The Clone Paradox

In My Humble Opinion
41

The only apparent paradox of this thought experiment concerns the temporal continuum of personal identity.

There is nothing paradoxical about having perfect clones of you, each indistinguishable from each other and all having a valid claim of being “you” to outside observers. If the universe is infinite, maybe there are already perfect clones of you out there already. They will all have personal identities, but they will separate from each other, even at the instance of clone creation with all particles in perfect symmetry.

The questions are: do you (i.e. your personal identity) have a future in any of the clones? Do you have a future in your original body?

There are 3 possibilities:

  1. You have a future only in your original body.
  2. You have a future in your original body and in your clones
  3. You have a future in neither your original body nor your clones.

#2 is a paradox, because your personal identity can’t be split, or exist in more place than once (you can’t be conscious in two locations without some type of physical connection).

#1 is what I believe. You have a future in your body only. My clone’s PI was “born” when he popped into existence, but was always separate from mine.

#3 is what I believe the physicalists really mean, when they appear to be arguing #2. When asked if it matters to them whether their perfect clone or their original-bodied them survives in the future, they say that it doesn’t really matter because they’re “both me”.

But, their premise suggests something more depressing; it predicts that neither will be them because they “die” every instant and a new “me” is born the next instant. It’s the reason they don’t mind stepping into a transporter. In essence, their attitude is “why not, I’m going to be dead whether I go through it or not”. They may not think of it in those terms, but it’s what it boils down to. Me, I’m not going in any transporter and I’m not going to choose my perfect clone to be the lone surviver, even if he’s rewarded with an evening with Scarlett Johansson (why should he have all the fun!).

42

All of this silliness reminds me of a film called “The Prestige”.

The very fact that I mention it in a thread like this might suggest plot elements. However, for the faint of heart, I’ll spoiler it:

[spoiler] One of the characters approaches Nikola Tesla for help building a method of achieving a particular stage illusion. The machine that Tesla builds creates duplicates of whatever is placed inside it. Rather than duplicate gold and retire. Rather than clone, say, grain or cattle and feed the world, our intrepid magician can only see it’s use in achieving the illusion.

The film attempts to go into a lot of existential questions, which I won’t. Suffice to say that the idea was to show the extent to which the magician was willing to suffer to win the self-imposed competition he was having with another magician.

So, the duplication machine becomes a somewhat macabre element in a story about obsession - Ahab and his white whale.[/spoiler]

Just generally, the existential struggle, I find best done in fiction by Philip K Dick. The struggle - knowing the answer to the question - is often very integral to the story. Knowing whether or not the Blade Runners were humans or replicants was a central theme.

I guess my larger point, the point I meant to make anyway, is that having two identical things isn’t nearly as interesting or unique as you might think. It’s what happens with them, their perception, their growth, their place in the world that is interesting.

And, that’s why I love Orphan Black. Helena!!!

43

What difference? The premise is that the two are identical. What difference can you point to that doesn’t violate the premise?

Two separate entities…both of which are “you.” They share the same “qualia” of self-ness.

If you kill one…you still live.

In fact, it’s the funniest thing (since Mengele…) We did it, 10,000 times. We made exact duplicates, and, in each case, killed one of them. In every single instance, the one that lived claimed to be the original. Now what are the odds of that? :wink:

44

What happens if we add the ‘Ship of Theseus’ in? Say instead of creating a clone from new material, the clone is created by taking one atom from your body at a time, while replacing the atom in your body using an outside source, so that at the end, the clone is comprised entirely of atoms that was originally your body, while you are now comprised entirely of new atoms. Could you still claim to be the original then?

45

I think it’s sometimes more useful to say neither one is more or less ‘you’ than the other.

The trouble with all of this is that it’s really easy to get hung up on the way things are at the moment, in our single-threaded, unbranching existence and answer on that basis, when in fact, the question poses a scenario where that single-threaded unbranching-ness is explicitly violated.

I regard myself as one person, the same person as I was yesterday; I never wake up as someone else and everyone else in the world doesn’t wake up as me, but all of that is an outcome of the way our world works right now. None of it really equips me (especially emotionally) to understand what it would be like if things were not that way.

46

It’s a different conundrum entirely…I think. But it does tie in nicely to what Mangetout said (see below) because this is what actually happens to us all in real life. Some of our atoms are replaced, day by day, until, after a few years, we’re 95% “new.”

