What makes YOU, you? From a SCIENCE Fiction pov?

That reminds me of a question asked some Star-Trek tech-guy:
"How does the Heisenberg-compensator work?" Answer: "It works fine, thank you."
So, while I think, highly advanced enough technology could copy our hardware, I daubt, there will ever be technology that can read out the software.
...But maybe close enough, so for the idea of science fiction, let's asume a technical paradigmen shift makes this possible.

...Well, I live my life with the believe, that we are just (totally awesome) bio-machines and - technical dificulties aside - there is nothing that prevents one of us from being copied.
And yet I dream dreams where this isn't so and there is a unique metaphysical spirit, attached to each person.
So - make sure what you want to write: Science fiction or Fantasy. Both is nice.

small axe said:

But from a Sci-Fi perspective, where do we think that "we are nothing we cannot copy" breaks down (or not)?

What IS or ISN'T "us" that's missing even from a perfect copy?

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Experience. Even a perfect biological copy won't ultimately have the same experiences as the original, and experiences have a profound impact on a person's psychology and even biology.

Even if an exact duplicate of me as I am now was created, she would cease to be an exact copy of me the moment she gained consciousness because I've never been synthetically created in a lab. She'd be starting out her life with an experience I've never had, so she wouldn't be me. And from there on out, she wouldn't be seeing the world through my eyes - she'd be seeing them through hers, and even extremely similar people (like identical twins) develop differences because of different experiences (or maybe because of different souls, if you're a spiritual type).

For me that's where the idea of clones always breaks down. I have a hard time understanding the SF fascination with clones, honestly, since twins are essentially clones and often develop into very different people.

I am a copy.

The carbon atoms that make up me now were borrowed from the environment and were used to make a duplicate of my molecules.

Admittedly, the copy isn't perfect - I'm starting to develop wrinkles and grey hair, which didn't exist in the original.

The original was also slowly ripped apart to make the copy that is typing this now. And even now, bit by bit my atoms are being changed with new ones to create a newer copy that people will talk with tomorrow.

The sad thing is that I kinda preferred the old me - I wish he hadn't been destroyed to make me. Maybe the copy tomorrow will be better.

Mac

I find that so fascinating, to think that we aren't made up of the same molecules that we were a decade ago. That's just amazing.

Rhys Cordelle said:

I find that so fascinating, to think that we aren't made up of the same molecules that we were a decade ago. That's just amazing.

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More than that, we're made of stardust. Literally.

On the topic, I think it would be possible to create an exact copy (with all that's stored in the brain, like memories, learned reflexes, feelings). I don't even think reading us and storing it as binary data is that far in the future. The more difficult task, I believe, would be forcing elementary particles to form such complex organism as humans. Today all we can do is synthetise proteins and some more complex particles, but we're nowhere close to creating a bacteria from nothing in a lab environment. I think so far they've only been able to create synthetic DNA...

I didn't see the show, but it seems to me that Kaku's argument relies most heavily on the exact duplication of the brain for the transfer of one's consciousness. Of all physiological structures, I find this one to be the most improbable to make and 'exact copy' due to the dependence of experience on its development in addition to the signals passed at any given moment.
By what means did Kaku suggest the duplication would occur? Along the lines of auquacat's comments once the duplicate was made, the original and the clone in the parallel universe would cease to be the same individual.
I don't see any reason that a consciousness would transfer. Though I would be intrigued by the idea that a single mind would simultaneously control and react to both bodies.

I think we have three identities -- a physical identity, a social identity and a psychological identity. We're more or less attached to each of them, but they're all constantly changing. Some are changes we aspire to; others are changes we resist; some are changes we accept.

Arguably we might be able to copy our physical identities to within some limit of precision. Arguably too our psychological identities would copy too, since mind is a function of brain activity. Our social identities though, are a property of the space we live in, the way we live there and our relationships. I don't believe that they duplicate nearly as easily.

Suppose I were physically duplicated. One copy of me lived in my current home, doing my current work, living with my wife and socialising with my friends. Say the other went off to explore far frontiers. Only one of me could claim my social identity, I think. Only one of me could claim to be married, could claim to possess my home and my occupation.

