A Cloning Catastrophe

hypericin

In the far future, cloning has been perfected. It is possible not merely to grow a new body with the same genetics, but to create an absolutely perfect physical duplicate, with any undesirable features edited away.

For certain intractable conditions this has become the standard treatment: simply create a new body, and edit out the illness, leaving everything else as it was. As the brain is physical, mental features survive with perfect fidelity.

You have serious, untreatable arthritis, causing significant chronic pain. While you can still get by, still enjoy life, your well being and happiness are certainly compromised. Your doctor suggests cloning. You are very apprehensive, but at that moment a sharp stab of pain prompts you to make what might be the most important decision of your life: "Doctor... let's do it".

The doctor explains: "The procedure is quite simple. We put you under, and scan your entire cellular structure. Once your information is in the computer, your arthrits can be edited away. Then, this device here, you can think of it as an organic 3d printer, constructs a new body from this vat of organic compounds. Once complete, we'll put your old body to sleep, I promise you won't feel a thing. You can be home for dinner!"

The anaesthesiologist straps a mask over your face. Your feeling of unease, along with the rest of the world, fades to nothingness.

*******

You wake up, as if from a long, refreshing sleep. "Well, at least I'm still alive", you think. You do a mental inventory. As far as you can tell, you feel the same, you remember everybody, and everything, as you did before the treatment.

Now for the real test. You flex your wrist, the one you can hardly move. It works! You twist your back. No pain, at all!

You spring to your feet. "Doc, this is amazing! I can move again! My God, you have given me my life back!"

Tears of joy streaming down your face, you hug the doctor tightly, with a grip that is as easy and sure as when you were a child.

*******

You wake up. You feel stiff, and can hardly move. How long were you out? You groan as pain lances through your back.

There is a commotion from behind a curtain. Someone is shouting: "... My God, you have given me my life back!"

You manage to get to your feet and pull back the curtain. You see yourself embracing the doctor. Both the doctor and yourself turn to you in shock. "He's still alive!" shouts the doctor. "Nurse, get in here now!"

A large man lumbers in, looking guilty. "Oops. Damn it, my bad." He hulks towards you, brandishing a syringe. "Nooo! Get the fuck away from me!" you screech. But you're easily overpowered, the syringe plunges home, and you realize with dismay that this large red face is the last thing you will ever see.

********

The moral of the story seems clear. From your perspective, your clone is absolutely not you. The clone is somebody else entirely, who has stolen your life and will now enjoy it free from illness. To add insult to injury, you are killed. The "treatment" is a personal catastrophe.

Surely it doesn't matter when you are killed. Whether you are killed before, as, or after the clone wakes up, what is important is that you are killed.

Therefore it seems that bodily continuity is a must for personal continuity to obtain. Given any scenario where it is even logically possible to meet your twin, then you are not your twin, and personal continuity does not hold between the original you and your twin.

This result holds equally for teleporter thought experiments. Unless the mechanics of the teleportation are such that you are somehow physically moved intact through space, it is always possible for the teleporter to produce a twin at the destination while leaving the source unchanged.

Are you buying this argument?

punos

↪hypericin

No, and no.

apokrisis

The moral of the story seems clear. From your perspective, your clone is absolutely not you. The clone is somebody else entirely, who has stolen your life and will now enjoy it free from illness. To add insult to injury, you are killed. The "treatment" is a personal catastrophe. — hypericin

Seems to me that your argument is that the "you" involved here bifurcated at the moment of the intervention. So there are two legitimate points of view to consider, each having becoming its own identity or world line in the time that follows.

And from both points of view, one of the you's made the decision that life was better with the illness edited out. And that one of you had pre-consented the termination of that you's history line. You had wanted to be the other you.

So claiming that a life has been stolen is a bit strong. It was freely given at the time. And morally one could argue that the new you has the right to the pain-free life you granted it. You can't make a gift and then snatch it back in the normal moral sense of things.

Although it isn't all so black and white. The clinic could hand you the syringe and say you choose who survives. Or hand the clone the syringe and say the same thing. The interesting question is then how many out of 100 such situations would the original and the clone chose the fair thing is terminating their own world-line. That then would at least be a pragmatic rule of thumb as to how folk would ordinarily weigh the justice of such a situation. The clinic would know what it ought to do for the good of all.

Down The Rabbit Hole

↪apokrisis

I think what makes you you is your mental patterns and memories. The material that gives rise to this is irrelevant.

