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Yes

10 (17.9%)

No

46 (82.1%)

Total Members Voted: 53

[Catsup]

Sort of? I mean, I could make a conscious decision now to do a handstand after the cloning happens. Then both mes will (at least try to) do a handstand after the procedure.

yes, you'll know from past memory that this is what you planned to do (do a handstand). Theres always the possibility for one of you to change their mind.

my point is, you cannot control the clone in real-time as you can with your own body, and neither can you sense sensory input that is experienced from their body. And therefore because of this, they are a separate being than you.

Heck, it could even be said that "You" die whenever you lose your train of thought, or go to sleep. If you had something that slowly and progressively replaces the behaviour of the brain, something so progressive the sense of "You" never changes, then a brain transfer to another medium wouldn't be death of the self, death of the you.

what you lose when you go to sleep is consciousness. Behavior and personality that define your person is determined by memory and experience, those are constantly being added and your personality is constantly changing and this ability to change is what makes a person human. You are considered dead when you fail to be able to take in physical stimulus permanently, with the brain that is in your head right now.

[MagmaMcFry]

Dude, you still didn't define "you". Either you mean your body, or you mean your mind.

why dont you start defining what "mind" is? you know exactly what i mean, your brain is the physical reality that represents "you". Duplicating it perfectly creates a copy that is a copy, that are their own, and which experience the world as a separate being than "you".

"You" die when your original brain dies, period. I dont get why thats so hard to understand, we arent discussing sci-fi fantasy here.

So you choose to perceive of "yourself" as a collection of particles, rather than as a configuration of particles. Now in a few years' time, most of the particles comprising "you" will be gradually replaced by other particles. The hypothetical copying scenario does the same thing, only it replaces all of the particles at the same time. The future "you" will be as different from "you" as the clone "you". Yet you only have problems with copying, not with aging. I see some cognitive dissonance here.

The second statement is true (we'll leave brain transplants out of the scenario for now). But the first statement is false, since that body has the same memories (therefore the same mind) as the original body.
Here's another question. Let's say you are abducted while sleeping and replaced with a duplicate of yourself. Nobody would notice, and your copy would be perfectly okay with that, since he doesn't know he is a copy.
Now let's say the same thing happens, except you are awake during the duplication process, and the copy remembers that. What would the copy feel?

it doesnt matter what memories the body has, it doesnt matter what appearance they have, it doesnt matter if the world is unchanged since your clone is your exact double. It doesnt change the fact that he is a separate being than your original self, whose body cannot be controlled by your original brain.

I agree to all of this (assuming "being" means sum of mind and body), yet it doesn't explain why you are against being replaced by a copy.

the other 2 questions are kind of pointless, what exactly are you trying to prove?

I'm trying to prove that since you don't fucking care if you are a copy or not if you don't know whether you are one, you shouldn't fucking care when you do know.

Is it wrong that I laugh when I read stuff like this? I think that basically a clone with my exact particles and memories is me. At the moment of it's creation there is no longer a singular 'me'. There is now two units of 'me'. Once any amount of time has passed we are no longer identical, but neither has a greater claim on being 'me'. No more than the 'me' that existed yesterday still exists. Basically I think that mind and body are one and the same.

no one will know its not you, but it isnt you because you arent the one in control of the body, you arent the one looking through its eyes.

what is created here is a piece of flesh that just happens to have the exact same brain structure and organization as you (and thus the same mind) as your original self, but is a entirely separate entity with it's own thought process (even if those may be identical to you).

EDIT: after rereading, mind and body are not exactly the same for humans because we do not have a decentralized nervous system. Just transferring our brain is enough to transfer our mind and our present "ability to become conscious", into another body so we can wake up in that body.

So transferring your brain is enough to transfer your "consciousness", yet merely transferring the pattern of your brain (which contains your "consciousness") is not? Seriously, get your thoughts straight. That sounds disturbingly like homeopathy. Atomic memory and stuff.

Also, can someone please explain why there are 47 votes in the poll, yet the poll says there are only 46?