And because our social identities have a profound impact on our psychological identities (e.g. our values and sense of self-worth) and our physical identities (what we do affects what we eat and how we look), it's hard to argue that my duplicate would remain anything like the same person for very long. Much like identical twins we'd simply be two people with the same genes and some common biological history.

The question seems to be one of the 'soul', that consciousness that you can reach out and touch with your mind. It's the thing that IS me. I can replace limbs and transplant organs and still be 'me'. If I am disassembled and reassembled, will I still be me? Or does that consciousness cease to exist and something new appears? To everyone else it would be 'me'. It sounds like me, talks like me, behaves like me. Yep. That's me. But would *I* be *me*?

If that's indeed the question, then I don't think straight duplication works, nor does disassembly and reassembly (ala Star Trek transporters).

About the closest I've seen to a 'consciousness transfer' that did not break me out of the narrative was in Scalzi's Old Man's War. In that, the main character actually did control both bodies at once for a brief moment.

small axe said:

But (from one perspective) wouldn't they still both be "you" ???

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Perhaps that requires us to define our perspective and explain why we prefer that particular one to any other.

Sociologically, different cultures have different notions of identity. It's not just their superstitions; it's their basic sense of self. For instance, in Mediaeval times, assault on a man's property was considered to be assault on his person. If I tore your clothes it meant the same as if I broke your finger.

To understand this, we should remember how much effort went into making clothes, how few garments most people owned, and how often, a single garment was the public face of that person. In other words, their long-term social identity (and hence perhaps their psychological identity) was tied to their clothing in a way that with mass-production techniques we may not fully appreciate today. The clothes didn't just maketh the man -- they were the man.

To me, the obvious solution to the paradox (a solution that materialist explanations may fail at) is to suggest that there is something Conscious inside "us" that exact physical copying cannot copy.

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It's not the simplest explanation though, because it postulates an additional untestable belief.

A simpler solution could be to consider that our sense of self is a compelling fictional narrative created by our attempts to reconcile our competing desires while defending and promoting our lives and privileges.

I see no great problem. The copy is perfect and consciousness is an emergent quality of the copy. So at the moment of creation it has a perfect (but quite separate) copy of the original's consciousness at the moment of copying. But is remains a copy, not the original. And it is conscious and identical to "me" but ut is not me. From that point of divergence the ideniticality would diverge.

I first recall this question being addressed in one of the essays in the book "The Mind's Eye," (which asks, among other things, "is the soul greater than the hum of its parts?"a fascinating read on cognitive science. It's a rather old book (and dare I admit I read it when it first came out), and there was surely discussion and speculation about this "identity problem" in making an atomic-level perfect copy of a person long before the publication of that book.

There was even a Star Trek Original Series episode in which two Captain Kirks stepped off the transporter separated by a few minutes - one was the "good" part of Kirk and the other was the "bad" part. How the transporter separated Kirk into these moral opposites is a philosophical question for another thread.

veinglory said:

I see no great problem. The copy is perfect and consciousness is an emergent quality of the copy. So at the moment of creation it has a perfect (but quite separate) copy of the original's consciousness at the moment of copying.

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This is pretty much how I was going to respond to this thread, up to but not including this point:

veinglory said:

But is remains a copy, not the original. And it is conscious and identical to "me" but ut is not me. From that point of divergence the ideniticality would diverge.

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Okay, I agree with the last sentence, that the "identicality" between the two would diverge from the moment the copy is made. However...

Suppose we have a Sony Copytron (a name I just invented, in the spirit of Sony's TV products Trinitron and Jumbotron). It has two cylinders you can step into and stand in, but only on is actually intended for you to step INTO. It is labeled Original. The other one is labeled Copy.

So you step into the Original, someone pushes a button, and the Copytron instantly copies whatever's in Original into Copy. You step out of one cylinder, and someone else who looks and acts just like you steps out of the other. How can you know whether "you" are the original or the copy?

Simple. You look at the label of the cylinder you walked out of. If it says Original you can satisfy yourself that you knew it all along. If it says Copy, you could be quite upset about that, because you certainly FEEL just like the original you. The cylinders don't even need to be labeled. If you step into the left cylinder the REAL you will step out of the left cylinder.