Would be interesting to find a thought experiment to make me change my mind, but they all seem to result in the second subject of experience being in a different spatial location to the original subject of experience, and hence having different experience and memories, and ipso facto not being the same person.

ChrisH

Given any scenario where it is even logically possible to meet your twin, then you are not your twin, and personal continuity does not hold between you and your twin. — hypericin

I don't think it makes sense to talk about personal continuity between you and your twin. I'd have thought what is pertinent is the degree (or lack) of continuity you and your twin have with the the 'you' prior to cloning. I'd have thought both have equal psychological continuity - physical continuity, in my view, is not important.

(I've been following your arguments in The imperfect transporter thread and agree with just about everything youv'e been saying - it's only your recent comments on physical continuity that have lost me)

EricH

↪hypericin

This topic has been the subject of numerous science fiction books and movies - most recently the book Mickey 7 - which was made into the movie Mickey 17

SolarWind

The scenario is very boring. I will stay with arthritis. The clone is the clone and just someone else. Cryonics is definitely more interesting.

Hanover

↪hypericin

Why would I choose to die so that my replica can live? I don't understand that. You've not cured my illness. You've just created a new person just like me without my illness. Why can't we both live? Why do we need another of me without arthritis? Why not make a whole team of people like me, all with different qualities (like one can cook really good, one cuts the grass really well, one is a good plumber, one is airline pilot, etc.) and send them to my family and job and I can get all sorts of stuff done while old arthritic me bitches in the recliner looking for the remote?

hypericin

And from both points of view, one of the you's made the decision that life was better with the illness edited out. And that one of you had pre-consented the termination of that you's history line. You had wanted to be the other you.

So claiming that a life has been stolen is a bit strong. It was freely given at the time. — apokrisis

Not quite, I don't think the intent was to give anything. It was not an altruistic gesture. The decision was made in self interest, in the mistaken belief that the original would become the clone. But the reality is, a stranger acquired the originals life.

Not that this stranger doesn't possess interests and rights. But the original is the victim of this story.

Would be interesting to find a thought experiment to make me change my mind, but they all seem to result in the second subject of experience being in a different spatial location to the original subject of experience, and hence having different experience and memories, and ipso facto not being the same person. — Down The Rabbit Hole

So you maintain that the clone is not the original, not because the original can see the clone walking about, but because of the seconds of time in which their experiences differ??

I don't think it makes sense to talk about personal continuity between you and your twin. I'd have thought what is pertinent is the degree (or lack) of continuity you and your twin have with the the 'you' prior to cloning. I'd have thought both have equal psychological continuity - physical continuity, in my view, is not important. — ChrisH

Yes that is the more accurate wording, I will edit the op.

I think both sides have valid arguments. But to me this is a pretty convincing one for the bodily continuity side. Why not you?

The scenario is very boring. I will stay with arthritis. The clone is the clone and just someone else. Cryonics is definitely more interesting. — SolarWind

Yet many don't share this intuition. And moreover most find it to be analogous to the teleporter case , meaning that that one is boring too. Maybe so, but there are a whole lot of people who insist teleportation is not murder, like this scenario is.

↪hypericinWhy would I choose to die so that my replica can live? I don't understand that. You've not cured my illness. You've just created a new person just like me without my illness. Why can't we both live? Why do we need another of me without arthritis? Why not make a whole team of people like me, — Hanover

I set it up this way to match the teleporter thought experiment as closely as possible. If it seems absurd that anyone would choose it, and it does in fact map to the teleporter, then I did my job, and teleporting is equally absurd.

ChrisH

I think both sides have valid arguments. But to me this is a pretty convincing one for the bodily continuity side. Why not you? — hypericin

It wasn't clear to me what argument you were making. You stated the following but it appeared to me to be unargued.

The moral of the story seems clear. From your perspective, your clone is absolutely not you. The clone is somebody else entirely, who has stolen your life and will now enjoy it free from illness. — hypericin

You appear to take it as given that the clone is not endowed with "your perspective" this seems unwarranted. I agree the original and clone have different perspectives but (in my view) they both view the world from the perspective of someone who was the original prior to cloning.

hypericin

I agree the original and clone have different perspectives but (in my view) they both view the world from the perspective of someone who was the original prior to cloning. — ChrisH

These are both true.

The point of the story was to give a visceral sense that the clone is certainly not you.

