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Some funny things about agency and identity


Christopher

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Did you know that your brain is actually two persons, with one maybe just a mute watcher being unable to act?

 

 

Another things are musing about mind copy immortality and the continuity flaw. Schlock Mercenary delves into that. Originally only in passing:
schlock20010320.jpg?v=1443894884318

 

While they had these thought exercises, true immortility (of the mind copy&clone flavor) did not become avalible until recently.
While they had awesome medical technology (as long as they put the head into a cryokit quickly), there was still perma-death. Indeed at least one person per storyline/book died. Including one of the persons in above strip.*

 

But the current book is all about that problem. It is called "a little immortality":
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05

In the previous Story, Captain Kaff Tagon died. He did have a memory backup from 42 minutes before he died. Wich is a lot of difference, as those 42 minutes were packed full of action and he is a Soldier/Captain. And inclued why he choose a heroic sacrifice.

And to make it worse, he was not resurrected quite away. But 4 months afterwards.

 

So now questions arose. Like the one about agency:

schlock20161209.jpg?v=1480015709708

 

One realistaition I had that the relationship between this kind of clone and it's original might be similar to "having to life up to my parent". Just much, much worse - having to life up to your previous self:

schlock20161229.jpg?v=1482072907175

schlock20161230.jpg?v=1482072907177

schlock20161231.jpg?v=1482072907178

I can already tell that this storyline is going to be deep and confusing.

*

It was Schlock that died. However he was resurrected. Due to his unique physique, he was the first non-AI to be revived that way in the story. However he is not a introspective person, so aside from a few cool remarks nothing came off it. Still he might help Captain Tagon 2 with this. The Gav's also might be a source of inspiration.

 

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And that's not even mentioning Kevyn Andreyasan, who was "time cloned" when a version of him travelled into the past to prevent the future that he came from coming to pass.

 

For that matter, although your post mentions "The Gavs" and therefore references it indirectly, the Gatekeepers had been routinely creating and destroying sentient copies of people for....how many hundreds of thousands of years was it?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

There is no palindromedary in Schlock Mercenary

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And that's not even mentioning Kevyn Andreyasan, who was "time cloned" when a version of him travelled into the past to prevent the future that he came from coming to pass.

 

For that matter, although your post mentions "The Gavs" and therefore references it indirectly, the Gatekeepers had been routinely creating and destroying sentient copies of people for....how many hundreds of thousands of years was it?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

There is no palindromedary in Schlock Mercenary

Andreyasan Prime went into retirement. And as a scientist both are destined to develop different stuff anyway.

The only gav that died during the cloning was the original one. Because he simply stood behind the disabeled gate. So it was not even a heroic sacrifice.

Schlock kind of died to own stupidity.

Just remembered that those are the 2nd+3rd Andreyasan - 2nd was the single gateclone he made when firing that gravity gun in target Echo. ("Always make a backup copy of yourself before testfiring a weapon").

 

All of them have in common that did not die Heriocally enough to warant a shrine/memorial/statue. Tagon 2 relates to Tagon 1 kind of like new timeline Kirk to his dad.

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Here's my favorite way of doing it.

 

Take one of the neurons in your brain.  Copy its complete functionality into a computer, then physically replace the neuron in your brain with an interface to the copy.  Your brain may take a few minutes to get used to the change, or it may not notice.  (Slight but very low chance of having a seizure.)  

 

After a while, repeat the above process with another neuron.  And another.   Eventually, you're running on external hardware rather than wetware, and you don't notice exactly when the changeover happens.

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Here's my favorite way of doing it.

 

Take one of the neurons in your brain.  Copy its complete functionality into a computer, then physically replace the neuron in your brain with an interface to the copy.  Your brain may take a few minutes to get used to the change, or it may not notice.  (Slight but very low chance of having a seizure.)  

 

After a while, repeat the above process with another neuron.  And another.   Eventually, you're running on external hardware rather than wetware, and you don't notice exactly when the changeover happens.

There are a few problems with that:

1st, what if you die during this process? You could end up a vegetable, and not the Saiyan kind.