Agreement: it isn’t something we have the commonplace “common sense” cognitive tools to work with. In the Star Trek universe, with transporter technology as a mature and commonly used mode of transportation, the question would almost certainly be settled. After 20% of the population has been transported, and no great breakdown of “selfhood” is perceived, it fades away to looney conspiracy theory territory.

But for us, now, where the idea is revolutionary and a little scary, we don’t know how to think about it clearly.

Someone in 300 B.C. might have the same questions about air travel.

47

Well they have different extrinsic qualities for a start (e.g. location).

Of all the different answers to the paradox, this is the one I feel is easiest to shoot down. For example, consider the following scenario:

I die at the age of 68. Meanwhile, an entity living in a galaxy a million light years away gets hit by lightning and his brain becomes reconfigured to have exactly all of my memories and personality (ignore the ridiculous unlikeliness of this: we’re already talking about duplicating entities to a precision we believe is physically impossible in our universe).
Now, according to your logic, I now live out the rest of my days in this galaxy, way beyond where I could have travelled.
Me and the other guy had no connection whatsoever throughout our lives, but suddenly, we do, and I get to live on over there. Is that right?

I think you’ve really misunderstood the other side of the debate if you think anyone’s suggesting that teleportees will be saying “OMG I’m not me any more”! or whatever.
Of course the people stepping out of the destination will have complete contuinity and believe that everything went OK. However, successful teleports would prove absolutely nothing; indeed this is just the premise of the transporter problem.

Let me ask you this: in the movie The Prestige <spoilers> a trick is performed by duplicating the magician and then killing the “original”. As far as other observers are concerned, they’re identical and the magician still exists. But from the POV of the guy in a tank of water, drowning, do you think it’s accurate to say he will soon be in the other magician’s body, as soon as the messy job of his death is over?

48

Well, to begin with, there’s the practical concerns: You couldn’t tie people down tight enough. You could use curare or some other paralytic, but that probably has unacceptable toxicity in large doses if you aren’t using pain control at the same time to reduce the need to paralyze muscle groups. You’re assuming the amnesiac drugs work perfectly, every single time, for everyone. And, of course, nobody wants to cut into a screamer.

More philosophically, no, it isn’t acceptable, because the person there screaming on the table is still a person, even if they won’t exist an hour from now after the amnesiacs have had a chance to erase all memories. If you are your memories and current sensory experiences, the version of you with the (short-term) memories and current experiences of that surgery is just as much of a person as the longer-lived version without those memories.

49

I’ve always had trouble with the type of thinking you’re arguing against, it’s so alien. Their ideas of theory of mind are really hard to empathize with.

Like…if you’re cloned a billion times, do they think your consciousness splits into a billion pieces? And if they all die, they zoom back into your skull? Would get crowded, I’d think. I can understand the dualism instinct, but that’s just weird.

These people must hate the ostensible clone episode every TV show does.

I never suffer from existential angst when making a backup copy of my hard drive.

50

If I punch a twin in the face when he’s blackout drunk, does the other one wake up with a hangover?

What about people who develop amnesia or dementia? I suppose in a certain sense, they aren’t the same people anymore.

The works in The Prestige because Tesla’s machine creates (presumably) an exact quantum copy.

It did NOT work for Michael Keaton in Multiplicity as each copy was “not quite as sharp as the original”.

No, because it’s not Ok for people to do this to people. Presumably you would have no memory of me killing you, but that’s not ok either.

51

Wasn’t that more or less the plot of John Carter?

What if I put your brain in a computer (Transcendence)?
What if I put your brain in a robot (Chappie)?
What if every time you died, your brain woke up in an identical body (Battlestar Galactica)?
What if I made an exact copy of you and then killed one of you (The Prestige)?
Or maybe I didn’t (The 6th Day)
What if I routinely scrabled your atoms and reconstituted them somewhere else (Star Trek)?
What if I put your brain in a virtual world while your body sits in a tub of goo (The Matrix)?
What if I put someone elses memories in your brain and you think they are yours? (Blade Runner)
What if I can hack your brain and make you think you are someone else (Ghost in the Shell)?
I suppose my take on all these various scenarios is you being “you” is largely defined by your memories and your consciousness (your perception of your self being you). Replacing your physical body doesn’t change that any more than replacing a lost limb with a prosthetic makes you a different person. I mean you’re different from before you lost your limb, but you are still the same person.

Where it becomes interesting is when you make an exact duplicate. IMHO, for all intents and purposes, both of you are you. But from that point forward, you diverge into two separate people.