There are two entities, Original and Copy. Original is unproblematically the same person after the procedure. Copy is manifestly NOT Original, from Originals perspective. To Original, Copy presents as an other who happens to look like him. What benefits Copy (pain free life) manifestly does NOT benefit Original, and what harms original (illness, murder) does NOT harm Copy. Original thought the procedure would be to Originals benefit; it was to Copies benefit.

If Original (after) is the same as Original (before), and Original(after) is not Copy, Original (before) is not Copy.

AmadeusD

second subject of experience being in a different spatial location to the original subject of experience, and hence having different experience and memories, and ipso facto not being the same person. — Down The Rabbit Hole

This is key. Even on relatively acceptable arguments about psychological continuity being what matters for continued existence, this difference will always betray the attempt to say there is no appreciable difference between the two 'people'. They are different people. The point is that it doesn't matter. Someone will continue to be 'you'.

I also suggest, it is metaphysically not possible to be two people at once. They are different people.

ChrisH

The point of the story was to give a visceral sense that the clone is certainly not you. — hypericin

I don't think it works. As far as I can tell, all you've done is show (not surprisingly) that the clone and original are different people. What you haven't done is show that the clone and post-cloned-original cannot both be considered equally valid descendants of the pre-cloned-original

AmadeusD

↪ChrisH

The post-cloned original isn't a descendant of anyone. They are the same person.

The clone isn't a descendant either. They are a copy. When you burn a CD it isn't a valid CD. It's a pirated CD. The pirated person isn't not a valid 'you' (as long as we know which is which at all times).

ChrisH

The pirated person isn't not a valid 'you' (as long as we know which is which at all times). — AmadeusD

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that, in your view, only the original can be deemed "valid". However you imply that If we haven't got firm evidence of which of the two people is the original then we can never really know which is the valid 'you'. Why would we want to call one "valid"?

punos

↪hypericin

Thinking upon it further i came up with this possible solution, reproduced from my notes:

A Potential Solution to the Teleportation Paradox

The classic teleportation paradox asks: If a machine perfectly replicates you particle-by-particle in a new location while destroying the original, is the person who arrives really you? Or has the original been murdered, and a new, identical copy created?

The State of Entangled Consciousness

The experiment begins with a crucial assumption: that it's possible to create a second, perfectly identical body in a new location. But this isn't a normal copy. For an instant, every single quantum particle in the original body is quantumly entangled with its corresponding particle in the new target body.

According to this hypothesis, this perfect entanglement creates a single, unified quantum state. Instead of two separate individuals, there is a moment where a single consciousness exists as a unified quantum state, shared between the two bodies. It is not located in one body or the other, but is a single, coherent entity.

The Problem of Decoherence

This state of perfect quantum harmony is fleeting. The universe is a noisy place, filled with countless interactions, stray photons, gravitational fluctuations, and so on. This environmental interaction causes what is called decoherence. For a complex, macroscopic system like a human body, decoherence would happen almost instantly, likely in less than a femtosecond.

The critical challenge is that there are two ways this decoherence can occur. The first is an uncontrolled decoherence, which happens naturally if the process is not managed. If the quantum state is allowed to decohere on its own, the single consciousness will split. The two bodies would each become a separate, distinct individual, leading to a duplication of consciousness. This is why the decoherence must be controlled in such a way that only the target body has the chance for the next moment of experience. For this to happen, the original body must be destroyed before either body has a chance to have its next moment of independent experience.

This distinction is crucial, as the moral and legal implications of destroying the original body depend entirely on the timing.

If the original body is destroyed before the entangled state is created, it is simply murder.
If the original body is destroyed after uncontrolled decoherence has occurred, it is also a form of murder, as it results in the death of one of two separate individuals.
However, if the original body is destroyed during the moment of quantum coherence, when both bodies are part of a single, unified quantum state, the act of destruction may not be considered murder. In this scenario, the destruction is not the end of a separate life, but the final step in a transfer of a single consciousness from one state to another.

The Femtosecond Solution

To prevent this catastrophic split, the solution proposes a radical act: the immediate and complete destruction of the original body. This destruction must happen with extreme precision and speed, within the fleeting window of a femtosecond, before the next moment of conscious experience can occur and cause decoherence.