2nd, if your brain has to adapt it has a decent chance to affect who you turn out to be after the process. When they re-introduced Fenix as a Mark 2 Purifier in Starcraft 2 LoV, they asked "how true to the original is thins copy"? The answer was 99.8% (or something like this). To wich the only followup question was: "How diffierent could that make him? What if that 0.2% decision was a important one, like to support Tassadar?"

3rd. You actually end up having more issues dealing with "not being human" anymore. Because you are not even running on wetware anymore. The Roid Rage/Nanoman storyline from Henchmen for Hire dealt wit hthat issue:

2014-01-17HenchmenRR04P25.jpg

2014-01-26HenchmenRR04P26.jpg

2014-02-03HenchmenRR04P27.jpg

4rd. You are really just protracting the isue, not solving it.

5th. Latest when you have your copy reinstatiated after a real death, the same issues will apply again.

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Another things are musing about mind copy immortality and the continuity flaw. Schlock Mercenary delves into that. Originally only in passing:

schlock20010320.jpg?v=1443894884318

 

While they had these thought exercises, true immortility (of the mind copy&clone flavor) did not become avalible until recently.

While they had awesome medical technology (as long as they put the head into a cryokit quickly), there was still perma-death. Indeed at least one person per storyline/book died. Including one of the persons in above strip.*

 

But the current book is all about that problem. It is called "a little immortality":

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05

In the previous Story, Captain Kaff Tagon died. He did have a memory backup from 42 minutes before he died. Wich is a lot of difference, as those 42 minutes were packed full of action and he is a Soldier/Captain. And inclued why he choose a heroic sacrifice.

And to make it worse, he was not resurrected quite away. But 4 months afterwards.

 

So now questions arose. Like the one about agency:

schlock20161209.jpg?v=1480015709708

 

 

So, a person who shares all but 42 minutes of your life experience is not you.

 

Which means that as I type this, at 0825 hrs local time, I am not the same person I was at 0748 hrs. The Christopher who posted the above at 2305 hrs on 30 DEC is a person who existed at that moment and did not exist at 2347 hrs or at 2228 hrs on that date.

 

When you split these hairs, they split all the way down to the root. The continuity flaw invoked by the Chaplain is not unique to the exotic science fiction scenario he describes; it's familiar to anyone who goes through a major life changing experience and comes out the other side, or just looks back in reflection on how they have changed over the years, or even looks forward to imagine what kind of person they may become in the future. And the difference between these obvious cases and the subtler distinction between Chaplain in Frame 3 and Chaplain in Frame 2 is a difference of degree, not of kind.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

You cannot read the same palindromedary tagline twice. If you go back and re-read this, it's a different you reading it the second time.

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So, a person who shares all but 42 minutes of your life experience is not you.

Of course not. After all, I share 100% of my memories with myself*. So by definition he must be somebody other then me, because he does not have the same access/same memories.

 

And as I said, those 42 minutes were kind of big for Tagon. As a lot of them was spend in combat, a major factor of Captain Tagons life.

 

 

*Within usual limits of biological memory access.

 

Which means that as I type this, at 0825 hrs local time, I am not the same person I was at 0748 hrs. The Christopher who posted the above at 2305 hrs on 30 DEC is a person who existed at that moment and did not exist at 2347 hrs or at 2228 hrs on that date.

Yes, when hitting post on this post I am not the same person I was when I decided to reply. However the difference is marginally entirely. Nothing remotely similar to "sacrificing yourself to save hundreds of lives".

 

When you split these hairs, they split all the way down to the root. The continuity flaw invoked by the Chaplain is not unique to the exotic science fiction scenario he describes; it's familiar to anyone who goes through a major life changing experience and comes out the other side, or just looks back in reflection on how they have changed over the years, or even looks forward to imagine what kind of person they may become in the future. And the difference between these obvious cases and the subtler distinction between Chaplain in Frame 3 and Chaplain in Frame 2 is a difference of degree, not of kind.

Now you are mixing up the clone and original viewpoint.

The continuity flaw applies only to the original. It is still dead as a doornail. If there is something like a soul, that soul went on. It's decision maters absolute for itself. This is not like "death in Dragonball".