That reminds me of the old joke about the RAF pilot who got shot down and captured during WWII. His leg went bad and had to be amputated. Ze Germans’, in accordance wish his wishes (or as an F-you to his mates, depending on the telling) dropped the leg over his airbase. Awhile later his other leg had to be removed and then his right arm. Each time, the Germans dropped the limb over his airbase.

Finally, his right left arm had to be removed and the pilot asked whether they were going to drop that limb over his airbase.

NEIN!! Replied ze Germans. VE THINK YOU IZ TRYING TO ESCAPE!!"

52

I was so impressed with this argument when you presented it before that I made up a religion around it.

In an infinite universe there are an infinite number of exact clones of me, separated on average by a distance which was calculated a few years ago by Max Tegmark. Each of those clones has an internal experience that is identical to mine.

But-
in an infinite universe most of those clones will have a slightly different future. Some of them will die in the next microsecond; every second that passes will see the death of a certain (infinite) set of these clones. Similarly I am the survivor of a myriad exactly similar clones that did not make it this far. The only thing that matters to me is that I am one of those surviving clones. The ones that are dead mean nothing to my experience of the universe.

The religion aspect comes in when you consider your continued existence in the universe; you can appeal to an infinite universe (or a many-worlds universe if you prefer, or both) to be assured of your eternal survival. A faith to sustain the existentially apprehensive, like any other faith.

This gets even weirder. Imagine that you are an artificially created fictional character in a simulation, something like Professor Moriarty in the Star Trek universe. Professor Moriarty in that show worked out, quite correctly that he was a simulation; but he could have taken some comfort in the apparent fact that somewhere out there in the infinite universe he had once been real.

Of course this belief would only be valid if the fictional character was a plausible creation; Professor Moriarty (probably) yes, Superman (or Harry Potter) almost certainly no.

53

Either this doesn’t matter…we can have two identical rooms…or else it violates the premise, and the issue is moot. You can’t have it both ways.

Yes. “You” are he, and he is you, and there is no difference between the two. That’s what you just postulated: he has all of your memories, including your personal sense of “me” – your personal sense of human identity.

Again, you’re violating the premise, by introducing a difference between the two individuals. One is drowning, the other isn’t. That’s a real difference.

Go back to the moment when they haven’t become distinguishable: when the two are sitting side by side, fresh out of the duplicating machine. At that point, they are truly identical, and are both “the real guy.”

If you kill one of them then, the other goes forward with the identity they both share together.

If you slap one of them in the face, and only then decide to kill one of them, the identity has been broken. You can either kill the guy who was slapped or the guy who wasn’t. The sense of having been slapped (or not) won’t be carried forward by the survivor, because he never experienced that sensation.

You continue to break the premise by introducing differences between the two, and then objecting “They aren’t really identical.” Well, of course not!

I think it’s pretty obvious that neither of us is going to change his mind: we have a fundamental difference of philosophical beliefs. We are, it appears, talking past each other.

54

Why do you think it is only one thing that has to be conserved? The consciousness is duplicated a billion times.

Why do they have to “zoom” anywhere? If you die…you die. Your consciousness is destroyed. It doesn’t have the magical property of “zooming.”

Yes…but because it’s a stupid cliché, not because it is in any way philosophically threatening. I actually liked the Will Riker/Tom Riker stories on ST:TNG. They explored some of these issues in a fairly clever way.

I don’t either. Why do you imagine that I would? (Is your computer’s hard drive conscious?)

55

This is what I call the “Ultimate Anthropic Principle.” You can never truly die, because you always exist in the universe where your consciousness exists. The “Many Worlds” idea of quantum physics is a variant of that: you might have died in a car crash “over there somewhere,” but not here.

However…do not take too much comfort from this. Think about the large number of ways where your consciousness could exist indefinitely… You might end up downloaded into a computer, for instance, to preserve your consciousness when your body is kaput. This might not be the kind of survival you would have chosen…

56

I’m going to say yes. A being that wakes up tomorrow with all of your memories and experiences is you. That’s actually what happens to you every day - you wake up with memories of being the person you were yesterday, therefore you are the person you were yesterday.

57

I agree with Mijin’s interpretation.

