Hi. This is my first input into Lila Squad so I hope you will excuse me if I miss the
point, or rehearse old arguments. I'm new to the net so may have trouble getting the
technology to work for me.
Roger says the debate on cloning is really about defining the self. Yes, though there
seem to be problems defining just what counts as evidence when we are theorizing.
Roger's scientific argument "you are a system" may work well in its own territory. The
question is whether that territory is adequate to encompass all that we experience as
human beings.
Theories are concocted in our minds as living creatures capable of observing the world
(including ourselves), hence 'conscious', and expressing our observations in language.
Any worthwhile theory must 'agree' with our more primary experience of the world
and ourselves, which includes our feelings, or must justify departing from such
agreement. So counter-intuitive theories require evidence more directly accessible to
experience to support them. If such evidence is lacking (eg in psychosis) then the
theory
is better labelled 'fantasy'. At the deepest level, though, all theory is fantasy,
held in a web of language that can never be totally tested. To test any new theory
requires that much involved in that testing is accepted for the time being as given,
and
the whole can never be tested at any one time. This is as true in the language of
science as it is in the language of ethics.
What has this got to do with cloning and the nature of self?
Pirsig, in using the term quality to point to the basis of all experience seems to be
saying that the traditional scientific world view is an abstraction from a richer
experiential world (experienced by individuals) and that therefore the self cannot be
encompassed by physics. He uses the novel in the computer as an analogy. As organisms,
we react to or interact with the world, and what does not excite us effectively does
not exist for us. Our nervous system has evolved to respond to threats or rewards,
and even single celled organisms move towards food or away from danger. Our ability to
think, to construct fantasy worlds spun from language in which we can test
possibilities without risking our bodies, allows us to imagine alternative realities.
Cloning
is one of these. But we do this (if you like) from the top down.
Our experience of quality occurs most significantly inwardly, in feelings and emotions
inaccessible to science (that is, the quality of any experience is ultimately
different to the neurological and physiological substrate in which it forms). No
amount of
study of the computer can adequately explain why I laugh at the joke on the screen.
So I suggest it is unlikely that any combination of atoms in a clone, even if cloning
were possible, can guarantee a personality, rather than a body. While the physical and
biological substrate which could in theory be cloned is essential to personhood,
to assume the molecules are the person seems risky. I am presumedly the same physical
body when asleep or in a coma as when conscious, but the analogue 'I' (to use Jaynes
term) is present in one and not in the other.
Ultimately the argumant comes down to that between those who place conceptual reality
ahead of experiential reality, which it seems to me is a richer amalgam of thought,
experience and feeling incapable of being encapsulated in any single mode such as the
conceptual. Surely this is where the MOQ does change our world view, allowing quality
( which is a relationship term) to be more fundamental than the traditional language
of being, which isolates one aspect of the experiential whole and gives it a
spurious reality.
It is another question why so many of us prefer this 'scientific' sense of being to
dominate.
John B
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
