Bumping Geese 7.1: Who Is Lindy Powell?

You'll remember that last time, I told you that Lindy Powell is the greatest monster in all of Goosebumps. Obviously I haven't read the entire series yet. In fact, since Goosebumps books are apparently still being written and published (something I did not know when I started) I may never finish reading the series.

BDG is goals

None the less, I am confident in saying that no monster, no villain, in the series will ever show more cunning and cruelty and such a frightening lack of humanity as Lindy Powell. But now that we have exposed her crimes to the world, we can punish her. Right?

But my question to you is, can Lindy Powell be punished for her sins?

I want you to do something for me. Imagine a ship. An ancient Greek trireme, we'll say.

Have a picture to help you imagine it

We'll say this ship you're imagining belonged to the legendary Greek hero Theseus. After Theseus is done being a hero, finished his life of adventure, and settled down to live out his days quietly as the king of Athens, his ship is placed in a museum for all to see.

Imagine this: The Ship of Theseus.

Over the next, I don't know, century. Let's say over the next one-hundred years, pieces of the ship begin to rot, and ship-wrights working for the museum replace those rotting parts. Plank by plank, sail by sail, over those hundred years, the whole of the ship has been replaced with new material.

Is this still The Ship of Theseus?

Why?

Why not?

If this ship is no longer The Ship of Theseus, when did it stop being so? Was it when on plank was replaced? Was it when the final plank was replaced?

Let us also say that after another century, some amazing technology is discovered that can restore all those rotten pieces of the ship to pristine condition again. This technology is used and all those pieces that were taken out of The Ship of Theseus are used to build a new trireme.

Which is The Ship of Theseus? Which is the original?

This is not an ancient Greek boat

This is a depiction of a human body. You probably have one just like it. A body with all the requisite number of organs, fingers, toes, nostrils, and at least one face (or you may have some perfectly human variation on these features). Are you your body?

Like The Ship of Theseus, your body is rotting and being repaired. Researches estimate that roughly every seven years, you have shed and regrown every cell in your body. The matter that makes up your body is changing constantly. So if The Ship of Theseus stops being The Ship of Theseus at some point during its repair, when did you stop being you?

If we punish Lindy Powell. If we sentence her to life in creepy child jail, and Lindy Powell is the sum of the matter which makes her, must she be released in seven years? At that time, has the Lindy Powell who committed those heinous crimes against her sister ceased to exist? Are you not punishing a new person for somebody else's crimes at that point?

Or if it doesn't take complete replacement - if The Ship of Theseus was no long The Ship of Theseus at the moment the first rotted plank was taken out and replaced, didn't the Lindy Powell who tortured her sister cease to exist the moment one of that Lindy Powell's cells died and flaked away from her body?

You might answer this by saying such base materialism is no way to define a human. A ship may or may not be the sum of its matter, but a human is more than that. A person might be kept in their body, you might say, but their essence is the sum of their life. When we talk about Lindy Powell, we don't mean "that collection of atoms arranged in that particular shape" we mean "that individual collection of memories, beliefs, life experiences, relationships, and emotions - well, maybe not emotions, given its Lindy - but definitely an entity that transcends their skin and liver cells."

And I would, on the face of it, agree. Certainly when I think of myself, I think of myself as a consciousness before a body.

But that doesn't actually resolve the question of The Ship of Theseus.

If Lindy Powell exists as the sum of her life, then isn't she, in every moment, experiencing new life and once again changing what it is that constitutes her? The Lindy Powell who plans to trick Kris into thinking her doll is alive is different to the Lindy Powell who is currently tricking Kris into thinking her doll is alive, who is different to the Lindy Powell who just tricked Kris into thinking her doll was alive, who is different to the Lindy Powell who tricked Kris into believing her doll was alive yesterday.

In every moment that passes, that equation that equals Lindy Powell has changed. The materials are different.

"No, not different!" you say. "Added to." And you make a good point. It is not so much replacing the sails as it is adding new sails. And maybe, so long as you are only adding new sails, the ship might remain fundamentally the same creation. It is a ship being infinitely built, but never rebuilt.

But haven't you ever forgotten something? Have you ever had a memory change over time? Have you ever changed your opinion on a food or a movie over time?

If we can assume that, other than being an inhumanely cruel monster of a child, Lindy Powell is still fundamentally human, and that humans do change our opinions, and that our memories are not like photographs but more like stories we tell ourselves a little different every time, then we do come back to that same problem.

How much of Lindy Powell needs to change before she stops being Lindy Powell? And if that transition is ever made, how can you be sure you punish Lindy Powell who is guilty of tormenting her sister and bringing woe to mankind, without ever punishing a Lindy Powell who did not?

Perhaps math is no way to resolve this. Minus a memory here, add a sail there. That's no practical way to define a person. Lindy Powell, perhaps is an idea. An idea of a dynamic but still ultimately temporally consistent person. Lindy Powell is who we agree, practically, who Lindy Powell is, who we understand her to be when we say "Lindy Powell is a danger to humanity and she must be stopped."

There are no public domain images of an idea, so here is one of a dog instead.

Okay.

But whose idea is that? All of us? Does the same idea of Lindy Powell exist in all of us?

You and I, we know in our hears that Lindy Powell is a vicious and conniving and merciless abomination who wears humanity like a mask and discards all sympathy and emotion at a callous whim. We share this in our understanding of the idea of Lindy Powell.

But put yourself in the shoes of her parents. Do what Lindy Powell cannot and try to empathise with them. Imagine you are seeing Lindy Powell as they do. They don't know the truth you know. They haven't read the book, or my review of the book. They think their daughter is a competitive but ultimately well meaning young girl with a talent for ventriloquism. That is the idea of Lindy Powell that exists in their mind.

And that Lindy Powell, as an idea, does not exist in our mind.

And what about the Lindy Powell who exists in her own mind? Does anybody believe they are the villain of their story? She is villain to us, but she might be the hero in her own mind. The idea of Lindy Powell that Lindy Powell has constructed is a third Lindy Powell.

And we can go on. While our idea of Lindy Powell might be most distinguished by disgust, and her parents' idea distinguished most by love, should Kris ever learn the truth, wouldn't it be safe to assume the the idea of Lindy Powell she possesses would then be most distinguished by betrayal? And wouldn't that revelation change the Lindy Powell that exists for Kris?

The person as an idea is no more static than the person as matter, or the person as metaphysical equation.

So who is Lindy Powell?

And if we can't answer that with any certainty, how can we punish Lindy Powell with an absolute certainty we aren't punishing somebody who is innocent?

The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment in philosophy that's basically as old as philosophy. The version I've presented most resembles that used by Thomas Hobbes. Many philosophers have taken a stab at resolving it one way or another, usually with a lot more rigour than I have. But I didn't want to resolve the question with this blog, or even give you a rundown of how better philosophers than I have tackled it.

I just wanted to make you aware of it, and walk you through some of my initial thoughts about it. And I wanted to raise it in the context of crime and punishment because it's not an angle I see very often for this thought experiment.

And also I had to link it to Goosebumps somehow.

But even if you ignore that angle, The Ship of Theseus does prompt us to consider our sense of self in relation to time and consider what, fundamentally, makes us who we are.

All literature, even spoopy children's books, ask questions of us. That question might be as simple as "should Lindy Powell be punished for being a terrible person who torments everybody around her and has never known what it is to care for another creature?" but I link to think of small questions as the loose threads of the universe. You start pulling on them, and inevitably you start pulling on something much larger, and your questions evolve into very big questions like "What does it even mean to be me?"

And the big questions are often the most fun to try and answer.