A replica of me

[anglepose]

often you find logic people dont believe in souls, heres something i cant get my head around;

what would happen if you created an exact replica of yourself down to the smallest connection in your brain, I mean totaly exact every cell is the same your age the same your brain the same.

 

What would you be thinking and what would your copy be thinking, think along the lines of would you still be you or what hmmmmmm.

[HydrogenBond]

The analogy has three answers. These can be explained using an analogy. Picture if you have a PC that has all your programs, data files, hardware, etc. If you make a duplicate PC in hardware only with a blank hard drive, the second PC would look the same and have the same capabilities but it would have many different future possibilities. If you dupe the hard-drive, the two would be the same. if you start with a blank harddrive but upload all your programs and then all your data, it would slightly different, since the used computer may have internal conflicts, redundancies, that may not end up on the new computer, i.e., clean install.

 

If your clone has the very same memory in the same brain it would be you at the very beginning. But since it is located in a different place in space, its sensory angles toward reality would be slightly different than yours, causing the two of you to develop further, slightly different.

[Syko]

If U-2 is an exact physical copy of U-1 (accepting you can copy atoms' spin and particules speed etc ...), I believe that U-2 would be the same as U-1 with the same thoughts and the same consciousness and Soul. But as HydrogenBond suggested this would be for a second only because from being in a different place in space, U-2 would start instantly differing, slightly but surely, from U-1.

 

Now, to answer that question you would have first to agree on the definition of Soul. If you believe Soul is outside of the body then you would tend to believe that u-2 might be born dead, or soul-less.

It's an interesting mind game but the answer belongs to Science Fiction, I believe.

[CraigD]

What would you be thinking and what would your copy be thinking, think along the lines of would you still be you or what hmmmmmm.

My first though it that I and my duplicate might be thinking the same thing, something along the lines of “I wonder if my duplicate intends to clean out my savings/checking/401K accounts? Maybe I should first! Oh my!” :D A joke, because, assuming the duplication occurred with my consent, I would have mentally prepared myself for it, presumably including an agreement with my future doppelganger and he with me for amicable future interactions.

 

This question is a deep one. I first read it in the 1981 collection “The Mind's I”, but the question was widespread over a decade earlier, due in large part to the 1966-1969 television series (you may have heard of this one :evil:) “Star Trek”, which introduced millions of viewers to the idea of “matter transporters”. It was not a huge leap of imagination to imagine, as Hofstadter and Dennett did wrote in their commentary in The Mind’s I, a “teleporter mark 2” that didn’t destroy the original, giving rise to the anglepose’s question “would you still be you?” The question is likely much older – philosophy students have pointed out that it’s a variation on the “Ship of Theseus” paradox, which, according to the 1st Century Greek writer Plutarch, was an old philosophical question then, and was apparently considered not just for ships, but for human bodies as well.

 

Physicists have tended to dismiss the question by contending, correctly, that the sort of atom-by-atom duplication implied in Star Trek is provably impossible. The momenta of individual atoms and free electrons necessary to “snapshot” roughly room-temperature matter at “atomic level resolution” that, per the uncertainty principle, such a snapshot is impossible. However, given the current state of knowledge of neurophysiology, I think such dismissal is premature – practical “snapshoting” of a human being or other organism may require only a resolution of thousands of atoms, larger than the scale at which uncertainty is significant. So, while far in advance of current technology, making an effectively exact duplicate of a human being may be, in principle, possible.

 

Assuming it can be done, then, the question becomes, would it work? According to some supernatural worldviews, an effectively exact duplicate of a human body would be nothing but lifeless meat, lacking an “animating principle”, or “soul”. I think this view is incorrect. From scientific explorations of the molecular-level mechanics of living cells and the matter of which they’re made, we know with a high degree of certainty that cells function in accordance with the observed and predicted laws of Biology, Chemistry, and, ultimately, Physics. If this is true, as I believe it is, then a sufficiently accurate physical duplicate of a human being would share all of the original’s attributes, and be effectively the same person.