The act of destroying the original body is the act of decoherence. In the framework of quantum mechanics, this action serves as a final observation or measurement. This measurement forces the unified quantum state to collapse, but since the original body is destroyed, it only has one state left to collapse to: the target body. Because the original body is destroyed, the single shared consciousness is left with only one viable option: to continue its existence in the new, intact target body. From the perspective of the quantum system, the next moment of experience is only possible in the target body, ensuring that the consciousness was transferred, and not duplicated.

By controlling the collapse of the wave function with this precise and destructive act, the personal identity is not lost but is seamlessly transferred, ensuring the continuity of the single individual without bifurcation or multiplication.

hypericin

What you haven't done is show that the clone and post-cloned-original cannot both be considered equally valid descendants of the pre-cloned-original — ChrisH

They may be. But why is that the question? The patient (or teleportee), isn't asking if the clone (or teleported) will be a "valid decedent", whatever that means. They ask if they will survive the procedure. It is not in my interest to create a 'valid descendent " who lives happily. It is my interest to live happily.

Manuel

↪hypericin

Personal identity consists in "continuity of consciousness", as Locke pointed out. As you say in the experiment, yes, there would be another person identical to you being "duplicated", but it's not you.

Your consciousness is not independent of its source in the brain. Ergo, as you seem to suggest, yes, doing the experiment would kill you.

Down The Rabbit Hole

↪hypericin

So you maintain that the clone is not the original, not because the original can see the clone walking about, but because of the seconds of time in which their experiences differ?? — hypericin

If they shared the same spatial location it would be the same person. The question is what is it about them not sharing the same spatial location that means they are not the same person.

The "gradual neural replacement" thought experiment suggests it's not material that makes us us, but our mind. If they had the same mind (including their memories), I would say they are the same person. But as a result of not sharing the same spatial location, the clone's mind will follow a different path to the original's and would thus not be the same person.

apokrisis

They ask if they will survive the procedure. — hypericin

But you have set this up so that the victim acted on a misunderstanding. And that over-complicates things. It seems the victim expected to have his mind moved to a vacant body, not that another body would appear imprinted with what would be his last living state of mind.

So if the victim understood the embodied nature of mind, then they would have at least been acting under a correct view of the procedure. But if the victim had some hazy notion about a soul stuff being lifted and moved across to some new matter vessel, then they are indeed the victim of a bad metaphysics.

The issue of identity is one of continuity. And the teleporter tale plays on the belief that mind and body are separable, so a dilemma such as this could exist. The mind could be lifted as some kind of pattern of information and plonked down to run on some other bit of physical hardware. There is just the single pattern and two bits of hardware involved. So continuity tracks the porting of the pattern.

But embodiment says not so fast. The clone is already an inhabited body running the exact same pattern. And it immediately started to diverge in its thoughts and experiences as soon as it was fired up. The continuity of the pattern was broken as soon as it began to run on the other bit of physical kit.

So even if teleporting were a possibility, the embodied basis of being and identity gets broken both as a continuity of the mental patterns and the physical bodies.

Having created a pair of identities – made as identical as they could possibly be – there is no reason they can't both be allowed to live on. It is not necessary to add on the moral drama. You can tell the same tale as being Elon Musk deciding he wants to both continue on his life down here on Earth and send a branching clone of himself to every nearest star system to start up a new Musk-ruled colony of Musk clones.

If he knows that these are all copies that start with everything that is particular to him at the moment they are fired off into space – or perhaps fabricated from a downloaded pattern at the time of future arrival – them he might think this is all gravy. His identity will continue forever, but now with a multiplying army of Musk world lines.

So how you set the story up can add all sorts of dramas. But the argument against Cartesianism and for embodied cognition can be made more directly.

Organisms aren't like hardware and software – machines running programs. They are living structures of interaction with their worlds.

And if the problems that creates for teleportation scenarios and questions about the continuity of identity ain't immediately clear, then a little more time studying the biological sciences seems required.

hypericin

But you have set this up so that the victim acted on a misunderstanding. And that over-complicates things. It seems the victim expected to have his mind moved to a vacant body, not that another body would appear imprinted with what would be his last living state of mind. — apokrisis

In the same way that someone entering a teleporter expects to come out the other side, the victim expected to wake up as the clone. There was no misunderstanding in the sense that the victim understood how it works. He just didn't understand what it implied.

But if the victim had some hazy notion about a soul stuff being lifted and moved across to some new matter vessel, then they are indeed the victim of a bad metaphysics. — apokrisis

He might equally have believed in psychological continuity.

