Saying otherwise would be tantamount to a philosophical zombie argument. If the person was atomically identical to the original, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t also have a constructed past as well.
No. I’m saying there is no meaningful difference between a memory and an exact copy of that memory. There is no invisible golden thread connecting the event in the past, to the ‘real’ memory.
I don’t know why you would say that.
The fact is, the event of your having been born is gone. It exists only now as memories, documents, effects. Of course you were born, but there is no way for something now to be connected back to you having been born, except for those things.
I’m not suggesting it won’t diverge, just that at the moment of duplication, the notions of ‘original’ and ‘copy’ are not as useful or meaningful as we would like them to be.
All we are is a thing that remembers being us. That’s what makes us us - right now, there’s only ever one thing waking up remembering being me each morning, creating an illusion of some essential ‘me’-ness that is unique and has existence in its own right.
To put it a different way; there’s an apple on my table. It’s the same apple that was there yesterday, but right now, it’s just an apple, on a table.
It doesnt have any particular yesterday-ness or on-the-table-yesterday-ishness intrinsic to it. The table is there now. The apple is there now. Yesterday isnt something that exists any more. If apples could remember and speak, the apple might tell us it was on the table yesterday, but it’s still nothing more than an apple, on a table, right now.
Deckard: Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window. You were going to play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran; you remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody? Remember the spider that lived outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there’s a big egg in it. The egg hatched…
Rachael: The egg hatched…
Deckard: Yeah…
Rachael: …and a hundred baby spiders came out… and they ate her.
Deckard: Implants. Those aren’t your memories, they’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s. [RIGHT]–Blade Runner[/RIGHT]
Rachael’s memories–replicated from Tyrell’s niece–are as authentic to her as any memories she forms subsequently, and serve as a core foundation of her essential identity, to the point that when it is revealed to her that some of those memories that no one else could have known about or experienced are implanted that she doubts all of her basic identity. They may not be the same memories as the original and clone diverge in subsequent experience, but at the time of duplication they will form the same neural connections, and for all intents and purposes the original and clone are the same person, indistinguishable in every way.
The persistance of memory, and it’s extension beyond just the person who experiences a memory, is discussed extensively in by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am A Strange Loop. He concludes, with extensive discussion and justification, that who we are isn’t just the collection of our own experiences but the experiences of those people we interact with, and that in a very tangible sense an identity–and some piece of what we might for lack of a better term consider to be consciousness–lives on in the minds of those we are intimately affiliated with in the form of shared experiences, conversations, a perception of how one might respond or might say to a given situation, et cetera. Hofstadter isn’t suggesting any kind of supernatural phenomenon or quantum entanglement or anysuch, just that the threads of our cognition are intimately connected with others. Even on that basis, the clone is still identical to the original at the time of duplication, but as each goes out and forms independent relationships with other people, they will rapidly diverge until they are no more the same person than identical twins who happen to share very similar (but not identical) recollections of past experience.
Stranger
I think I’m a clone now.
There’s always two of me just a-hangin’ around.
I think I’m a clone now
'Cause ev’ry pair of genes is a hand-me-down.
Weird Al Yankovic
This is only true if you watched the copy being made. Then you have a memory that it doesn’t, which some might argue privileges your instance above the other.
However, you can do away with this objection a number of ways, for example by supposing a copying technique that disassembles the original and converts it to information, which can then be transmitted somewhere else to be reassembled. Basically a teleporter, you just send the information to two receivers at once.
Now which one is “real”?
Those arguing on the side of special continuity of identity will answer neither (and the real one is destroyed)
What a silly question. They’re both real. Which is the original? The first one.
No, you could in theory be a clone made in 2015. A clone made in 2040 would have memories of having experienced all the years leading up to 2040, you don’t have that, all you have are memories leading up to now.
What I would argue is that you have now gone beyond the “two indistinguishable clones” premise, and introduced a difference. You’ve put a tattoo on the arm of one of the two clones, a label that reads “me.”
Since that makes the two non-identical, yes, you are right and you win…but you only win by violating the premise.
People have false memories all the time. Some of them quite complex.
So a clone has false memories? No big deal.
In a sense, all memories are ‘false’. Experiences are objective when they are happening; after that, the memory of the event is just a phantasm.
Not at all.
The clue is in the fact we are calling them two indistinguishable clones. We are tacitly acknowledging that there are two entities, two consciousnesses.
So, that’s why there’s a difference between saying “Is the other clone Mijin?” or “Is the other clone me?”
The answer to the first question is yes, because we’re qualitatively identical, and therefore both qualitatively identical to the set of attributes Mijin has. There is no “real” and “fake” Mijin (or at least, no point trying to make such a distinction).
But asking “Is he me?” is asking whether we are one and the same instance. The answer is no.
You mean the one that was disassembled molecule by molecule during the transmission? Both copies were created, for the sake of argument, at the same time. Also, the molecules making up the original were used to construct a large basket of grapefruit. 
How can I tell them apart? How can you tell them apart?
Every thought in your head…is also in his head. Every “me” sensation you experience, he experiences also. There is no “you and he.”
Again, yeah, I can slap one of them in the face, and not the other. You will know, instantly, if you are the one who was slapped or the one who wasn’t.
But that’s introducing a difference between the two, which violates the premise of two identical minds.
No clone could be a perfect reproduction of the original. It would lack spatial continuity.
I’m sitting in a room in my house in front of a computer. If an exact clone was made of me at this moment, it couldn’t be in this same location because I’m occupying it. So the clone, who would have my memories of sitting here, would experience the mental discontinuity of suddenly finding himself somewhere else without having any memory of having moved there. The original, on the other hand, would be located where he had been and where he expected to be.
To maintain exact identity, the environment would also have to be duplicated. There would be two rooms, two computers, etc.
What makes this interesting (to me) is that the two identities would naturally diverge, due to quantum uncertainty if nothing else, more likely just due to ordinary chemical uncertainty. In time, one of the persons would think something that the other guy didn’t. At that point, the terms of the premise are broken anyway.
The only real purpose of the thought-experiment is the act of duplicating itself; after that, we’re only talking engineering.
But as long as the two minds are identical, and no external clues are used to identify one from the other, then there isn’t any “me and he,” but two “me’s.”
That said…all kinda pointless, really. It’s not going to happen any time soon, and is only of the most abstract possible philosophical interest. And the joy of philosophy is that one can argue either point of view with equal facility. Until someone actually does this, it’s angels and heads of pins (as someone noted in the “Free Will” debate which is equally pointless…and equally kinda fun!)
It’s not introducing a difference. It’s demonstrating a difference.
And as Little Nemo pointed out, at the very least there must be a difference in properties such as spatial location. It’s no use saying the clone must be in an identical room; the other room must be in another spatial location.
Or put it like this: earlier you were using the word “two”; referring to “two clones”. That’s the same concept that I’m referring to when I say there are now two separate entities. I don’t see why anyone would insist that there is only 1 “me” except to try to head off the philosophical questions that typically follow.