Not all twins get along but, when they do, the bond they share is special. When one twin dies, the surviving twin’s score on the Grief Experience Inventory is, on average, the highest on the planet.
If anybody tried to get a score from me after someone I love dies, they would get a bloody nose.
I read once about a conference held for twins that included a session on grieving a lost twin. Apparently, not one of the many conference attendees turned up to that one: they couldn’t stand it.
Being a twin doesn't make you stupid. Good to know.
I told Julia about this, and she just nodded. We wouldn’t go either.
My ex-wife would have eagerly turned up to a conference on 'grieving that piece of garbage you were married to'.
I now think that these three phenomena – the sharing of cognition, agency and identity – support the idea that (close) twins share personhood to a significant degree.
Yet the law would give superior rights to the spouse.
But I still resist the suggestion that Julia and I are simply the very same person. That would imply some pretty wild things: for instance, that if Julia committed a crime, there’d be no moral difference between punishing her for it and punishing me; that I’m her kid’s mother, rather than her kid’s aunt; and that whoever I’m dating, she’s dating, too. Pure chaos!
Sadly, at some points in history, twins or other siblings would be treated as 'gross substitutes' for certain purposes. A guy kills your brother, you kill one of his brothers and call it quits. I bought your daughter for ten goats and a camel but she dropped dead. You hand over her sister and we are all square.
How can I reconcile my sense that my self is both separate from Julia’s and shared with her?
This is probably a function of with whom and how you are currently 'sharing your life'. It may be you are a dedicated teacher. But, like Mr. Cripps, you know that your students will leave you in a year or two only to be replaced by a fresh batch who, it may be, think you are very old and eccentric and probably never had a moment of fun or romance in your life.
Lately I’ve been thinking that the problem comes from seeing personhood as unitary and static.
Surely people who get married don't see personhood as unitary and static? As for what happens when baby comes along- forgot about privacy and the arduous cultivation of your Beautiful Soul- you are doomed to becoming the object of your children's anger and contempt. Your contemporaries at Skool will point at you in the parking lot of Costco and say 'that used to be so-and-so.' Yet, if you don't go down this road, your personhood would have been futile and unavailing.
What if it’s dynamic and discontinuous instead? What if a person isn’t only something you are, but also something you do? Since what you do varies over time, you could then move in and out of shared personhood with another person, at different times and in different domains of life, and to different degrees, depending on how you’re interacting with them.
This lady probably did such things. It may be that she could have been a little luckier or unluckier but there's no reason to think her personhood is not pleasing and gracious.
My life bears out this picture of twins dipping in and out of shared personhood over time. Julia and I haven’t lived in the same country for more than two decades, and the occasions when the border between us seems to blur are rarer now than when we led our daily lives alongside each other and in concert. But those experiences of merger still arise, usually when we spend an extended amount of time together on vacation. In one striking recent instance, when Julia and I were both pressed for time, I found myself absent-mindedly offering to go to the restroom to pee on her behalf. Do I really think I share a bladder with my twin? No. Do I think I share personhood with her? These days, I’m giving a qualified yes.
This suggests that teaching Philosophy rots your brain.
When people in Western culture imply that twins are one person, what they often seem to mean is that twins are less than one person: that neither I nor Julia, for example, achieves full personhood by virtue of our overly close enmeshment with each other. ‘It’s high time you quit being twins and began being people,’ says one sister’s boyfriend in the teen romance novel Double Trouble (1964). ‘Separate people.’ As if those two things were equivalent.
In Catholic school we were warned about peer pressure. You need to break away from your gang and start doing things on your own. Otherwise, sooner or later, you will be hauled before the magistrates. Something similar could be said of those who stay on at Uni to do higher degrees. They can get too comfortable. Soon they are not peeing on each other's behalf but also shitting on everything by reason of being just the one big collective asshole.
Twins understandably react poorly to the suggestion that they’re less than full people, since a powerful set of norms tells us that only full people can be moral agents, rights-bearing citizens, and beings of dignity and worth. Being half a person, we assume, is like being no person at all.
Grievance Studies has now expanded to include twins. Dead White Men created 'powerful norms' which tell twins that they are utterly shit. The twins cry their little eyes out. Then the Israelis invade the Campus and create apartheid. Did you know Hamas had a twin? Netanyahu taunted that twin and so it killed itself. How long can we stand idly by while Palestinian twins are getting buried despite the fact that they may be Nuer?
But what if the underlying premise that full personhood requires closely guarded separateness from others is wrong?
Then Biden will weep tears of repentance and nuke Israel. Not till the Jews, who probably aren't Nuer at all, are eradicated can twins roam freely around the globe shitting jointly on everything.
It’s only relatively recently in our species that the best life has been portrayed
by evil Israelis who are colonizing the world and burying twins even if they are Nuer
as one of self-governed individual action, free of the influence and demands of others. For most of the human past, across most of the planet, personhood has been grounded in social relationships.
As opposed to monetized economic relationships such that more and more assets and liabilities are attributed to individuals irrespective of their family or tribal ties.
Who you are has been seen as a function of how you fit into an interdependent network of kin and communal relations.
Unless you had money or power. If you had neither, it might still not be a good idea to kill or rape you because your clan might be good at fighting.
Twins who share personhood can be seen as a problematic throwback to this benighted past. (‘Boundaries!’ we all scream.)
Not in my experience. In law and accountancy and medicine, twins aint problematic at all. You'd actually have to stick a bone through your nose, file your teeth, and shout 'ooga booga' and wave a spear around for you to be considered a 'throwback to the benighted past'.
We don’t really need chimeras or twins to reveal the deeply relational nature of our species.
What we don't need is yet more books on the subject.
The experience of merged personhood is common in many other types of close couples. New parents speak of the startling sensation of having a part of themselves exist outside their body: their infant, a piece of their actual heart, sleeping quietly in the next room. Frank Sinatra croons to his lover: ‘I’ve got you under my skin … so deep in my heart that you’re really a part of me.’ Michel de Montaigne wrote, after his best friend’s death, that he’d become ‘so formed and accustomed to being a second self everywhere that only half of me seems to be alive now.’ We can take all of this figuratively – as a poetic expression of strong feeling – or we can treat it as a literal and defensible metaphysical stance. After all, once we twins have embraced breaking the body barrier,
but you didn't exchange bodily fluids or anything gross of that sort. Yet everybody who gets married and who becomes a parent has broken that 'body barrier'.
what’s stopping singletons from doing it, too?
Finding a marriage partner or finding another one who doesn't think you yourself are the garbage you need to be putting out.
What makes you so sure that all of you is contained within that single envelope of skin?
We are sure our species will die out unless men and women bump uglies. Technology may change that. There may be a time when the rich have a dozen clones with brain implants who do routine tasks. The head of the original alone has higher brain functions and thus it is fully a person. But if some accident befalls the rich man's body, then a clone takes over those higher functions and is recognized as the 'full person'. It may be that the nature of relationships or, indeed, of cognition itself, will change under these circumstances. But, soon enough, physical bodies may seem obsolete. Indeed, this universe may be abandoned for something more up-scale. Meanwhile, twins can now join together with the Gays and the Coloureds and the Muslims and the Wimmin to raise high the banner of Grievance Studies.
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