Suppose some wacko scientists kidnap you. They freeze you somehow so that you stay in the exact same state, and every cell will remain the same.
Then they clone you so they have two EXACT same copies. They put you on the left, and the clone on the right
Next they painstakingly switch your cells, one by one, and attach them to the clone and his (hers) cells to you. Untill finally, you have completely switched places.
Then they revive you and the clone. Which one are you now, the one on the left or the one on the right?
Now, what if they would do this while you are awake (I don’t care how, nano technology, or whatever, it doesn’t even matter if it’s possible or not). Switching one cell won’t make you another person. But eventually they will all have been switched. So will there be a moment when you think “hey, just a while I ago I was on the left, and now all of a sudden I’m on the right?”?
Assuming that the duplication was flawless and fully-blind, there would be no way to tell (for you or any observer) which one was ‘real’ and which one was the clone - both copies would have every reason to believe that they were the real thing.
One of the implications of this is that maybe there isn’t any transcendent ‘you’ at all - the person you were yesterday (and indeed perhaps five milliseconds ago) is gone and what you are is a new person that has merely inherited the old one’s sense of self.
I don’t understand this question at all. Besides saying that it doesn’t matter how it is done or if it is possible, the whole idea of a clone is flawed. When an animal or human is cloned first there is an fetus, then a birth and then the normal aging process. The clone isn’t created as an adult, which would be necessary for the OP.
Leaving that behind for a minute, the idea of switching cells one by one is mind boggling. It would be better to use a devise like that used in Star Trek, when they said “Beam me up, Scottie.” Of course then there would be the problem addressed in the movie “The Fly”.
If the clone could be created as an adult, it would have no experiences stored in its memory, conceivably not even those stored while in the womb. The question then would be could this blank slate be transferred from one to the other? The answer is “Yes”. So could the memory from the primary individual be transferred? As the cells in the brain were transferred they would lose the contact necessary to maintain memory and so it seems what you’d end up with would be two adult individuals with completely useless brains. Their only memories would be that of the transfer of the last billion or so cells, done after they became conscious.*****
I guess we must also discount the immense time it would take to accomplish even the last step mentioned above.
*****[sup]Then there is the question as to how you would get life back into these individuals after they were dismantled, but I guess that is for another thread.[/sup]
which of these two ‘cloned’ OP do you think is the original? they are an exact copy of each other, yet their ‘experiences’ and the replies they’ve had received have been different since they were posted. does it matter (and can you tell?) which is the original?
the answer is neither of them is the original. your written post in the reply box was the original, yet they are no different from the original as far as we are concerned, what matters is that they are now two different threads that started off being the same.
therefore, IMHO there are now two of you. two copies of you that will be different the moment you are released from the experiment and am exposed to ‘outside’ stimuli.