 

What Kaff Tagon 2 has to deal with is being the clone of that relationship. Basically a sort of Son. I likened it to Kelvin timeline Kirk and his Father. With Tagon 1 being the Father, Tagon 2 being the Kirk.

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Now you are mixing up the clone and original viewpoint.

Not at all. I'm denying that the distinction between "the clone and original viewpoint" is more meaningful than the distinction between "you right now and you 42 minutes ago."

 

The continuity flaw applies only to the original. It is still dead as a doornail.

So is the you who existed 42 minutes ago.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary lights the candle and turns the wheel for the Lucius Alexander of 42 minutes ago.

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That portion of the discussion actually ties in well with Buddhist and Taoist views on the self. Namely, they conclude that there is no discrete self. We have far more in common with some other adults than the children we once were, yet we never call those other adults 'me' due to a trick of perception. Among adults we are most similar to, we are no closer to assigning them a 'me' status, despite not a single atom from childhood likely still being in our bodies and the difference between the memories of what happened to a past me not matching what actually happened to that past me. Today's me is a result of a yesterday 'me' as today's me is a result of something someone who I do not recognize as me saying something that I now think of as me.

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Two things:

 

Continuity of memory

Continuity of consciousness

 

The clone and the original have the first in common, but do not have the second in any way in relation to one another. They are two sets of identical consciousnesses at a specific point, not one.

 

The original, upon death, does not, no matter what, continue on because there is a clone.

 

The memories are all that still exists, not the consciousness of the original. And actually, there is no reason to believe that, given the exact same experiences, the clone would find all the choices he made in his false memories consistent with what he would do. I find it highly likely that he would look on some memories as totally against his own tendencies or preferences.

 

Interesting topic.

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Two things:

 

Continuity of memory

Continuity of consciousness

 

The clone and the original have the first in common, but do not have the second in any way in relation to one another. They are two sets of identical consciousnesses at a specific point, not one.

 

The original, upon death, does not, no matter what, continue on because there is a clone.

 

The memories are all that still exists, not the consciousness of the original. And actually, there is no reason to believe that, given the exact same experiences, the clone would find all the choices he made in his false memories consistent with what he would do. I find it highly likely that he would look on some memories as totally against his own tendencies or preferences.

 

Interesting topic.

Good point with the differnt kinds of Continuity. Memory vs Consciousness.

 

And we are not even certain that given the same memories, a person would develop the same consciousness.

Actually this ties into how memories actually work on a biochemical level. An area where the scientific knowledge uses the words "X is blieved to be" way too often....

 

It could be that truly exact replication of memory would result in an excact replication of consciousness. The same way waking a Operating System from a hibernate state is. Because the decision pathways through the brain an memory/experience created is part of that memory.

Or not, we have no idea.

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People make a big deal about continuity of consciousness without stopping to reflect that we already don't have it. Do you ever sleep? Were you conscious then? Hypothetically speaking, if you had died in your sleep and been replaced with a clone with your memories, would you have noticed?

 

I once had some surgery that included general anaesthetic, and the stuff they used prevented me from committing anything to long-term memory for a short time after they administered it and before I lost consciousness. My memories simply cut off at a point in the operating room. I woke up later with some "missing time" including a short period of time when I was conscious that I don't remember; a situation very similar to what Clone Tagon is in, in those strips. The only difference is that pre-surgery "me" and current "me" are tied together by an unconscious body, while Tagon's world-line is physically discontinuous.

 

So: me from five minutes ago and me right now are tied together by a continuously conscious me, as far as I can remember. Full continuity of memory and full continuity of consciousness.

Me from yesterday is tied to me right now by a sleeping "me", whose brain was still doing something, even if it wasn't performing the full consciousness process. Full continuity of memory, at best partial continuity of consciousness.

Pre-anaesthetic me is tied to me right now by a body with the higher functions shut down hard; there was no dreaming, no memory processing, just low-level autonomic functions. Incomplete continuity of memory, no continuity of consciousness.

<gap in example spectrum>

Tagon right now is tied to Tagon of four months ago by dying and being restored from a backup. Slightly less complete continuity of memory, no continuity of consciousness.

 

It's not immediately clear to me why we should say that post-death Tagon is NOT the same person as before, while post-surgery me IS the same person as before.

