Raelian cloning

The stuff I'm going to talk about here is pretty hard to articulate, and I'm not a great wordsmith so hopefully you'll be able to get my drift. I think something similar to this has been pointed out by theists on this forum before. They tried to argue it as proof of the existence of a soul. I on the other hand don't really see the same implications.

This occured to me when we were discussing the Raelians a while ago in my molecular biology class. For those of you who aren't familiar with their beliefs: it's their aim to acheive immortality through cloning. Basically they want to be able to clone humans, accelerate their development processes, download their minds to computers and then upload them into the developed clones. The question I have is, would this clone be.....you?

To those of you who are familiar with Star Trek you may recall an episode when Riker gets cloned. Basically, because of a transporter accident, two Rikers were created. One later adopted the name Tom Riker. They were identical physically; they were basically the exact same configuration of matter. They had identical memories and life experiences. Yet they still had separate senses of self; they had distinct identities.

So that got me thinking about the cloning idea. Let's say it does become possible some day to download people's minds; we could store all the information in a person's mind in a computer. Then we could give this mind a body. Would this person be the same? Would we have created a new "soul" (for lack of a better word), although we have kept the exact same person? Would this person have a new sense of self or would he retain the old sense of self? Would the person being cloned basically die from his perspective?

I think I've done a poor job so far of explaining exactly what I mean, so perhaps another example can help. Right now, I am self-aware (or at least I think I am). I am "me". Now let's say that somehow another "me" comes into existence. Another transporter accident happened. There is now a collection of matter arranged in the exact same configuration as me. This being has the exact same memories and experiences as me. He basically
is "me". But yet he's not me. He has a distinct identity all his own.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that even if were possible to do all this stuff the Raelians seek to do, wouldn't we still die (from our perspective)?

I think I recall some theist (lurker or thomas maybe?) using something similar to this to argue that we have a soul. Basically he was saying that our existence is not simply physical. This "non-physical" aspect of our existence is our soul. Of course I don't agree with that. Perhaps someone could articulate this better than me, but right now I see two identical pens in front of me. They were manufactured by the same process and they have pretty much identical compositions of matter. In the same way that these two pencils are distinct from each other so are the hypothetical clones I've talked about.

Anyway.....that totally tangled my brain.

[a different tim]

I would argue no, you wouldn't die. I think that the human mind is basically encodable (I was going to say basically software but the evidence is that an awful lot of it depends on embodiment - but there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to virtualise those bodily aspects as well).

Now this may prove in practice impossible, not because we have a "soul" or anything, but because too much of our consciousness may be tied up with the outside world in too complex a way to disentangle without building an entire virtual universe, but if it were possible I don't think we'd die, in the same way that the "self" of a few years ago isn't dead even though most of the cells in its body have been replaced. In the transporter accident both selves would be "me" - it would be as if "I" had divided.

To be honest though I wouldn't worry about it just yet. The Raelians are full of shit on a cosmic scale and I don't think we are likely to see this technology in our lifetimes.

[Victus]

People think the brain is a jar where electricity rolls around and that's where 'they' are. Infact, the very structure of your brain is who you are. It is shped by your experienced over the lifetime. If you cloned yourself and accelerated its development you would only have created a zombie. Philosophical arguments aside, it wouldn't also be 'you', as it lacks any of the structural components that make it even remotely similar to yourself.

For your star trek example, that's not cloning. Riker was effectively split, with neither being a 'copy' of the other. Both were "the original" Riker. In cloning, one is the original, the other the clone. Their distinct identities are most likely (hypothetically speaking, this never actually happened) caused by the 7(?) years they spent in totally seperate circumstances. As noted above, your experiences literally define the structure of your brain, to an extent. As such their radically different experiences created radically different people. If they had been fissioned from one another and remained in the exact same environment for 7 years the divergence between their personalities would have progressed much slower and to a much lesser extent, I would think.