[Graknorke]

Sort of? I mean, I could make a conscious decision now to do a handstand after the cloning happens. Then both mes will (at least try to) do a handstand after the procedure.

yes, you'll know from past memory that this is what you planned to do (do a handstand). Theres always the possibility for one of you to change their mind.

my point is, you cannot control the clone in real-time as you can with your own body, and neither can you sense sensory input that is experienced from their body. And therefore because of this, they are a separate being than you.

Well yes, the two people post-cloning are definitely different, since they are experiencing different things etc.
But they would both be me. I would exist as a memory in both of them.

[Catsup]

So you choose to perceive of "yourself" as a collection of particles, rather than as a configuration of particles. Now in a few years' time, most of the particles comprising "you" will be gradually replaced by other particles. The hypothetical copying scenario does the same thing, only it replaces all of the particles at the same time. The future "you" will be as different from "you" as the clone "you". Yet you only have problems with copying, not with aging. I see some cognitive dissonance here.

you still did not define what mind is yet.

yet it doesn't explain why you are against being replaced by a copy.

because the world ends when you original brain dies. It doesnt matter that nothing is changed in the world because a copy of yourself can fulfill anything you could have done for the world.

I'm trying to prove that since you don't fucking care if you are a copy or not if you don't know whether you are one, you shouldn't fucking care when you do know.

if i was a clone and found out i was a copy i would be disturbed, but glad to be alive. Any being has the will to live, even if they are unnatural, not the original, or was not meant to exist.

So transferring your brain is enough to transfer your "consciousness", yet merely transferring the pattern of your brain (which contains your "consciousness") is not?

correct, our individual ability to become conscious comes from only our particular biological brain. Every brain has their own ability to do so if it is functional, but each particular "ability to become conscious" can exist only once.

for me the world started existing when i was born, it will disappear when i die.

[Gamerlord]

Okay, you aren't making much sense to me, Catsup. If two things are physically identical, then for a single instant they may as well be each other. You haven't explained this 'individual ability to become conscious'. This may sound rude and unfair, but from what I'm hearing from you I get the impression that being a distinct individual is very important to you and it sounds like you're grasping at straws to protect that idea.

[MorleyDev]

what you lose when you go to sleep is consciousness. Behavior and personality that define your person is determined by memory and experience, those are constantly being added and your personality is constantly changing and this ability to change is what makes a person human. You are considered dead when you fail to be able to take in physical stimulus permanently, with the brain that is in your head right now.

That depends upon how far one stretches the idea of self. I am a markedly different person than I was ten years ago, to the point that I have difficulty consciously rectifying how I was and thought then with how I am and think now. We're both a continuation of the same person at different points, but can the person I was back then not be said to be dead? They have ceased to exist, key aspects of what defined them have since disappeared and new ones have arisen and there are even things that happened that me as I am now does not remember experiencing, but old me did.

Is to have suffered a cessation of existence not to have died? It's a philosophical debate around interpretations of definitions for concepts the human brain inherently has difficulty comprehending. Complete cessation of existence is a hard thing to comprehend for that which exists and understands in terms of existing.

Personally I don't regard myself as the same person I was, I consider them someone whose actions and behaviours I have inherited through time but am no longer responsible for due to simply being too different a person. It's the old me, and not Me me. A perfect clone could easily develop the same view (and mine most likely would given that is my current attitude), that they have merely "inherited" the attitudes, personalities and memories of the original, not that they are their own.

[Catsup]

Okay, you aren't making much sense to me, Catsup. If two things are physically identical, then for a single instant they may as well be each other. You haven't explained this 'individual ability to become conscious'. This may sound rude and unfair, but from what I'm hearing from you I get the impression that being a distinct individual is very important to you and it sounds like you're grasping at straws to protect that idea.

no, im just very bad at conversations in general, a few pages back in the thread i was arguing that everyone had their own individual consciousness, and that they die when they lose this consciousness permanently; only to figure out that different ppl had different meanings to what consciousness meant.

i think i will use another poster's post as an example for you, many ppl voted "no" for the poll because they want to live and could care less about what their clone could do for the world as "them":

As to my limited understanding, we're basically electrically charged flesh behind a bone structure, if you copy that charge into three identically pieces of flesh, and then removes the charge from the first, you've killed an instance that was cabable of experiencing the world beyond what it already had.