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People make a big deal about continuity of consciousness without stopping to reflect that we already don't have it. Do you ever sleep? Were you conscious then? Hypothetically speaking, if you had died in your sleep and been replaced with a clone with your memories, would you have noticed?

I would not have noticed, because I was dead. And I do not presume to be able to speak for a hypothetical clone of mine :)

That is at the core of the continuity flaw - I am still dead. What that clone does not realy mater to me, nor will I have the capacity to have it mater to me.

 

Sleep and Continuity of Consciousness:

We do not currently know why we (as a species) sleep. Much less 8 hours per day. But I do not think it actually cancels the process of "consciousness".

One misconception is that a few important parts of our body never rest. You heart never stops beating (for long) as long as you are alive. Even when it "rests", it is still working. The same is true for our brain - even in sleep, you is still online (even if on a power saving setting).

 

I once had some surgery that included general anaesthetic, and the stuff they used prevented me from committing anything to long-term memory for a short time after they administered it and before I lost consciousness. My memories simply cut off at a point in the operating room. I woke up later with some "missing time" including a short period of time when I was conscious that I don't remember; a situation very similar to what Clone Tagon is in, in those strips. The only difference is that pre-surgery "me" and current "me" are tied together by an unconscious body, while Tagon's world-line is physically discontinuous.

You are mixing up being aware/having memories of being conscious with continuity of consciousness. Even while under the drugs, your brain never turned off. Braindeath never occurred.

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Agreed. The difference is for the dead one. He's dead. His consciousness ended. They would have identical consciousnesses, but not the same consciousness, the end of one is its end.

 

The sleep issue is an interesting one. One could even make the case that, even awake, there are periods in which not much is happening.

 

Back to Buddhism and Taoism, which both make the case that there is conscious thought, and then there are thoughts as senses, mere responses to stimuli that are not conscious at all.

 

In essence, the eastern answer to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am," is “Thought occurs, therefore something is." After which they would follow it through to the point of determining that that thought is inseperable from a host of other causes and effects, and thus, everything is, but no one thing is of itself.

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There are a few problems with that:

1st, what if you die during this process? You could end up a vegetable, and not the Saiyan kind.

 

 

Yes, but you could die at any time. You could easily take a straight-copy backup before you start this process. In fact you might want to do so in order to have a functioning copy of "you" as a framework. For instance, instead of just copying a single one of your neurons, you could replace the neuron in your meatbrain with an interface to the corresponding neuron in the copy, or at least a copy of that neuron.

 

2nd, if your brain has to adapt it has a decent chance to affect who you turn out to be after the process. When they re-introduced Fenix as a Mark 2 Purifier in Starcraft 2 LoV, they asked "how true to the original is thins copy"? The answer was 99.8% (or something like this). To wich the only followup question was: "How diffierent could that make him? What if that 0.2% decision was a important one, like to support Tassadar?"

 

I'm 46 years old. My brain isn't the same as it was when I was 10, or 15, or 20, or 30, or 40.  It's had to do some adaptation along the way, and I know that a few brain cells have gotten lost during that time. I've done more than a few reappraisals of my beliefs and attitudes on a number of things during that time, all of it spent in meat. I don't see the gradual change into silicon, or whatever ends up being used as computing machinery by the time we have the ability to do this, as being that much of a difference.

 

3rd. You actually end up having more issues dealing with "not being human" anymore. Because you are not even running on wetware anymore. The Roid Rage/Nanoman storyline from Henchmen for Hire dealt wit hthat issue:

 

Not necessarily. If the version of you running externally in computing strata is set up to fully emulate the meatbrain version of you, then you can stay as human as you need to. You've still got a meat body with a complete interface to the machine, and the machine part thinks it's human, so there's really no change.

 

And the upload is a Ship of Theseus or Grandfather's Axe kind of change.

 

4rd. You are really just protracting the isue, not solving it.

 

I disagree. If the issue is with continuity of self, you are completely solving it.  All that dies is a body, unless you opt for the reverse of my above process -- and while a lot of people might do that, I'm not one of them.  