There is an old philosophical example of what you're proposing with cognitive downloading. Imagine you have a brain tumor, you're going to die. Now, we have a new procedure that can save you. What we do is we introduce nanobots into your brain and they replace the damaged areas. These bots have all the same properties as brain cells, they do the exact same things in the same ways. So they replace the damaged section after you agree to the procedure. But uh-oh, they find the damage has spread to over 90% of your brain. You agree to let the nano's take over 90% of your brain. Are you still you, or are you someone different.

The truth is, out brain changes every minute of every day. We've never the same exact person twice. I'm not the same person as I was when I started typing this post, just as, by the time you read this, you're not the same person as when you started reading. Our experiences are part of what defines us as an individual.

Why would there being a copy of ourselves mean that we've died? If, for the sake of argument, we could download one's mind into another, earlier version of their own bodies it would, I imagine, be very much as follows...

Imagine you're on your death bed. In front of you, across the room is a clone of yourself (age around 20), standing in stasis in a vertically oriented tube of some sort, its eyes closed as it hasn't had your cognitive pattern downloaded into it. Science is so advanced at this point that we can predict the time of death to within 30 seconds (we know 30 seconds ahead of time when you will die). Because of this, we run the neural scan 30 seconds before you die. The entire transfer takes less than a seconds. You open your eyes. You see an old man in a bed, with tubes running in and out of him. By the time you are aware of what you're experiencing, the old man closes his eyes and dies. Congrats, you've just been cloned.

Disorienting as it may seem, this is what I think cloning and neural transference might resemble from the perspective of the cloned. Imagine you're typing something in word and you see a thunderstorm is on the horizon. You immediately save the file, and just before the power goes off. When the power returns you open the file. You see that you lost the last sentence you wrote before the power went off (the last 30 seconds of life in the above example), but you saved 1200 pages of text (the life time experiences).

There is no way you could 'download' a copy of yourself into a clone because your mind isn't a software program, it's a one off machine that used it's experiences in life to build itself.

You would have to nano construct an exact replica of your existing brain and insert that into the clone. Even then, the original (you) would still slowly die as it watches an exact replica continue on with all your memories.

If you could do that? then you could use the nano tech to stabilize the physical structure of your own brain and transplant IT into any body you damn well wanted.

[Victus]

RenaissanceMan wrote

There is no way you could 'download' a copy of yourself into a clone because your mind isn't a software program, it's a one off machine that used it's experiences in life to build itself.

You would have to nano construct an exact replica of your existing brain and insert that into the clone. Even then, the original (you) would still slowly die as it watches an exact replica continue on with all your memories.

If you could do that? then you could use the nano tech to stabilize the physical structure of your own brain and transplant IT into any body you damn well wanted.

Indeed. If you have the technology to clone yourself and transfer into that body, you can probably fix whatever is wrong in the first place.

Victus wrote

People think the brain is a jar where electricity rolls around and that's where 'they' are. Infact, the very structure of your brain is who you are. It is shped by your experienced over the lifetime. If you cloned yourself and accelerated its development you would only have created a zombie. Philosophical arguments aside, it wouldn't also be 'you', as it lacks any of the structural components that make it even remotely similar to yourself.

For your star trek example, that's not cloning. Riker was effectively split, with neither being a 'copy' of the other. Both were "the original" Riker. In cloning, one is the original, the other the clone. Their distinct identities are most likely (hypothetically speaking, this never actually happened) caused by the 7(?) years they spent in totally seperate circumstances. As noted above, your experiences literally define the structure of your brain, to an extent. As such their radically different experiences created radically different people. If they had been fissioned from one another and remained in the exact same environment for 7 years the divergence between their personalities would have progressed much slower and to a much lesser extent, I would think.