PI = Personal Identity

Let’s first consider Enilno’s ‘Ship of Theseus’

Analogy. Think of a traffic circle with one on-ramp and one off-ramp. The circle roadway is your brain. The cars traveling around the circle are your personal ID (your self-awareness). Most of the cars go around and around in a circle for an average lifespan of decades. But, every once in a while, a car will get off the offramp or crash (some neurons die). Some of the cars become aged to the point of breakdown (normal aging of the mind). Some circles have too many cars that break down or crash (Alzheimer’s). Infrequently, a new car will enter circle (rare regeneration of neurons).

Take one piece of asphalt at a time from the original circle, replace it with a new piece, and place the old piece of asphalt into the construction of a new circle somewhere else. Do this piece by piece until none of the old asphalt remains on the original circle and they are all part of the new circle. When the new roadway forms a completed circle, new cars start to enter from its onramp (a new conscious is born with its own unique PI).

So, if your consciousness is the process of circling cars on the original roadway, where does it (PI/cars) go when there are no original pieces of the original roadway where it began? Did the original cars magically transport to the new roadway constructed from the old roadway asphalt? No, they remain at the original location with new asphalt.

If the pieces of asphalt were replace all at once instead of piece by piece, and the old roadway was transported to the new location in one piece, then your PI would transport with it, and a new PI would emerge at the old location with the new asphalt.
Your consciousness is an emergent property that arose from the matter of your brain—it’s a process (like cars circling a circle). Your PI is a higher order process atop your consciousness that supervenes on the matter of your brain. It’s a local event.

Imaging an infinite universe with multiple versions of you popping in an out of existence throughout it does not, as far as I can tell, break any physical laws. But do you have any future, or past PI in any of those other versions? No. To say that you do implies a non-local event—action at a distance. I don’t buy that.

The counter argument is that there are no privileged particles, there is no woo in particles. Identical particles in the exact same configuration should behave exactly the same and therefore if you are conscious here, you should be conscious there. I agree someone like you is conscious there. To all outside observers you are one in the same. You can be a conscious being with self-consciousness anywhere in the universe, in multiple locations. But, each and every version of you has its own PI; always did, always will. You’re not going to travel billions of light years away, into any one of your perfect clones. You’re stuck at the same location you were born in.

There is a difference between you and all the other perfect clones, although it’s not something that can be measured. The difference is the continuity of your PI in the brain you were born into. It doesn’t matter if your brain ages, or changes, or goes to sleep, or goes under general anesthesia: everyone’s PI is stuck onto its original brain.

I believe consciousness/self-consciousness is a property that arises at the cellular level (not sub-atomic). The vast majorities of CNS neurons do not regenerate or get replaced. Most other cells in your body do regenerate or get replace over time. I don’t think it’s an accident that CNS neurons have evolved to be so resistant to replacement—it may be the prime reason consciousness was able to emerge in the first place.

Even if you do believe consciousness is a property that supervenes at the subatomic level of the brain, if I recall, the majority of non-metabolic particles in your brain likewise remain intact throughout your life (maybe you can research that, as will I). But, even so, I think PI is a cellular level property, so it may not matter.

58

It’s neither.
The original premise is that the clones are identical. By this we mean qualitatively identical, and therefore have all the same intrinsic properties.
We don’t mean they have the same extrinsic properties, otherwise they’d have to occupy the same space. This is not a difference we’re adding, this is just spelling out the terms of the hypothetical.

And yeah it makes a difference as we’re explicitly talking about two entities with physical separation and no apparent “connection”. There’s no more reason to say they are one and the same as there is to say that your shirt is my shirt if you put an identical stain on yours.

I disagree. Memories are part of it, but no, I don’t think the critical feature of “me” is my memories.

Let me put it this way:

One day, for no apparent reason, me and Barack Obama become psychically linked. I can see what he sees, he can see what I see, jab either of us with a needle we both cry out in pain, etc. Neither of us has access to the other’s memories however.
Is Barack Obama now me? Actually, I would say, at least partially, yes, since we now have a kind of shared conciousness (and in this situation I have reason to think that if I die I might live on as him). It doesn’t matter that he’s qualitatively completely different to me.

But make a perfect clone of me, with all my memories, but no such link? Well, no that’s not me. It’s Mijin all right; he has as much claim to that name as I do, absolutely. I’m not saying “I’m real, he’s fake” or whatever. I’m saying there are two consciousnesses, and “me” is this one.

59

Here are the two shirts, on a table, side by side.

Which one is yours?

60

The ability of me to tell in a given situation which is which is irrelevant.

If I destroy my shirt, can I now take you to small claims court and demand that you give me “my” shirt?