 

 

5th. Latest when you have your copy reinstatiated after a real death, the same issues will apply again.

 

If you're running externally, and the only thing your meat body is carrying is an interface to the virtual brain, then it could be traumatic for the "you" running externally to suddenly lose the body, but you could clone out, or even 3D print, a new body for yourself (sans brain), with interface built in, and away we go. And you could easily have the offsite brain set up to dump you into a sensory simulation if the body suddenly goes offline, so you don't have to even suffer the traumatic loss of sensory input.

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I would not have noticed, because I was dead. And I do not presume to be able to speak for a hypothetical clone of mine :)

That is at the core of the continuity flaw - I am still dead. What that clone does not realy mater to me, nor will I have the capacity to have it mater to me.

Okay, so, how do you know this hasn't been happening every time you sleep, and the current "you" is only as old as the last time you woke up? How do you know it won't happen again the next time you sleep?

 

And more importantly, how would it make any difference in your life if this were the case?

 

You are mixing up being aware/having memories of being conscious with continuity of consciousness. Even while under the drugs, your brain never turned off. Braindeath never occurred.

 

No, I'm not; someone under surgical anaesthesia is not conscious. There is no thinking, no response to stimulus going on. The higher brain functions are suspended. I agree that complete brain death does not occur . . . but why does that matter? If my brain WERE completely shut down during surgery, and then started back up with no ill effects, would THAT mean that it was a different person waking up in the recovery room?

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Okay, so, how do you know this hasn't been happening every time you sleep, and the current "you" is only as old as the last time you woke up? How do you know it won't happen again the next time you sleep?

 

The point is, if that were the case, from my perspective, no change, but from the perspective of the original(s), big change.

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One problem with it is the assumption that identical consciousnesses will remain identical.

 

Killing Day One's clone and initiating Day Two Clone does not guarantee that Day Two will act the same way under all the same circumstances as Day Two. It's also murdering Day One.

 

So, to know that at least identical consciousness still exists, even if it is not continuous, we decide to not kill C1 at the end of day 1, we just have day 2 occur to both clones exactly the same. If C1 diverges from C2, then we don't have identical consciousness. If they don't diverge, then we plan on killing C1 and continuiing tests on C2.

 

Until...

 

...it occurs to us that C1 and C2 might actually be more likely to diverge on day three. So, we keep C1 and C2 alive and we make C1m1 and C2m2.

 

The death of any of them ends that particular consciousness. The continuation of the others does nothing to alter that there are less beings with that consciousness as before, and though they do not know that the experiences they have are identical but not the same, merely false articulations of one experience, the reality is, they are, at best, identical consciousnesses with totally different experiences that they don't know are totally different, assuming they still have identical consciousnesses.

 

Yes, to any one non-dead clone, there is no difference(if there is no divergence). BUT, to the one killed, there is one experience, death, and then the inconvenience of being a dead person, which includes lethargy, stiffness, a foul rotting odor, and occasional bloating.

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Okay, so, how do you know this hasn't been happening every time you sleep, and the current "you" is only as old as the last time you woke up? How do you know it won't happen again the next time you sleep?

 

And more importantly, how would it make any difference in your life if this were the case?

 

 

No, I'm not; someone under surgical anaesthesia is not conscious. There is no thinking, no response to stimulus going on. The higher brain functions are suspended. I agree that complete brain death does not occur . . . but why does that matter? If my brain WERE completely shut down during surgery, and then started back up with no ill effects, would THAT mean that it was a different person waking up in the recovery room?

It would make a difference for current me, certainly. Because I would know that someone will try to kill me to replace me with a clone when I go to sleep. For next me, it would be irrelevant.

And yes, I do not exclude that this post was started by another person, by definition. Just to the best of my knowlege, it was not.

 

How do you know you were not repalced while uner Anestesia? The operating crew told you, you were not. Implicitly. Even when you could not observe yourself being alive, you still were alive.

A tree that falls in the forrest still causes a shockwave in air commonly identified as it "making a sound". Wheter a human observes it or only animals and insects, does not change that.*

 

For sleep it was all the time my parents implicitly told me I was not replaced in my sleep while growing up. Plus all the times I stayed awake through the night and nobody came in, trying to kill me.*

 

*In both these cases and time travel mechanics I think people are too dependant on "Observing is needed for it to be true".

