# What would this sci-fi crime be called? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 13, 2020, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662 "2020-04-13T00:14:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/21 "2020-04-13T15:58:34Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > The robot and the human are distinct individuals, even if the one is a copy of the other. > > Therefore, it’s murder. I feel there might be an issue of degree of distinction. If an individual was duplicated and one duplicate was killed ten seconds later, I would feel that the remaining individual was essentially the same as the dead individual. But if an individual was duplicated and one duplicate was killed ten years later, I would feel that the two duplicates would have had enough different experiences in those ten years to have effectively become two distinct individuals. Which I guess demonstrates my inability to think like a dinosaur. ---
**Author:** ![TroutMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/troutman/32/6721_2.png) [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/22 "2020-04-13T16:00:17Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > ETA I am positive I have read multiple short stories with this basic premise, as well as others where duplication is (semi)routine “Robot with human’s mind tries to euthanize the original human” was part of the Black Mirror episode _[Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel,_Jack_and_Ashley_Too)_. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/23 "2020-04-13T17:25:53Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Bear in mind that the person in question had \*wanted \*her human body to die - that was the whole purpose of the procedure. Having her metal body finish the job is essentially assisted suicide. Forget the science-fiction aspect of the scenario. Suppose someone goes to a doctor for euthanasia (somewhere where it is legal). The person signs all the forms stating clearly that he wants to die and is doing this of his own free will. But the procedure goes wrong and at the end the person is still alive but suffering. The doctor then does something unorthodox (in the context of the normal euthanasia procedure) to kill the patient. Did the doctor commit a crime? I say no, he’s just completing the desired procedure in the best way he can. Similarly, the robot is just finishing up the botched procedure to get the outcome that everyone desired. I don’t see a crime. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/24 "2020-04-13T17:50:42Z")
If the flesh-person still wanted to die, maybe. But what if she’s changed her mind? ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/25 "2020-04-13T18:11:29Z")
Then no, obviously. But take assisted suicide. Say the doctor gives you drugs that make you fall unconscious and then, half an hour later, die. Should the doctor assume that during that half hour there’s a chance that you might have changed your mind and halt the process, or, barring any clear indication otherwise, should they just presume you want to continue dying? I’d say that unless you actually wake up and say “stop!”, the doctor should continue with the procedure. ---
**Author:** ![sohvan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/96bed5/32.png) [@sohvan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sohvan)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/26 "2020-04-13T18:49:04Z")
I think it’s assisted suicide if the meatbag is still willing to die, and homicide if they change their mind and want to continue living instead. They are two individual people from that point on. It’s an interesting question what society should do if both of the copies want to keep on living. One option is to say that copies aren’t people, and deserve no rights. I tend to think that a sentient being does deserve individual rights even if they were copied from someone. That still leaves a lot of open questions. Does the copy have any right to property owned by the original? Is the copy bound by any contracts that the original had made? What about relationships with friends and loved ones? Does this change if someone makes a copy of you against your wishes? ---
**Author:** ![Ranchoth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ranchoth/32/1066_2.png) [@Ranchoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ranchoth)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/27 "2020-04-14T00:31:00Z")
First: does the robot-her have legal rights—or, more exactly, legal “personhood”? Or _was_ she at least intended to have rights, if the procedure had gone perfectly according to plan? Second, and most importantly: was meatbag-her conscious (and presumably requesting death) when she died? Not a lawyer, but I’m thinking that’d be the most critical point. From the most generous legal perspective, the robot is merely an “identical twin” if to an unusual degree. You’re not legally permitted to kill your own twin, or presume that they’d consent to being euthanized, even if you’re 99% likely to know that that’s exactly what they’d want to be done. Or _even_ then, in strict anti-euthanasia/assisted-suicide law. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/28 "2020-04-14T02:55:18Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Alessan** : > > But take assisted suicide. Say the doctor gives you drugs that make you fall unconscious and then, half an hour later, die. Should the doctor assume that during that half hour there’s a chance that you might have changed your mind and halt the process, or, barring any clear indication otherwise, should they just presume you want to continue dying? I’d say that unless you actually wake up and say “stop!”, the doctor should continue with the procedure. I think that’s part of the reason why some countries still ban assisted suicide. ---
