I’m currently reading Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, which inspired this thread.*
Basic scenario is that due to the necessities of plot a couple of breakthrough technologies have become available in the near future, backing up the mind by digital means and cloning human bodies. For a very reasonable outlay you can sign up to a deal whereby a small device is implanted in your head which every month automatically sends a perfect copy of your current mind (thoughts, memories, personality etc) to a storage facility where there’s a healthy and currently unoccupied clone of your body at a youthful age. This body is kept on ice and in stasis until you eventually meet your maker and your last mental upload is used to waken it up, as the manufacturers claim no worse for wear except for the loss of a months worth of memories.
Do you sign up or not? And why/why not? I’m going to keep my own opinion to myself for now to see what other people think (if this thread takes off!)
*I realise this general topic has been discussed before but I’d like to focus on this particular aspect and see if I can better understand others perspectives on it.
So long as all the sci-fi nightmare variants are taken care of by statute… Then, yes, sure!
Ray Bradbury made up one scenario where things could go bad. Jack Vance addressed a couple of others.
Close those loopholes (which were pretty contrived anyway.) Let’s just make sure that a duplicate isn’t awakened accidentally, so that there are now two of “me” walking around and contesting legal rights.
And let’s quietly throw out the notion of danger-crazed daredevils using it as an excuse to practice extremely dangerous “sports.” Let’s throw out the “Russian Roulette” world championship. Abusing the system causes premiums to go WAY up. Go rock climbing if you want, but don’t push it to free climbing beside Niagara Falls.
Without those extreme situations to muck it all up, I think it’s a grand idea.
Except with a teleporter if you don’t use the service, you just don’t get instant travel. With this you are dead. I’d call that a significant difference to the teleporter thing - I could see a parent singing up for this even if they don’t think they’ll be the same person. Even a near-perfect clone should be better for their kids than being orphans.
I’d sign up if I had other people depending on me or big projects I was involved in, but since I live alone and have no kids I’m not really interested.
One exception - if I’m doing groundbreaking work of significant value and I’m convinced no one else can carry on with it then I’d consider it. Hell, barring accidental death I’d probably wait till I was nearing death naturally or loosing my facilities and off myself right after the most recent upload to avoid losing a months worth of research.
To the people who say that the person who survives is not the “real you”: do you believe in something like the religious concept of a soul? That is, do you believe that the “real you” is something which exists independently from the patterns encoded in the synapses of your brain? If so, do you believe that there is some way in which a person could tell if they still have their soul or not?
If not, then in what way would a clone body with all your memories, who behaves exactly the same and responds to any external stimulus in exactly the same way as you would, and whose thoughts under any circumstances are exactly the same as the original “you” would have, not be the real you?
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that you have this insurance, and one day you wake up in the hospital. A doctor explains that you’ve fallen off a ladder onto your head and have been unconscious for a while. The rest of your body was not badly damaged, so there’s no need to bring out the clone body.
As it happens, your last monthly brain backup was taken just a few hours before the accident. The doctor says: “Now, maybe we restored you from backup, or maybe there was no permanent brain damage and you just woke up normally after a while. If you ask me, I am legally required to tell you. But perhaps you’d rather not know?”
Would you want to know? And if you choose not to be told, and therefore spend the rest of your life without knowing if you “died” that day, would it matter?
It’s my understanding that a clone of me is no different from an identical twin. It is of absolutely no concern to me whether or not I have an identical twin somewhere, separated at birth, who has a life of his own, whether or not it is somehow influenced by my own life.
So I’m voting “I don’t care, and I wouldn’t even care if it was done involuntarily. It’s not me.”
That’s a long argued philosophical question, but no, I do not believe in a soul, per se. I do believe, that despite moments of mundane or profound unconsciousness, that there is an evolving but unique and distinct “string” of an I that persists only within my particular body.
I can see the argument from the other side, but all you would need to do to dissuade you from that notion is to wake a clone up while you’re still alive. I don’t know by what physiological mechanism my consciousness persists in this body, but I know that so far I have not woken up in anyone else’s; nor would I expect to become aware in a clone of myself.
That would be true for a normal clone, but not for a clone who has had a recent copy of your brain patterns implanted into them, as per the OP.
An identical twin is a separate person. He or she may be very similar to you, especially if the two of you have grown up together and shared many of the same life experiences, but it is not you. You may be more similar to your identical twin than to a random stranger, but you are by no means interchangeable with them.
