We dont project ourselves into the future, because* the future does not exist yet*
Neither does the past, anymore, so what you’re describing above is the laying down of memories that can be accessed at a later date. Conventionally, only by the entity that we call ‘you’ (that is, the personality apparently inhabiting your body at any given moment).
But the hypothetical copying scenario posits the unconventional possibility of two distinct entities being able to access those memories tomorrow.
Exactly. Regardless of the question of souls, Me1’s consciousness ceases to exist at death. Just because someone made another consciousness with the same memories, does not make it the same consciousness. The person that resides inside my head would be gone. I have no access to what goes on inside of someone else’s head. I can’t “jump ship” into another body, as it were.
This reminds me of the Farscape episode “Eat Me.” They run into someone with a “twinning” device, and upon examination it’s determined that both resulting individuals are equally original / copy. The crew members thus twinned go through this exact identity crisis, especially Chiana, who witnessed one of herself get killed immediately after the split/duplication.
Consciousness is just the awareness of now coupled with a memory of the past (in my opinion). If the awareness of now is consistent with the memory of the awareness of now, then the original/clone cannot distinguish their prior state (original vs new).
People who are unconscious have no awareness of time, and can suffer an extreme disconnect if they are out for an extended period of time (days or weeks). If the right parietal lobe of the brain is damaged, people can suffer a disconnect between their own body and their awareness of their body - all the way up to feeling an out-of-body experience, because the body they inhabit (i.e their awareness of now) does not match their memories of awareness of now, so the body they are in cannot be their own, and they dissociate. We all suffer lapses of consciousness - it is not constant, and as it returns we evaluate the current awareness with our memories of prior awareness. When things don’t quite match up, things feel odd. If we have lost a limb in the intervening time, it takes time to get used to the change (phantom limbs), and it can be very challenging.
This was a plot point for The 6th Day, a Schwarzenegger movie from 2000. The protagonist is illegally cloned because he was expected to be killed along with his employer, but the murder never occurs. So the cloner has to dispose of the clone. But the clone survives, and eventually views the original living the life he expects to return to. Until they meet, they have no idea what has happened.
Ok, let’s consider the following scenario.
Suppose we have a technology that allows us to disintegrate a human body to atoms and then reassemble it with absolute precision so that all biological and electrochemical processes of the body continue to run as if no disintegration has taken place. The question is: will I survive such an experiment or will I die?
Assuming a non-zero period of time between the disintegration and reintegration, you died AND you survived, or if you don’t like using “survived” that way you died and you were recreated as yourself.
Your scenario made me think of a slightly different thought experiment. What if you were disintegrated in room 1 and reassembled TWICE, once in room 1 and once in room 2? How is the ultimate result any different from having an “original” in room 1 and a “copy” in room 2 as suggested earlier in the thread? To go back to the original premise, how is killing the original and letting the copy wake up in the original scenario any different than killing the one in room 1 and letting the one in room 2 live in my scenario?
I guess I would summarize my thoughts on the matter as - if you make an absolutely verbatim reproduction of me, then it doesn’t make any sense to say that “I” am one of the two copies and the other one is someone else; both used to be “I” (since there was only one of them) and both together have become “we” (in other words there are now two of us), and “we” now go our separate ways.
Since the exact copy has ALL memories, it would know there was copy (unless the cloning was unknown). The question is, would the memories be 1st or 2nd person related memories. i.e. would the copy’s memories be all the memories of someone else, or would they be “his” memories or his life.
IF the memories are of 1st person, what cannot be answered is when both awake, would either know who the real one was and who was the copy since the memories are exactly the same.
Thus when the copy came out of anesthesia and the original had died, there is nothing to say the original wasnt the copy, and the copy wasnt the original, unless the staff performing the cloning proved the answer to the copy.
For an external observer there’s no point in trying to make distinction between a “copy” and an “original”. You just have two people with the same “personality”, that’s it, no problem. But try to think of it from the standpoint of the original “self”, the one undergoing the experiment.
Suppose you were given a shot of anesthesia in room1, taken apart to molecules and then after a while reassembled in the same room. From the physicalist position there’s all reason to believe that you will wake up as if nothing happened to you, except maybe a little headache from anesthetics. The same result we can expect if you were disintegrated and left scattered around in room1 but a precise copy of you put together out of a different set of molecules in room2. Again, no problem, you will just wake up in room2, as if your body was carried over in room2 during your unconscious phase. Now, here is the crunch, what if your disintegrated body in room1 were also reintegrated at the same time as the copy in room2? Where will YOU wake up? Obviously you can not wake up in BOTH room simultaneously, that’s nonsensical, but at the same time I fail to see any plausible reason why you should regain consciousness in one room rather than in the other…
We semi-recently did something very like this topic in the “Transporters and the Destruction of Self” thread. Of particular interest are the “Grandfather’s Axe” and “Ship of Theseus” thought experiments.
