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[Pandarsenic]

We are not making a Death Note -.-

Procure a laser pointer, and for its light power Inject the light generated by a street lamp or a spotlight.

[Sinpwn]

We are not making a Death Note -.-

Procure a laser pointer, and for its light power Inject the light generated by a street lamp or a spotlight.

And the heat of a thousand suns? 

[Pandarsenic]

Let's be careful about things that might Accidentally End The World.

[LAAT501legion]

Use corrupt on a pen to see what it does.

[Armok]

> Try making a duplicate of yourself.

[BunnyBob77]

> Try making a duplicate of yourself.

That's a little too dangerous.  After all, we have no conscience, we have no idea what our clone would do.

[Armok]

It's no more dangerous than to keep existing ourselves.

[Pandarsenic]

Sooner or later one of us is going to off the other, and I didn't start posting in this thread to philosophize on whether one of us can be meaningfully defined as the original in any sense other than "Well, this one came first."

[Armok]

The game already assumes a metaphysical framework where it's clearly settled: there is no meaningful sense in which one is a "copy" and the other is the "original", they are both just instances of the same data string in memory in the Machine. Just like this instance of 2956 and this one: 2956, are the same, just separated by " and this one: ".

[Pandarsenic]

Yes, but the moment those two instances are even occupying different space, they have different position-variable values and begin to acquire even larger divergences...

A thought, though.

If we could network multiple selves to all add to and take from the same data source, though, we could have an army of us-instances. Which would be glorious.

[Armok]

*facepalms*

Yes, the copies will diverge, that much was stated in the OP. However that divergence is a random walk, and would happen regardless of if a copy is created now. Current!us extrapolating into the future can chose between three possible futures. In one future!us* is the only descendant of current!us, in the second there are two descendants future!us_1 and future!us_A and future!us_1 has experienced being reported, and in the third we have killed ourselves and have no descendants. future!us*, future!us_1 and future!us_A are all equally different from current!us, and furthermore future!us* is as different from future!us_A as future!us_A is from future!us_1 which is also the same quantity of difference as between future!us_1 and future!us*. If we expect the existence of entities as different from us as these three to have a positive net value we should maximize the amount by creating copies, and if we expect it to be negative we should minimize it by killing ourselves. Under no relevant circumstance should we stay one, and the only reason we even consider it is status quo bias.

[Pandarsenic]

Or not being obnoxious to the GM by turning one game into several games.

[Gigalith]

Was seriously sick yesterday and the day before. Will possibly update today or tomorrow, depending on how I'm feeling.

Speaking of metagame reasons, there's no problem with multiple bodies, as I'll just change the scale from single demigod to army of demigod clones.

In game, though, you're the Crown Prince. You're probably not going to be able to order yourselves around, and if one of you decides to be the crowned prince of crown princes, you won't feel any qualms about stabbing the rest of yourselves in the back.

This isn't to say you can't work out some kind agreement with yourself, just that you're not sure you'll follow your agreement in the future. You're especially sure you can't convince yourself to do things you wouldn't do yourself. (How about I banish you so we can see what happens to banished things. What? Why are you looking at me like that?)

[Armok]

Are you saying the character is stupid enough to react like that, or that you the GM is? If we make a clone, it's as much the same one person as our future self, and ranking ourselves in status or having politics between copies is equal folly. All of the copies is the one and only crown prince, and since we knowable have the same goals, intelligence, rationality, and starting beliefs all clones should just believe everything every clone says, and all will do the same thing in reaction to that so there is no need for orders.

[Pandarsenic]

Reminder: we're a sociopathic chaos demigod.