The mind could be lifted as some kind of pattern of information and plonked down to run on some other bit of physical hardware. There is just the single pattern and two bits of hardware involved. So continuity tracks the porting of the pattern. — apokrisis

At times I have believed something like this. And I think a compelling case can be made. If there is no observable consequence of this "continuity", if the universe looks exactly the same whether the original "continued" on in their twin or did not, to everyone involved and to the twin themselves, and to us in our mundane acts of living, shouldn't we discard this notion of continuity altogether?

And thus, so long as the twin feels as if there is continuity, that is, so long as the information from the original was transferred intact, then there is continuity, there is no observable extra thing to it.

Except when the original remains alive. Then the lack of continuity with the .

Having created a pair of identities – made as identical as they could possibly be – there is no reason they can't both be allowed to live on. It is not necessary to add on the moral drama. — apokrisis

The inspiration of this thought experiment was to reframe the basic teleporter concept in such a way that it seems viscerally clear that the clone or teleported are not the original. That from the original's perspective, it is just suicide. Straightforward cloning wouldn't capture that.

Also, I like the drama.

apokrisis

He might equally have believed in psychological continuity. — hypericin

If so, how would he have come to his misunderstanding? Or does "psychological continuity" mean something other than the embodied and enactive view of cognition and sense of self?

The inspiration of this thought experiment was to reframe the basic teleporter concept in such a way that it seems viscerally clear that the clone or teleported are not the original. — hypericin

The teleporter is sciencey bullshit. But at least dematerialising a body to atoms in one location and instantly having them reassembled as the same form elsewhere preserves the continuity of an embodied state. Or fudges the continuity issue by sending both the fundamental matter particles and the scanned information pattern through a "sub domain in the spacetime continuum" at the "same time". There is a continuity being preserved, even if all aspects of this are physical impossibilities.

The problem with cloning is that this is now a thought experiment based on actual real-world science. You have to grow your body. And for it to have a mind, it would have to grow with it in the usual fashion.

So as I said, things fall down where your victim is said to believe that there is only an empty body on the other side of the procedure. And somehow his own mind it going to hop over to inhabit it.

There is not even any bullshit reason to expect continuity at this level. Even if we grant some cloning procedure that creates fully formed bodies with identical mental experiences that can be grown in a vat in a couple of weeks, there is still no reason for your victim to make his invalid inferences.

If you said you were going to dissolve him in the vat and then regenerate him from the vat just as quickly – and somehow both the mental patterns and flesh and blood patterns would re-emerge together exactly as they were, just a bit gene edited for arthritis – then now you would be closer to the teleporter story.

Even if one believed in a Cartesian model – his soul hovers over the dissolving goo until nano-bots knit it back into renewed form – there would be sufficient continuity both of his own matter and his own form to minimise the identity crisis.

After, much of our body's molecular structure turns over in hours if not minutes and seconds. We are literally remaking ourselves every day we live. And it is our genetic information that keeps rebuilding what was there, just a little newer and fresher – a bit different, but not so that you would notice anything radical to challenge your psychic continuity over a lifetime of wear, tear and repair.

The Ship of Theseus is the better guide to the question being posed. At what point does the usual biological and psychology fact of continual remodelling of both body and mind change from being a familiar fact to being an alarming discovery? When faced with the usual technologies of identity crisis, what choices would people really make if fully informed of the reality of psychological identity?

And then the real question here. How can plainly unrealistic technologies illustrate anything other than some of the weird beliefs we have about the separability of body and mind? Organisms are cognitive structures down to the level of enzymes and their other molecular machinery. We don't come apart like hardware and software, despite what might be commonly believed.

AmadeusD

↪ChrisH

For the exact same reason we call a burned CD pirated. Audibly indistinguishable, but one is original and one is note. These are facts that seem to matter to people, I don;t think there's any metaphysical reason for this, particularly, other than the brute fact of one be derivative of the other. We all prefer live music to recorded, for the same reasons (though, many of us don't, and wouldn't think this was an interesting point to make). Whether or not it matters is another thing, i'd say.

To be clear, I don't think 'valid' is a moral/ethical claim here as it can be elsewhere. It's just stating that one is derivative, and people would care about that. A clone of you isn't you, basically. It just might not matter that it isn't.

LuckyR

It's a question of perspective. From the perspective of third persons, say your family waiting at home, you are arriving having been cured. For them it is a miracle. From the perspective of the doctor and staff, they're creating facsimiles and they're committing murder. From your own perspective, you're murdered. From the facimile's perspective, they were cured and they're you.