We can complicate this by moving the labels. Or more subtlely, we could claim that the "copy process" take a couple of minutes even though it's actually instant, and during these minutes the Original and Copy cylinders are slowly moved around so you don't notice the movement and they end up interchanged, and the labels are also interchanged so things appear as they originally were. Thus you step into the cylinder on the left labeled Original, and then you step out of the cylinder on the right labeled Copy even though "you" are the original.

How do you (either one of you!) know or determine which one is the "original" you?

Does it matter which is the original?

But this all goes back to the metaphysical again. We have never come close to bringing tissue to "life", much less creating tissue in the first place. We can't even make synthetic blood or amniotic fluid. Nobody has ever taken dead plant tissue or fungi tissue, whatever, and made it alive.

So where does that life come from? Where would it come from if you made a duplicate of someone? Why wouldn't you just end up with a perfect organ donor? A dead corpse?

Let's say you start with living tissue, and grow-a-copy instead. I would still see it as making a clone. It would be like having a twin. We all start as living blobs of tissue anyway, and we're not copies of our parents or our siblings, even when their genetics are shared/identical to ours.

veinglory said:

I see no great problem. The copy is perfect and consciousness is an emergent quality of the copy. So at the moment of creation it has a perfect (but quite separate) copy of the original's consciousness at the moment of copying. But is remains a copy, not the original. And it is conscious and identical to "me" but ut is not me. From that point of divergence the ideniticality would diverge.

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I agree with this. If the copy is perfect (and that is a big IF), then my copy would be identical to me in every way. The biochemistry of my body including my brain (which makes up my consciousness and identiy and all of my experiences) would be exactly the same as me when the duplication occured. As another person said in a previous post, there would be no way to know who was the original unless we were labeled. After that, however, my copy and I would diverge since we would then be experiencing different things.

Of course this is assuming that we are nothing more than arrangements of atoms. I personally believe that we have souls, but there is no scientific evidence of this.

But this all goes back to the metaphysical again. We have never come close to bringing tissue to "life", much less creating tissue in the first place. We can't even make synthetic blood or amniotic fluid. Nobody has ever taken dead plant tissue or fungi tissue, whatever, and made it alive.

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Are you saying that since we can't do this there must be a metaphysical component to life? We may not have the knowledge or technology to do this yet, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Deleted because it is late and I totally misread smallax's post

small axe said:

Or, another issue being discussed: How do we know which is the original?

Both are valid questions, but aren't both taking an objective point of view (as "outside" observer's) rather than a (perhaps) more proper subjective "inside" experiencer's perspective?

How does any outside observer know what any other human Consciousness experiences, except their own? (what classic SF writer had a character who believed that HE was the only truely aware being in the world, and all other humans were merely machines acting out specific roles in his life?)

-----> If we consider that the human Awareness is nothing but the sum of our material brains, why wouldn't that demand that both brains would share a single Consciousness?

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This is what trips me up. When you say share a single consciousness, do you mean that there is one consciousness shared by the two bodies or do you mean that there are two consciousnesses (?) that are identical. If it is the latter, I totally agree with you. If it is the former, then how would that be possible assuming that there is no metaphysical component?

True, the two brains would rapidly gather separate EXPERIENCES, and so in each 24 hours of life might each contain a different 24 hours of different memories.

BUT ... my brain and my Consciousness NOW also contains 24 hours' worth of memory and experience which it didn't contain 24 hours AGO.

But I'm still "me" ...

I didn't become another being, another "me" during those 24 hours, right?

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It depends on what happens in those 24 hours, right? A tramatic experience could totally reshape who you are.

In just such a way, (and scientifically speaking) wouldn't BOTH copies of the duplicated brain HAVE to contain the SAME CONSCIOUSNESS, even though they are now gathering different memories or experiences?

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Once again, I am confused by what you mean by the SAME conciousness. If our consciousness is nothing more than neural pathways in our brains, then the consciousnesses (?) would diverge the moment that you and your duplicate experience something the other hasn't. This would change the brain chemistry and you and your duplicate's consciousnesses (What is the plural for consciousness?) would no longer be identical.