**Author:** ![road\_lobo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/d78d45/32.png) [@road\_lobo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/road_lobo)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/29 "2020-04-14T08:09:18Z")
It depends on the laws of the future society you create. The situation you describe is not homicide, suicide, or murder according to contemporary law. From a hard sci-fi perspective, getting sufficient information about a human brain to meaningfully emulate it would require freezing the person’s head, shaving/slicing the head in molecule thin layers, and imaging the layers with a scanning electron microscope. The mind isn’t software and the brain isn’t a disk drive. Yes, I’m fun at parties. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 8:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/30 "2020-04-14T08:48:25Z")
Whether we call it murder, suicide or something else depends on the answer to a philosophical question that is still very much debated. So it’s basically up to you. In terms of imagining the social change for a novel, I think we’d probably have a whole set of new concepts related to moving / copying / splitting / networking minds etc. One body, one mind rather simplifies things in our reality, a world where brains can be copied or moved opens up countless possibilities. But I think if one physical brain is unambiguously responsible for the unlawful death of another physical brain…we’d still think of that as some flavor of murder. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 9:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/31 "2020-04-14T09:04:23Z")
Freezing and slicing would definitely kill the patient, and probably wouldn’t reproduce the entire mind. I’d do it a different way; expose the brain, and tease all the neurons apart while keeping them alive and active, replacing them gradually with artificial replicas which could then be relocatedv into an artificial body. I call this _mind-expansion_; synaptic connections are so slow that you could replace them with much faster connections and expand the brain to several metres in radius, giving your medical technology room to operate comfortably. If you are really careful you could keep the original neurons and reassemble them into a working brain at the end, and pop the skull back on. The result; two people, one biological, one artificial. I won’t speculate on how the artificial replica functions, or how accurate it is; but the level of medical technology required to do all this is several centuries away, at least, and if you could do all that, there should be no real difficulty restoring the original to health (even if they are somewhat disappointed that they are not the robot). ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 9:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/32 "2020-04-14T09:20:51Z")
> [@eburacum45](#): > > I’d do it a different way; expose the brain, and tease all the neurons apart while keeping them alive and active, replacing them gradually with artificial replicas which could then be relocatedv into an artificial body. I call this _mind-expansion_; synaptic connections are so slow that you could replace them with much faster connections and expand the brain to several metres in radius, giving your medical technology room to operate comfortably. This is based on the misconception that the neurons and synapses contain all the information. They don’t. From an [article](https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/15/109906/the-false-science-of-cryonics/) by a neurologist at the MIT Technology Review: > [@](#): > > Synapses are the physical contacts between neurons where a special form of chemoelectric signaling—neurotransmission—occurs, and they come in many varieties. They are complex molecular machines made of thousands of proteins and specialized lipid structures. It is the precise molecular composition of synapses and the membranes they are embedded in that confers their properties. The presence or absence of a synapse, which is all that current connectomics methods tell us, suggests that a possible functional relationship between two neurons exists, but little or nothing about the nature of this relationship—precisely what you need to know to simulate it. > > Additionally, neurons and other cells in the brain are in constant communication through signaling pathways that do not act through synapses. Many of the signals that regulate fundamental behaviors such as eating, sleeping, mood, mating, and social bonding are mediated by chemical cues acting through networks that are invisible to us anatomically. We know that the same set of synaptic connections can function very differently depending on what mix of these signals is present at a given time. These issues highlight an important distinction: the colossally hard problem of simulating _any_ brain as opposed to the stupendously more difficult task of replicating a _particular_ brain, which is required for the promised personal immortality of uploading. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 9:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/33 "2020-04-14T09:37:55Z")
Of course, extracellular signalling would be replicated too. Here’s a picture I made of the process; the blood supply and cellular environments are carefully moderated, and synaptic connections replicated in great detail. [![](https://www.orionsarm.com/im_store/gradual_uploading2.png) ](https://www.orionsarm.com/im_store/gradual_uploading2.png) Don’t think for a minute I am recommending this process, or think it would be desirable; but I do think it is possible in the long run, and may even become a normal part of life in the far future. But how realistic would the end product be? Would it even be conscious? ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662/34 "2020-04-14T10:20:02Z")
Nice picture! Perhaps you could illustrate **Love Rhombus** ’ book. 😃 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-would-this-sci-fi-crime-be-called/851662.md?page=1)