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Lego robot controlled by artificial worm brain developed by OpenWorm project
(www.ibtimes.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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youre not wrong in that cloning you twice would immediately create 2 distinct entities. and their consciousness/brains would immediately differentiate. so? now theres 2 of you.
i dont see the problem with there being 2 versions of you instead of the 1 that was destroyed and recreated in a transporter. its the experience that makes the differentiation, and if there is only 1 of you at a time there is no differentiation. only one of you continues experience, there you are.
In my interpretation it's a different one of me, and that matters. Granted, I don't expect either of us are on a path that is likely to convince the other, but fundamentally that's my objection. (see my two different ships example)
The fundamental difference between your two positions seems to be that an identical ship that was created would be a fundamentally different ship. But that's just something you've assumed. Why would that actually be the case? What, when you really get down to it, would be the difference that you could point to and say "ah, this one is a copy"? They would be, truly, definitionally, the same object. The differences between an original and a duplicate that existed together would only appear after they were created - if they appeared before they were created, then (again definitionally) they wouldn't be identical copies.
If you destroyed the original and then created the duplicate, there wouldn't be any differences - it would be created as an identical version, and continue being that version, accumulating differences only to itself. Nothing about it would have diverged from that instant of creation. How could it? There's nothing to diverge from. If you can assume that there could be an original that isn't destroyed, and then a copy created of it, then why couldn't you just swap those labels around? Have a duplicate, and create an original from it. If for an instant they're the same, then... er... there'd be no difference. The labels are just be a human affectation.
Think of it like transferring a file. I'm sure you've moved a file onto a different drive or dragged something from your downloads folder to your desktop or somesuch similar action. What actually happens is that the file is frozen to modification, copied from one place to the other, then deleted from the first place. But in all the times you've done that, have you ever thought to yourself "huh, you know, this isn't actually the same file as what I initially clicked on". And that's because fundamentally, mathematically, it is the same file. Changes to the file follow it around when it's moved again, if you change the name it's still referring to the same piece of data, etc. It's the same, single file.
Its a huge difference. I for one like waking up after I go to sleep, if I didn't wake up then the real "me" ceases to exist.
Similar to a transporter, you can never be truly sure its the original "you" waking up on the other side.