ChrisH

What you haven't done is show that the clone and post-cloned-original cannot both be considered equally valid descendants of the pre-cloned-original
— ChrisH

They may be. But why is that the question? The patient (or teleportee), isn't asking if the clone (or teleported) will be a "valid decedent", whatever that means. They ask if they will survive the procedure. It is not in my interest to create a 'valid descendent " who lives happily. It is my interest to live happily. — hypericin

My point is that, in my view, both successfully survive as continuations of the pre-cloned-original. Pointing out that from the perspective of one, the other is a different person doesn't seem to me to invalidate this.

ChrisH

To be clear, I don't think 'valid' is a moral/ethical claim here as it can be elsewhere. It's just stating that one is derivative, and people would care about that. — AmadeusD

But this does bring a moral dimension into the assessment.

A clone of you isn't you, basically. It just might not matter that it isn't. — AmadeusD

My view is that it doesn't matter and I think there are moral reasons why it shouldn't matter.

hypericin

My point is that, in my view, both successfully survive as continuations of the pre-cloned-original. Pointing out that from the perspective of one, the other is a different person doesn't seem to me to invalidate this. — ChrisH

There is still an epistemic asymmetry. You know, as the original, that you will be murdered. This is guaranteed. But you can only ever believe that you will also continue as the clone. Since there is no observable consequence of continuance or it's failure, this can never be verified. You can only try to reason it out, as we are. Are you confident enough in your reasoning to stake your life in this way?

But really, it is quite difficult to conceive of this splitting. Suppose the split happened, and the clone was a "valid descendent". To what does this benefit the original? The original, post split, is still the original, the copy is as "other" as any stranger. Somehow, the original also woke up as a clone. But as soon as the split happens, the clone has interests that are opposed to the original. Would you pay $1000 for another version of you to be a millionaire?

Is it somehow a matter of chance which path you take? Does the original wake up and think "damn I got unlucky! I wanted to wake up as a clone!"

Really this whole concept doesn't feel fully coherent.

hypericin

Or does "psychological continuity" mean something other than the embodied and enactive view of cognition and sense of self? — apokrisis

By that I mean the idea that it is not the the body that counts in personal persistence, but the mind. So long as the mind is faithfully reproduced, the original persists as the clone.

The teleporter is sciencey bullshit. But at least dematerialising a body to atoms in one location and instantly having them reassembled as the same form elsewhere preserves the continuity of an embodied state. — apokrisis

I think it is all smoke and mirrors, and that my op is logically equivalent. Is, for instance, the instantaneous reassemblage metaphysically critical? Or, does it just play into our intuition that the person moved quickly, rather than was destroyed and recreated.

The problem with cloning is that this is now a thought experiment based on actual real-world science. You have to grow your body. And for it to have a mind, it would have to grow with it in the usual fashion.

So as I said, things fall down where your victim is said to believe that there is only an empty body on the other side of the procedure. And somehow his own mind it going to hop over to inhabit it. — apokrisis

No real world science here, it is just as bullshit as the teleporter. I described the machine growing of the clone as a "organic 3d printer", and I implied that it only took a few hours. And so, equivalent to versions of the teleporter where the victim is reassembled at the destination (but not versions where the original molecules are actually transported somehow).

There is not even any bullshit reason to expect continuity at this level. Even if we grant some cloning procedure that creates fully formed bodies with identical mental experiences that can be grown in a vat in a couple of weeks, there is still no reason for your victim to make his invalid inferences. — apokrisis

Yet people here (i.e. @ChrisH) believe in the continuity.

If you said you were going to dissolve him in the vat and then regenerate him from the vat just as quickly – and somehow both the mental patterns and flesh and blood patterns would re-emerge together exactly as they were, just a bit gene edited for arthritis – then now you would be closer to the teleporter story. — apokrisis

Closer in metaphysical ways that matter? Or closer merely in the way it plays on our intuitions, "transformation of the same thing" in this case.

And then the real question here. How can plainly unrealistic technologies illustrate anything other than some of the weird beliefs we have about the separability of body and mind? Organisms are cognitive structures down to the level of enzymes and their other molecular machinery. We don't come apart like hardware and software, despite what might be commonly believed. — apokrisis

To me, the real lesson is that the concepts we use only present themselves as aspects of reality. But really they are tailored to reality as it happens to be for us, and break down when we try to apply them to scenarios that are foreign to them ( In this sense the scenarios are necessarily unrealistic, if they were realistic our concepts would have already been shaped to accommodate them).