Two of YOU do wake up, in different rooms. I don’t see why this is a problem - both will have a sense of awareness, memory and personal identity that is coherent and complete, apart from a period of unconsciousness (as happens when we sleep, or go into a coma).
If those two meet, there will be issues of cognitive dissonance - it would be hard to accept a clone with the same mannerisms and memories as yourself, claiming to be yourself. But as time went on, the two would diverge to some extent - experiences would be different, and those would modify the interpretation of memories, too. Two clones diverged in a narrow wood, and all that.
Humans are complex meat-sacks - all DNA driven chemical reactions, synaptic impulses and biological state machines. If you can copy that, it is as identical as copying a file on a computer.
Si
I wasn’t asking where I would wake up. I was asking where YOU would wake up if you were the subject of this experiment. Think carefully about it, you’ll see the problem.
Of course, there’s no problem from the standpoint of an external observer.
I would discover that I am now a we. We would be a little freaked out that we were a double, and then would begin to transition into a life where we have the chance of (possibly extremely) disparate future experiences - in contrast to our singular past.
We (I imagine now) would have a difficult time working out the legal ramifications of this duplication, so we would most likely have to do such interesting tasks as deciding which of us gets to legally acquire which portions of our original name (or perhaps avoid the difficult topic entirely by each choosing entirely new names), in order to create a legal distinction between us, even though there is no distinction/primacy in reality.
We would also suddenly be in a polyamorous relationship, which would be interesting to navigate. We would be in a unique position to be jealous of ourselves.
I would like to comment at this point that my husband is horrified by this concept, unless he has the opportunity to pair off as well, so that he’s not outnumbered. Personally, I think that idea works quite well - the four of us would then most likely live together for a while until we begin to develop along different lines, and then we’d split off into whatever arrangement worked out for us all.
We’d all be broke as shit for a while as our originally two-person income is now supporting four physical persons, but that would be temporary, overcome through additional jobs or state support once the legalities are worked out. In the meantime, having four persons working two jobs would make for lots of free time for each of us, which might be a nice break.
Each of us would of course continue to consider themselves the “real” “me” throughout this ordeal, and that would most likely appear as the gravest insult thrown out during heated disputes. Despite that, I currently see no reason that both of us shouldn’t rightly consider ourselves to be the “real” “me” - it’s perfectly true for us both.
In either case, there’s no one there to experience the loss.
Sure. But in the circumstances described in the OP, one would have historical continuity and the other would be new.
Then you would be dead and two copies of you would exist. As opposed to you being alive while also having a copy.
Let’s ask it in reverse. If a precise EMP could be designed that would wipe away your memories, but leave your personality intact, would you be dead? Would you not be you?
ETA - for the record, I wouldn’t volunteer for that, either.
How would that work? Seriously. With what possible mechanism could that happen?
The only sense of identity we have is encapsulated in 3 pounds of soggy fat behind our eyeballs, and the connections to the rest of our body. If you replicate that exactly, then each replicant has their own sense of identity. They will be confused as heck if they meet their alter because someone else who looks like them is also claiming to be them, and can back it up that claim with identical memories. It might even drive them mad (a pretty common scenario in such literature).
But you have nothing to support any other position, other than
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Where will YOU wake up? Obviously you can not wake up in BOTH room simultaneously, that’s nonsensical
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Why is it nonsensical - you need to justify this with some sort of reason before dismissing the alternative being presented - that the replicants both have a sense of identity that wakes up in the different rooms.
No - just that there are two beings with equally valid claim on being the real ‘me’. The personality doesn’t somehow span the two individuals - it’s just that both of them think they’re the real thing, and both are not only as correct as each other, but as correct as a single, uncopied individual would be on waking after an ordinary night’s sleep.
The same thorny question can be asked without transporters and dupli-clones; it’s this:
What are you? What makes you ‘you’? If you’re the same person you were yesterday, what and where is that person now?
Of course it wouldn’t work! That’s why waking up in BOTH rooms is nonsensical!
You can wake up in only one of the rooms. Which exactly?
Again you are talking from the standpoint of AN EXTERNAL OBSERVER, for whom both copies are just two identical objects. Try to think of it from the point of view of YOUR OWN consciousness, if YOU were replicated.