I do not observe the generator producing the electricity to run my laptop right now (I rarely use the battery). Yet my Laptop runs, hence the power grid has net energy income, hence somewhere a generator is running right now.

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So, to know that at least identical consciousness still exists, even if it is not continuous, we decide to not kill C1 at the end of day 1, we just have day 2 occur to both clones exactly the same. If C1 diverges from C2, then we don't have identical consciousness. If they don't diverge, then we plan on killing C1 and continuiing tests on C2.

Well, you're implicitly assuming that consciousness is a) entirely deterministic, and B) not chaotic in the mathematical sense. Assumption A is suspect because we know that the universe is probabilistic at the quantum level, and we can't rule out quantum effects being significant in the operation of the human brain. There's also the issue of radiation events taking place within the human brain (naturally occurring carbon-14, you know) which could (maybe? I don't know enough neuroscience) influence things at the level of individual neurotransmitter molecules. If assumption B is wrong, then even tiny discrepancies in inputs (from the environment you're reproducing for each clone) could lead to divergent behavior, even if they started out the exactly the same and no random events occurred.

 

TL;DR: just because the two instances diverge later it doesn't necessarily follow that they're different now.

 

It would make a difference for current me, certainly. Because I would know that someone will try to kill me to replace me with a clone when I go to sleep.

I apparently didn't make myself clear; sorry about that. What I was proposing as a hypothetical is that you do NOT know that you have been and will be replaced, in which you go to bed secure in the belief that you'll sleep normally, just like you assume that you do in reality. However, in this hypothetical scenario, unknown to you, you have been and will continue to be replaced with a duplicate in your sleep frequently (and no, the fact that you've never caught a ninja sneaking in doesn't prove it's not happening. There are ways to check if someone's sleeping. If you don't believe that, then assume that this scenario also includes a sci-fi remote brain wave sensor or something).

 

I'm asking you to consider this question: how, in principle, would your life be any different in this scenario? Obviously, in reality nothing can be done without leaving evidence, but for the sake of the hypothetical, you've been replaced by someone capable of covering their tracks beyond your ability to detect any interference. Again, in the hypothetical, you've been replaced at least several times, and will be replaced again in the future, but you have NO forensic evidence to suggest this.

 

I simply ask, what would be different about you in that case? How would the you of right now in the real world differ from you in the hypothetical world? Would there be any significant difference? (and no, just repeating "I'd be dead and it would be a clone" isn't what I'm looking for.) Would there be ANY difference? Is it true that "a difference that makes no difference IS no difference"?

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Well, you're implicitly assuming that consciousness is a) entirely deterministic, and B) not chaotic in the mathematical sense. Assumption A is suspect because we know that the universe is probabilistic at the quantum level, and we can't rule out quantum effects being significant in the operation of the human brain. There's also the issue of radiation events taking place within the human brain (naturally occurring carbon-14, you know) which could (maybe? I don't know enough neuroscience) influence things at the level of individual neurotransmitter molecules. If assumption B is wrong, then even tiny discrepancies in inputs (from the environment you're reproducing for each clone) could lead to divergent behavior, even if they started out the exactly the same and no random events occurred.

 

TL;DR: just because the two instances diverge later it doesn't necessarily follow that they're different now.

 

I apparently didn't make myself clear; sorry about that. What I was proposing as a hypothetical is that you do NOT know that you have been and will be replaced, in which you go to bed secure in the belief that you'll sleep normally, just like you assume that you do in reality. However, in this hypothetical scenario, unknown to you, you have been and will continue to be replaced with a duplicate in your sleep frequently (and no, the fact that you've never caught a ninja sneaking in doesn't prove it's not happening. There are ways to check if someone's sleeping. If you don't believe that, then assume that this scenario also includes a sci-fi remote brain wave sensor or something).

 

I'm asking you to consider this question: how, in principle, would your life be any different in this scenario? Obviously, in reality nothing can be done without leaving evidence, but for the sake of the hypothetical, you've been replaced by someone capable of covering their tracks beyond your ability to detect any interference. Again, in the hypothetical, you've been replaced at least several times, and will be replaced again in the future, but you have NO forensic evidence to suggest this.