So then, what do we do? Can we salvage our concepts by fixing a few flaws so they work in every situation? Or do we concede that they are fundamentally bespoke, and do not and can not match with "reality"? So much of philosophy, I think, reduces to this kind of question, of the relationship between concepts and reality.

finarfin

↪Down The Rabbit Hole

The gradual neural replacement experiment only really works because the physical change is executed in such a way that continuity of consciousness is maintained. If only the clone were produced (with no operational shenanigans or mishaps), the clone would have the exact same identity as the person who stepped into the machine. They are subjectively the same (even if the clone is produced in a spatially separate location than where the original stepped into the machine), because they have the exact same physical structure that leads to the same mental patterns, memories and personalities. But it would be hard to argue that rapid physical disassembly, however instantaneous, could preserve the stream of consciousness which defines birth, life, and death. There would be a discrete beginning and end to the experience of the original and the copy, even if the copy claims its memories as proof of past experience. After all, sameness does not imply continuity.

Obviously, if copy and original were neither separated by space nor by time, than they would be the same and the question would be meaningless. Otherwise, the copy and original of the original transporter problem are identical, but not discrete.

apokrisis

Can we salvage our concepts by fixing a few flaws so they work in every situation? Or do we concede that they are fundamentally bespoke, and do not and can not match with "reality"? — hypericin

This seems a different issue to the mind-body problem that the thought experiment was originally addressing.

So of course I would agree our understanding of reality is a psychological and sociological construction. But then I believe that because this is the view that makes the most pragmatic sense. It works for all situations that we might have when it comes to explaining our epistemic relation with reality.

And one of the problems this pragmatic or semiotic metaphysics fixes would be the mind-body issue. It leads to an embodied and enactive view of what it is to be alive and mindful of the world, experiencing it as a point of view.

Certainly a model. But a model of the world as a world with “us” in it. The self-centred view that can insert our organism purposes into the greater order of things.

So that would be the lens I would use to answer about organic 3D printers and teleporters. That would be why an authentic story on identity would focus on the embodied self and see the error of treating mind and body as seperable in any useful way.

I take your point about the organic 3D copier machine. But I would say the teleporter poses less of an issue because exactly reassembling your atoms - either your original ones or locally sourced one - would seem to bring the original you back to life as the original structural blueprint was being used.

There would be a transition issue. A gap to jump. But the set-up says the atoms were for a time an unorganised collection, and the organisation was also itself in a state of suspension for the same time. So it only all comes back together when the rephysicalised body plops out of the machine as a fully working system again. You have a single world-line or identity at any moment in that a single embodied state gets broken down, then rebuilt, with no leakage of selfhood, just the kind of halt and reboot of going to bed everynight.

A teleporter scenario seems benign for that reason.

But the printer instead doubles the number of bodies running around claiming the right to be “you”, live in your house, spend your cash, sleep with your wife. We can all see the problem in that.

If the transition was seamless - merely a switching off followed by a rebooting of the embodied state - then the printer would parallel the teleporter. So the copying process ought to be simultaneously a 3D shredder that avoids the glitch you present.

Even an embodied notion of conscious identity is troubled by the dilemma of two people running about claiming to be the only identity that has all the worldly rights and relationships that go with being that person so far as the world is concerned.

So I agree this is a fun thought experiment. But still unclear what it might be arguing for or against. :up:

ChrisH

But really, it is quite difficult to conceive of this splitting. Suppose the split happened, and the clone was a "valid descendent". To what does this benefit the original? The original, post split, is still the original, the copy is as "other" as any stranger. Somehow, the original also woke up as a clone. But as soon as the split happens, the clone has interests that are opposed to the original. Would you pay $1000 for another version of you to be a millionaire? — hypericin

This is an argument against the wisdom of undertaking human cloning. For what it's worth I think non-destructive human cloning would be both morally and practically disastrous. However this has no bearing on whether or not humans could survive cloning or not.

Is it somehow a matter of chance which path you take? Does the original wake up and think "damn I got unlucky! I wanted to wake up as a clone!" — hypericin

I can't tell if this was meant as a serious comment but I'll respond anyway. In my view, neither the original nor the clone will be aware of which they are. The only way they can deduce who they may be is from external information which may or may not be trustworthy.

A Cloning Catastrophe

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