Even if a copy of me lives a good life and no one else ever knows, my charge is still gone if I'm dead and I won't know it. I'll not accept to die before I am forced, because I want to know the world. I don't care if you copy me a million times and each of them experience amazing things, the original charge has been put out and won't even know it. I'll be dead and it'll matter nothing to me.

I don't understand how you can have such a hard time understanding that.

here the poster refers to my definition of "ability to become conscious" as "charge"

I'm pretty sure the divergence here is that you see a mind as something abstract to be preserved, whereas I don't. I don't care about my memories and personality either surviving or being consigned to oblivion*, what I care about is the conscious self that is staring out of my eyeballs right now being able to continue doing so. If I'm dead, having a 100% identical copy with all my hopes and dreams and memories will never, ever achieve that.

[Scoops Novel]

What the hell are all of you rehashing? The obvious proclamation that you are not your clone has been made, repeatedly. Hence committing suicide for 10 posthumous dollars is an understandably poor choice. The net loss doesn't seem to outweigh the net gain, objectively speaking from the perspective of someone who is looking for the minimal amount of suffering for the maximum gain in sapient beings. The questions boils down to the value of death.

[Graknorke]

What the hell are all of you rehashing? The obvious proclamation that you are not your clone has been made, repeatedly. Hence committing suicide for 10 posthumous dollars is an understandably poor choice. The net loss doesn't seem to outweigh the net gain, objectively speaking from the perspective of someone who is looking for the minimal amount of suffering for the maximum gain in sapient beings.

That the clone is also the person from before the transfer.
Some people don't seem to want to accept that because of whatever way they have constructed their perception of reality.

[Scoops Novel]

The problem is chiefly the title. There's no brain transfers mentioned in the question, is there? If so, remove it.

[Gamerlord]

Thing is, I think that 'self' IS my memories and physical body. There is nothing about me that cannot be copied. Therefore, what makes me me?

NINJAEDIT: I'm nit rehashing. I just got here and I disagree with that.

[Graknorke]

The problem is chiefly the title. There's no brain transfers mentioned in the question, is there? If so, remove it.

"Perfect copy" does not arbitrarily exclude the brain.

[MagmaMcFry]

So you choose to perceive of "yourself" as a collection of particles, rather than as a configuration of particles. Now in a few years' time, most of the particles comprising "you" will be gradually replaced by other particles. The hypothetical copying scenario does the same thing, only it replaces all of the particles at the same time. The future "you" will be as different from "you" as the clone "you". Yet you only have problems with copying, not with aging. I see some cognitive dissonance here.

you still did not define what mind is yet.

Here you go:

Here's a list of definitions we've (well, I've) established for those words:
Mind: Set of memories.
Consciousness: Instance of a set of thoughts acting on and modifying a mind. Every consciousness only exists for a single point in time.
Cloning: Per-particle copy/paste duplication. Particle physics and neuroscience says this copies the entire mind.
Dying: A thing that only bodies can do, interring permanent absence of consciousness, therefore essentially irrecoverable loss of the mind.

for me the world started existing when i was born, it will disappear when i die.

Why would you believe that the world does not exist outside your cognitive capabilities? If you are already going to believe in a personally unverifiable assumption, then why not believe in what the evidence tells you, namely that the world has existed for some billion years already? Now you'll probably want to change your statement to:

i only experience the world when i am conscious.

which is probably what you intended to mean, but also kind of staggeringly obvious.

Here's a further question: Assume you were disassembled and subsequently rebuilt with all the same particles in the exact same configuration. Would "you" still be "you"?

[Lysabild]

That the clone is also the person from before the transfer.
Some people don't seem to want to accept that because of whatever way they have constructed their perception of reality.

"Some people have a different idea than me about something none of us know for certain, so they're wrong."

If you have two completely identical people and you kill one, is that person not dead? Is there not one instead of two now?

I don't want to die. How can it be more simple?

[MagmaMcFry]

What the hell are all of you rehashing? The obvious proclamation that you are not your clone has been made, repeatedly.

I see it as more obvious that you are, in fact, your clone, and this is what I am trying to convey this entire time.