Hi Roger and LS,
>From Roger's great post of 2/10:
> In summary, though this may well never be possible, there is no reason to
> assume that you couldn�t copy yourself and make two versions UP TO THE
> POINT of duplication. From that point on they would differ.
The Happy Iconoclast does her job...
I agree with you Roger. If you assume that the clone is an identical
copy of the original, then it would be the same person. There is no
transcendent "I" hovering around in our bodies that is not composed
of the atomic arrangement of which we are made. There is nothing
special about the self. The self is just the sum total of our
experiences to date. There is no soul waiting to transcend into
heaven when we die.
Our selves are based on the physical configuration of our personal
collection of atoms, all of which can be replaced easily. I have no
problem with this. It's not the atoms themselves that are important,
but their relationship with each other. I could collect a bucket of
atoms from a cremated a human being, but I would not have a human
being. I would have a bucket of atoms. My bucket of atoms would
lack the basic ingredient for an individual - which is not the atoms
themselves, but their relationship to each other. Their PATTERNS.
What is the self? The self is the sum total of experiences from
conception onwards that forms the individual. The self is memory.
Who would you be if you had no memory? You would not be anybody! If
you one day woke up like the proverbial duck in a new world without
any memories at all you would not be you. You would be a
manifestation of a new-born infant in an adult's body. You would be
nobody because you wouldn't have any experiences at all to define
yourself in relation to anything else in the universe.
I submit that without memory, a human body is a human body
functioning at no better than the biological level - and a primitive
biological level at that. I have a box on my mantle containing the
ashes of my Mother, but I have no illusions about what is actually in
the box. That is not my Mother in any sense of the word. When she
died and her patterns decayed (as they would quite rapidly in a dead
brain), then what I was left with was a collection of atoms in a box
that used to be part of my Mother. But the patterns are gone. It's
the patterns that made her who she was - not the atoms, but their
relationship to each other. The patterns - the value - is all that
counts.
If I could take that box of ashes - along with all the atoms that
must have escaped into the atmosphere during cremation, and restore
the "Mother" patterns to them, then I would have my Mother - but
without the patterns I would have nothing of value.
The cloning experiment is fascinating to me in this sense. What if
you took a person who had just died and cloned their patterns before
they started to deteriorate? Would this clone be that person brought
back to life? Yes, I think so - assuming of course that the clone
was "alive". As long as you had been able to capture their pattern
information before it deteriorated, then if you created a living
clone you would have the same person as the one who just died. The
dead person would still be laying there on the table or whatever, but
the living clone would have the same patterns of memory as the
deceased and would thus BE the deceased - with one major difference -
the new clone would be one that also contained a memory of what it
was like to die. Thus, as Horse, Roger, and others have said, the
clone would be identical to the original at it's "birth", but would
then immediately begin to diverge from there. The Mother I knew had
no experience of death, but the new clone would. So in that sense,
and in that sense only, the clone and the original would be
different.
This is no different from the "freezing" experiments someone
mentioned previously. The only difference between the frozen
original person and the unfrozen one at it's birth would be the
experience of being frozen and thawed. Experience *and* the memory
of that experience are what makes us who we are.
Let me have it guys!
Mary (aka the Happy Iconoclast)
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
