From: oahvenla@robin.cs.hut.fi (Osma Ahvenlampi)
Subject: Re: Teleportation == suicide (and further digressions)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, CS lab
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 19:06:18 GMT

In <1992Sep30.232758.162@pro-magic.oau.org> gatech!pro-magic.oau.org!mikeu (Mike Ungerman) writes:

>How about making a clone of oneself and then implanting the memory
>"recordings" of the original person in the clone?  You could do this if
>terminally ill, or even stay alive.  Would the clone be you? Or just
>another organism with your memories and feelings?

>Or, another similar theme is that of implanting your memory and feelings
>into a robot or computer when you die.  Would that robot or computer be
>you?

Of course not. He/it would be a different entity thinking that it was you, but
you could see the difference really being you. I think it's somewhat analogous
to two computers with exactly the same configuration and running the same
program. Both can see the other and not mix it with itself, both to a third
computer or a human they would be identical, and as such it would not matter
which one is which. (Until you use either one, after which they are not
identical. In human clones, this could lead to serious difficulties if many
clones were operative at any one time, at least to everyone else. You could
never know which was which and knew what and have you been in contact with
he/it or some other.)
As you probably can see, I don't believe there's anything more to identity than
the synaptic connections in the brain.

>A number of books, movies and tv programs have delt with these issues, but
>have treated the clone or robot as if they were the original person.  I
>tend to doubt that if the original was to die that in fact the duplicate
>would actually cause the orginal to "live on."

What do you mean with this? If you could somehow download the brain from a
terminally ill person to a healthy cloned surrogate, how would this make the
original "live on"? The person would live on, in the new body, but the old
body (still containing the person), would die just as probably as without
the download. Which gives us a hard question. Would it be murder if you, after
such download, disconnected the original body from life-support equipment?
That would kill the person in that body, though a clone would live. The
original person however probably would not think of the clone as himself,
though the clone could think of the original as "the former me"... What if the
original still wanted to live? Would you have to kill the clone? Maybe the
best way would be to somehow 'freeze' the original before cloning, so that
he would never be 'activated' again, thus leaving the clone as the only active
copy of the person. This way, the original could never say that okay, I have
been cloned, but *I*'m still here, in this dying body, while *he*'s got a new
shining clone body. Now you could think of the clone as the original brain
moved to a new body...

>What one would seem to want to actually do is to do a brain transplant, ala
>some of the flakier horror flicks, so at least "you" continue to "exist."

This would probably be the only possible way of doing it at all, as I can not
imagine any machinery capable of reading all the information stored in the
brain and constructing a new one. On the other hand, I can imagine medical
technology advanced enough to take a brain out of the body and putting it into
another, splicing all the nerves back. Much of this can be done today, if
you could only make the brain and the body then accept each other...
This would not be a way to immortality, on the other hand, as the brain would
be the same old brain with 5% of the neurones dead. A few transplants, and
the brain would be too old, even if the body was young...
--
Osma Ahvenlampi  -  oahvenla@niksula.cs.hut.fi
My opinions are mine, and though someone else may share them, that's not my
fault. You may freely agree or disagree with me, I don't much care.