 

I simply ask, what would be different about you in that case? How would the you of right now in the real world differ from you in the hypothetical world? Would there be any significant difference? (and no, just repeating "I'd be dead and it would be a clone" isn't what I'm looking for.) Would there be ANY difference? Is it true that "a difference that makes no difference IS no difference"?

As to the question 'how would my life be any different now', two different answers:

 

If we are discussing my life as in mine in particular as observed by me, I would be dead. I would NOT be thinking or conscious. The presence of someone else doing the exact same things and thinking in the exact same way would not add a single one of those thoughts into my dead brain.

 

If we are discussing my life as in a life observed by others, it would only differ for those who were killing me nightly, but, for them, it would differ vastly from a life in which one me did all the same things, versus many lives that did them, but were then killed after a day.

 

And you were correct on me applying a deterministic approach to it, because, if we are doing this experiment, we would have to observe whether differences were, as you said, tied to natural chaos and other factors, or were hitherto unmeasured differences in the two consciousses that we somehow missed. Now, if we can perfectly measure these things already, I think we are no longer doing an experiment, but actually just like killing this one guy. Which, as a GM, I can respect.

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I'm starting to wonder whether the communication problem is on my end or yours at this point.

 

Once again, in this hypothetical scenario, you are you right now, today, the same you that you are in actual reality. The only difference is that "someone else" has been killed and replaced with the current you, and the current you is going to be similarly replaced, but the current hypothetical you is unaware of these facts and believes that he/you has actually had the continuous existence that hypothetical current today you remembers (which is the same set of memories that actual real world today you has as you're reading this).

 

I am NOT, repeat NOT asking how the dead bodies perceive the situation. I am not asking how the replacements growing in the clone tank perceive the situation. I am asking how ALIVE hypothetical today you's perceptions of the situation--indeed, how the ACTUALITY of the situation--would differ from alive real today you's perceptions and actualities.

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I'm starting to wonder whether the communication problem is on my end or yours at this point.

 

Once again, in this hypothetical scenario, you are you right now, today, the same you that you are in actual reality. The only difference is that "someone else" has been killed and replaced with the current you, and the current you is going to be similarly replaced, but the current hypothetical you is unaware of these facts and believes that he/you has actually had the continuous existence that hypothetical current today you remembers (which is the same set of memories that actual real world today you has as you're reading this).

 

I am NOT, repeat NOT asking how the dead bodies perceive the situation. I am not asking how the replacements growing in the clone tank perceive the situation. I am asking how ALIVE hypothetical today you's perceptions of the situation--indeed, how the ACTUALITY of the situation--would differ from alive real today you's perceptions and actualities.

Oh, I getcha, from that perspective, they are the identical. The same poor unfortunate people with identical consciousness surrounded by insane murderers.

 

Congitively, it makes no difference that the me I think I was before, I never actually was, as far as my consciousness in my day in the sun, as it were.

 

Actually, this would make for an insane game. Like a reverse of the movie Memento. I have found out they are killing me. Every day. Except I am not losing my memory, my memory isn't really mine. And I have no memory of dying.

 

The one thing is, the actuality of the situation is not that the consciousness continues, a copy of it does in another person. The actuality is still that the others are dead and insensate, and the one has their day. They are identical, but they are not one.

 

For example, if I copy word onto two computers, yes, we would know that the code is identical, but we would also know that they are different copies. Even if we only wrote the same documents on them on the same days and times on identical computers, we would not really consider that if, on Computer A, a malicious virus destroyed word utterly, that we had lost nothing. The copy is an addition, not a continuation, in that sense. You are correct, in that each version of word is identical to the last, but it is also true that they are not the same copy.

 

As an aside, like reality, I suspect that things would begin to fray a bit in the system if I installed and uninstalled word every day. I might begin to fray. Days might get missed. In the clone's case, of course, he could never know the difference between whether he was a replacement or not, saving some slip on the part of the experimenters.

 

I'm not trying to argue feverishly with you, just an interesting topic that goes fun places.

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