There is an old philosophical example of what you're proposing with cognitive downloading. Imagine you have a brain tumor, you're going to die. Now, we have a new procedure that can save you. What we do is we introduce nanobots into your brain and they replace the damaged areas. These bots have all the same properties as brain cells, they do the exact same things in the same ways. So they replace the damaged section after you agree to the procedure. But uh-oh, they find the damage has spread to over 90% of your brain. You agree to let the nano's take over 90% of your brain. Are you still you, or are you someone different.

The truth is, out brain changes every minute of every day. We've never the same exact person twice. I'm not the same person as I was when I started typing this post, just as, by the time you read this, you're not the same person as when you started reading. Our experiences are part of what defines us as an individual.

Why would there being a copy of ourselves mean that we've died? If, for the sake of argument, we could download one's mind into another, earlier version of their own bodies it would, I imagine, be very much as follows...

Imagine you're on your death bed. In front of you, across the room is a clone of yourself (age around 20), standing in stasis in a vertically oriented tube of some sort, its eyes closed as it hasn't had your cognitive pattern downloaded into it. Science is so advanced at this point that we can predict the time of death to within 30 seconds (we know 30 seconds ahead of time when you will die). Because of this, we run the neural scan 30 seconds before you die. The entire transfer takes less than a seconds. You open your eyes. You see an old man in a bed, with tubes running in and out of him. By the time you are aware of what you're experiencing, the old man closes his eyes and dies. Congrats, you've just been cloned.

Disorienting as it may seem, this is what I think cloning and neural transference might resemble from the perspective of the cloned. Imagine you're typing something in word and you see a thunderstorm is on the horizon. You immediately save the file, and just before the power goes off. When the power returns you open the file. You see that you lost the last sentence you wrote before the power went off (the last 30 seconds of life in the above example), but you saved 1200 pages of text (the life time experiences).

I'm not sure, but you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. That's not very surprising since it's very difficult to put into words.

Going back to the example of the two Rikers. For an instant, they were the exact same person. They had the same EXACT memories, structural configurations, life experiences etc. Even at that moment, they were aware of only themselves. That is, there self-awareness extended to only one Riker and not two. I'm referring to the two Rikers as THEM, not him.

Now let me try to use your example of the dying old man. Of course we're being completely hypothetical here. We don't even know if this technology could even exist. But let's say it is possible to download all the information in a person's brain into a computer. Perhaps a computer could read the connections of a brain's neurons, store the structure etc. Then in addition to storing this data, people are capable of converting back into its original form. Basically, they take a new brain and create identical connections of the neurons as in the first brain. But now let's just only change one thing from your example. Instead of having the old man dying, they transfer the data while he is still alive. If this were to happen, the old man AND the young clone would both be alive. The clone would wake up and see an old man on a bed. But that old man would look back and see a younger version of himself. Both of them would believe themselves to be the same person. But yet they would be different people. I don't think things would be any different if the old man died in the process of creating the clone.

Finally with Word document analogy, I guess what I'm trying to get at with the old man example is basically the same as copying the Word document. You have two different Word documents. They are identical in every physical sense except for their exact location in space time, yet they are different. Just because one Word document would cease to exist when the copy is made doesn't change the fact that the copy is different.

Ugh. This is really hard to articulate :mad: If only we were all Betazoids!

Victus wrote

Disorienting as it may seem, this is what I think cloning and neural transference might resemble from the perspective of the cloned. Imagine you're typing something in word and you see a thunderstorm is on the horizon. You immediately save the file, and just before the power goes off. When the power returns you open the file. You see that you lost the last sentence you wrote before the power went off (the last 30 seconds of life in the above example), but you saved 1200 pages of text (the life time experiences).

Expand

[edit] meh.. what I get for not refreshing window

[Victus]

Metaman, what is your point?

Yes, things that are not the same things are not the same things are one another. I don't think anyone would argue that. But if you're asking whether they are the same "person" (person being used in a different sense than a physical object), then an argument can be made for both.