I got as far as: Cool! Somebody who knows German Longsword as well as I cdo. Can we ship him/me back to earth so we can fight?

Canotila said:

But this all goes back to the metaphysical again. We have never come close to bringing tissue to "life", much less creating tissue in the first place. We can't even make synthetic blood or amniotic fluid. Nobody has ever taken dead plant tissue or fungi tissue, whatever, and made it alive.

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Scientists love speculating about metaphysics, but tend to only retreat into it when they run out of experiments to test (as happened to physics in the late 19th century). That is simply not the case right now in abiogenesis (life from nothing).

This work is galloping along (relatively, in scientific terms). It's not that there are countless failures, but rather so many paths to investigate and so much info to look at on each path -- especially with the explosion of genetic investigations in the last few decades. I'm not aware of any serious biologist with metaphysical anxiety on this topic; they're all excited and optimistic, and when you look at the results it's hard to blame them.

We've known since the Miller-Urey experiment of 1953 that amino acids can form spontaneously from simple gases using little more than rain, volcanoes and lightning. Fifty years later, that experiment has since been revisited and shown to be more successful than Miller et. all knew at the time. In 1963, Oró and Kimball showed that the nucleobase adenine could form through warm hydrogen cyanide -- which is a key step to creating RNA. More recently in 1997 it was shown by Miller that several nucleobases can form in ice -- an experiment that took a quarter-century to perform.

Meanwhile, work by Sidney W. Fox and Aleksandr Oparin showed that protobionts (self-organising abiotically-produced organic molecules in a cell-like membrane) can occur spontaneously, and there is significant work on the prokaryotes (life without a nucleus, which occur as bacteria -- now a defunct classification), simple eukaryotes (life with a nucleus, such as humans) and the newly-classified archaea bacteria to work out how they might have formed.

Nobody has yet produced a 'protocell' for self-replicating life, but in fairness the serious work on abiogenesis is only 50 years old -- and some experiments like Miller's have taken 25-50 years to mature. Our knowledge of genetics is in its infancy -- the human genome project only completed in 2003; most other species aren't fully mapped, the our ability to study bacteria by RNA rather than just by microscope has required a complete reclassification of bacteria as recently as 2006.

The metaphysical questions about life and identity remain fun -- especially for authors of fiction. In the framework of science though, the excitement is much more in nature rather than metaphysical gum-sucking at the moment.

My current component atoms and their location in space-time make me me. An identical arrangement of atoms would, by necessity, have to occupy a different set of coordinates. I am unique only in where and when I am.

small axe said:

...
In just such a way, (and scientifically speaking) wouldn't BOTH copies of the duplicated brain HAVE to contain the SAME CONSCIOUSNESS, even though they are now gathering different memories or experiences?

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Please explain your definition and use of the word consciousness. MAP has a good point about the metaphysical (which is pretty much by definition outside of the realm of scientific investigation, which would tend to negate the phrase "scientifically speaking").

Here's a (rather crude, but let's try it) analogy: We have two identical computers (identical in that they're the same model and have the same amount of RAM and same size disk drives). One drive is blank, and the other has MS Windows installed. Yesterday someone made a bit-by-bit copy of the drive with Windows onto the other drive. Now both computers boot MS Windows.

Last night someone installed Microsoft Office on one machine, and someone else installed OpenOffice on the other. So now they both boot MS Windows, but they're no longer quite the same. What's wrong with this analogy?

It's questions like these that make me wish there was more SF being written from a Christian perspective; the implications of this level of technology are multiplied several-fold when you start including ideas like souls, judgment, and the creation of life. For instance, if a copy of me is made and immediately dies, can he be held accountable for my past actions? Even though he would feel as though he had committed all of my sins, it was neither his body, mind, nor soul that was involved, and his experience is nothing more than a false memory.

small axe said:

But from a Sci-Fi perspective, where do we think that "we are nothing we cannot copy" breaks down (or not)?

What IS or ISN'T "us" that's missing even from a perfect copy?

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The only way that copy of me could remain a copy of me was if he experienced everything I experienced and made every decision I made the same way I made it. As soon as the copy of me makes a decision of his own, he is no longer a copy of me. He is himself.