On the other hand, a recently restored backup copy would be you. They would remember living your life, right up to the moment that the backup was made, and they would feel the exact same emotions and have exactly the same responses as you would in any given situation. It would be like overwriting a file on your computer with an identical copy of the same file. For all the world including yourself, the situation would be indistinguishable from if the backup-and-restore had never happened at all.
Disagree. What if the clone was woken in your presence right after the latest upload.
Are you OK being killed right then because, hey, there’s me right there in front of me, and he, I mean I, will still be alive?
So if we have a scenario similar to the OP’s, but instead of loading your brain patterns into the clone’s brain, we simply put your original, physical brain (together with the spine, and any other bits and pieces which contain enough complex neurons that they might be considered part of your personality) into the new body, would you also consider that equivalent to dying and being replaced by a separate person?
That would certainly be the mother of all identity crises. But I don’t think it’s a decisive argument against the notion that a clone would be “you”. Certainly the clone would feel like me, would emphatically argue that he was me, would interact with my friends and loved ones in the same way that I would, etc. So I’d say that there would then be two “me’s” running around, neither of whom would have a superior claim to being the real one, and we would just somehow need to deal with that fact.
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I don’t know by what physiological mechanism my consciousness persists in this body, but I know that so far I have not woken up in anyone else’s; nor would I expect to become aware in a clone of myself.
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I don’t expect it to happen in reality anytime soon, either. But if the option was there, and if I had been through the backup-and-restore cycle a few times, I think I would still consider myself to be the same person whose childhood memories I have.
These people understand the only value of this technology. It’s a literal living will - a person who in the event of your death will manage your estate the way you would have wanted it.
You’ve got it backwards - it is the “The clone is you” side that requires the existence of the soul - a non-physical entity that can be transferred to another body. They just dress it up by claiming your soul is merely information - a sufficiently large number that can be input into your clone’s body and BAM! they are you.
That would be an incredibly shitty doctor. If a patient dies in your care, telling the next of kin that it doesn’t matter because you got them a replacement goldfish is way out of line.
I honestly don’t know how I would act in that situation. Quite possibly, at that moment, my lizard brain would indeed go “no, I don’t want to die, screw that other guy!”
And of course, within a few seconds after the clone woke up, we would start diverging from each other, until at some point we would really consider ourselves different people despite having the first X years of our lives in common.
But sitting here behind my PC and considering the situation dispassionately, I do think I could be OK with it (assuming the killing is guaranteed to be painless). Certainly, if I knew that I (that is, the “me” in my current body) was going to die inevitably, having a backup made and making sure that the clone will survive, would be very high on my list of priorities, which would not be the case if I cared no more about the clone’s life than I would about a random stranger.
You haven’t convinced me that “I” after my death, would care if anything of mine became a usable part by another person. whether kidney, cornea, or memory. You’ve only convinced me that you think you would care.
Obviously we are talking about science fiction technology here, but do you agree in principle that if a sufficiently high-resolution copy of a person’s brain could be made, so that every neuron and synaps could be replicated in a new body in the exact state as it was in the original, together with the right quantities of any relevant chemicals etc, then that person would behave and feel exactly as the original?
That depends. If the patient has this insurance then presumably they believe in the continuity of personhood across the backup-and-restore procedure. So if the next-of-kin feel the same, then there wouldn’t be anything wrong with the doctor saying “congratulations, the restore went perfectly and the backup was only a few days old so there is almost no damage!” And then the next-of-kin would go “great! A few days you say? That means he won’t know about the $200 I borrowed from him!”
True. Most likely this is one of those cases where different people are working from different axioms and there isn’t a whole lot you can do to convince each other. But I’m interested in trying to figure out exactly what those different axioms between us are.
It does matter. If the doctor me I’m still the original, I can carry on as always, thanking my lucky stars.
If he told me, I am in fact a clone with implanted memories of the original, and the original is dead and now eternally unaware, I would consider myself as a new conscious entity, and perhaps even morn the loss of the original person of whom I am a meticulous copy.
As for the original me, he is dead and nonexistent as I was before my conception. There is no way forward, or coming back for him. As a clone, I am forced to act and live my life under the illusion I was him, but that doesn’t mean I am him.
But I don’t think it’s a decisive argument against the notion that a clone would be “you”. Certainly the clone would feel like me, would emphatically argue that he was me, would interact with my friends and loved ones in the same way that I would, etc. So I’d say that there would then be two “me’s” running around, neither of whom would have a superior claim to being the real one, and we would just somehow need to deal with that fact.