In the sense that their memories and past experiences are the same (though in the case of cloning one actually experiences them and the other simply has the memory of experiencing them, though this is an irrelevent can of worms). They are 'effectively' the same 'person', in all the ways that matter.

On the other hand, the moment one was differentiated from the other they became two seperate cognitive entities whose behavioral patterns were no longer contingent on one another. As such, it can be argued that they are not the same, as they now experience the environment from two mutually exclusive perspectives.

Personally, I would lean more towards the latter. Were I to look across the room and seen a fissioned version of myself (same age/clothes/etc) staring back at me, I would recognize that his behavioral patterns, motives, interests, memories and the like are all nearly exact to my own, but we would never be exactly the same person.

Could clarify your question further?

Victus wrote

Metaman, what is your point?

Yes, things that are not the same things are not the same things are one another. I don't think anyone would argue that. But if you're asking whether they are the same "person" (person being used in a different sense than a physical object), then an argument can be made for both.

In the sense that their memories and past experiences are the same (though in the case of cloning one actually experiences them and the other simply has the memory of experiencing them, though this is an irrelevent can of worms). They are 'effectively' the same 'person', in all the ways that matter.

On the other hand, the moment one was differentiated from the other they became two seperate cognitive entities whose behavioral patterns were no longer contingent on one another. As such, it can be argued that they are not the same, as they now experience the environment from two mutually exclusive perspectives.

Personally, I would lean more towards the latter. Were I to look across the room and seen a fissioned version of myself (same age/clothes/etc) staring back at me, I would recognize that his behavioral patterns, motives, interests, memories and the like are all nearly exact to my own, but we would never be exactly the same person.

Could clarify your question further?

You'll have to bear with me here. I'm having a really hard time putting what I'm thinking into words. Basically, the point I'm making here is that the person being cloned still dies from HIS perspective. As you said, the clone is identical in all the ways that matter. To everyone else, that person would live on. This clone would even believe himself to be the person who died. For lack of a better word, I'm going to say that the clone has a new "soul". I don't believe in a soul in the religious sense, but I guess by soul I am referring to the sense of self.

Let me use the example of you being fissioned. You look in front of you to see another "you". Both of you believe yourself to be the same person, yet you are separate cognitive entities. If you were killed but the other "you" was left unharmed, from everyone else's perspective you would live on. But from your perspective, you have died.

In essence, the only real difference between the Raelian cloning technique and the fission technique is that the original is destroyed in making the clone. But does that necessarily mean that the clone is not a new cognitive entity? And if it is a new cognitive identity, then from the perspective of the person being cloned, he has not attained immortality. To everyone else, the person being cloned lives on. The new clone believes itself to be the person who was cloned, but yet the person who was cloned is no more. His "soul" has died, but a new "soul" has been created. Because things that are not the same things are not the same things as one another, from one "thing's" perspective, it has died. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of cloning (from a narcissistic point of view). The "self" is not preserved.

Does that make any more sense? This is sort of philosophical in nature and it's rather esoteric. Rhino, help us out here!

[a different tim]

I think we know what you mean, but we're claiming it would be the same self. Yes you'd have to reconstruct brain structure (although personally I see know reason why you shouldn't be able to reproduce it as some kind of virtual network) and yes, if you had that kind of technology you'd be able to do whatever you wanted. But I don't think the "self" would die any more than the "self" of ten years, ten minutes or ten seconds ago is dead because some of its physical makeup has changed.

As an aside I'm a little dubuoius about the existence of the "self" anyway. We could probably start another neuro thread just on that.

Here's something a Buddhist told me about and seems true:
Basically, the question is not 'would a clone of me be me,' but, am I the same me I was yesterday? The answer, I think, is, 'no.' Extending it to the me of last year - we look different, we have different memories and skills, we react differently in different situations. We are, essentially, different people. Therefore a clone of me would not be me, but only in the same way as I am not the same me as I was yesterday.

a different tim wrote

I think we know what you mean, but we're claiming it would be the same self. Yes you'd have to reconstruct brain structure (although personally I see know reason why you shouldn't be able to reproduce it as some kind of virtual network) and yes, if you had that kind of technology you'd be able to do whatever you wanted. But I don't think the "self" would die any more than the "self" of ten years, ten minutes or ten seconds ago is dead because some of its physical makeup has changed.

As an aside I'm a little dubuoius about the existence of the "self" anyway. We could probably start another neuro thread just on that.

I don't think so, it would not be the SAME self, it would be an IDENTICAL self.

This is the model 9000 advanced brain. There are many model 9000 advanced brains, but this one is mine.

All you can do is make a copy, the copy has a sense of self too, but it's not YOU.

For proof in the pudding... think of it this way. You build the duplicate. You reformat it's proto-brain to be identical to your own. It works! Both of them say they are you. What are you going to do when the technician reaches over to TURN YOU OFF? Are you going to say "Wait! I'm still here!" or are you going to say "Ok! Time for me to die."

[Sternwallow]

You all seem to be making the whole issue much more complicated than necessary.

Contrary to Raelian BS, I have the technology to create a perfectly identical pair of humans from a single one. The resulting two people, share experiences right up to the point of the split and so, until that time are a single individual person. At the exact point of the split, there are two persons whose experiences begin to diverge. They may look identical, but, like the two pens, one of which was used to write a sonnet and the other to check a charitable donation box on a form, they are not actually identical as soon as something, anything, happens to them. At the moment of split, no matter how similar they appear, it is only superficial. They are just as individual as a pair of strangers. The death of either one or both, tragic as it may be, is no more significant than the death of any human.

Every moment of every day the totality of who you are changes, both physically and in the mental patterns of your memory and behavior. You need not mourn the you of yesterday that effectively died at midnight.

The cloning technology I refer to is identical twins. They are perfect copies at the point when they divide, their neurological equipment (admittedly rudimentary) is identical then and they avoid the unnecessary conceptual complication of needing accelerated development to being the “younger” into adulthood.

They walk among us!

[a different tim]

RenaissanceMan wrote

I don't think so, it would not be the SAME self, it would be an IDENTICAL self.

But I'm not an identical self to the one ten minutes ago anyway. Sterny and fishface are on this as well. I'm sorry but I really don't see the difference (give or take some unfeasible technology and stuff). Neither "self" (presuming the original isn't destroyed in the process of uploading or something) is identical to the one just before the cloning process, because time has passed. What sterny said.

a different tim wrote

But I'm not an identical self to the one ten minutes ago anyway. Sterny and fishface are on this as well. I'm sorry but I really don't see the difference (give or take some unfeasible technology and stuff). Neither "self" (presuming the original isn't destroyed in the process of uploading or something) is identical to the one just before the cloning process, because time has passed. What sterny said.

The detail that they're not identical-identical is irrevelant. The point was that the ORIGINAL would be destroyed after the copy was made. You can't do that because of the moral implications.

In the original post, the 'original' would be asleep when it was killed to make room for the duplicate. My point is, that sleeping or awake, killing the original is killing a sentient being... in fact the one that originally agreed (stupidly, it now realizes) to the procedure.

The duplicate, of course, has the memories of the original, but knows it's a duplicate almost immediately. (Assuming it's not being lied to) You haven't transferred the 'mind' to another being, you've created a second one.

If you allow the killing of the first one because the duplicate is the same guy, then you open the moral floodgates for creating armies of duplicates to act as throw away workers or soldiers.

For this reason, creation of duplicates.... even in a future where we could all be cyborgs, will be HIGHLY illegal.

Clones too. If you could create 10 genetically identical people, you could get away with ANY crime because there would be no way to conclusively prove who was the actual perpetrator... even if they left copius DNA evidence and several eye witnesses. You can't do that with identical twins... One can't be the alibi for the other AND themselves at the same time.