A clone wouldn’t have the same consciousness , so that’s a bad deal. But for whatever reason, people have a sense of a personal identity across time. I am fully willing to make inter temporal trade offs. It seems more just to make up for past injustices.
Whether or not you could in theory create a replica of a person which has the same consciousness isn’t necessary clear. If you’re entirely a physicalist and believe in computational theory of mind, what reason is there for you not to believe you could recreate a persons consciousness? Just exactly replicate all their brain processes.
‘If you’re entirely a physicalist and believe in computational theory of mind, what reason is there for you not to believe you could recreate a persons consciousness? Just exactly replicate all their brain processes.’ This is confusing 2 different kinds of identity, “qualitative” and “numerical”. :
Qualitative identity=I can have 2 different (qualitatively) identical apples, if one is a perfect duplicate of the other
Numerical identity=X is numerically identical to Y, if they’re the same object, for example ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ are numerically identical, since these are both old names for the planet Venus.
What physicalism implies is that if you build someone who has all the same physical properties as me then they will be qualitatively identical to me, full-stop, because physicalism just is the view that all properties of things are fixed by their physical properties. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’d be numerically identical to me, any more than if I create a perfect duplicate of an apple, their both the same apple. Common-sense says ‘no they are not the same apple, because I started with only one apple and now I have 2, and if there are 2 apples, they are (numerically) distinct from each other’. You could of course have a theory that ‘same person’ is special, in that any perfect duplicate of me just is me. But I don’t think that is very plausible: build a perfect duplicate of me while I am alive, and it seems like you have two (qualitatively) identical people, not just one person who is somehow in 2 places at once.
I think some people are confused about this because they’ve heard philosophers have “psychological” theories of personal identity, where if the informational contents of your brain get wiped and moved to another new brain, then you are the person with the new brain. But actually, the theories that philosophers take seriously which imply this don’t say that if two people have exactly the same mental properties, they must be the same person. What they say is that if there’s a future person who’s psychological state depends on your current state in the right way, then that future person is you*, and they then combined this with the idea that if info is deliberately transferred from your brain to another brain, this is a connection of the right sort for the person with the new brain to count as you.
*Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that: you need to add a clause saying ‘and no other person at the same point in the future has mental states that depend on yours in the right way’. Can’t have 2 future people who are identical to you but not each other. That’s the key insight behind Derek Parfit’s famous argument that there are situations as selfishly good as survival for you but where you cease to exist: this happens when there are multiple duplicates of you whose mental states are each connected to yours in the right way.
A clone wouldn’t have the same consciousness , so that’s a bad deal. But for whatever reason, people have a sense of a personal identity across time. I am fully willing to make inter temporal trade offs. It seems more just to make up for past injustices.
Whether or not you could in theory create a replica of a person which has the same consciousness isn’t necessary clear. If you’re entirely a physicalist and believe in computational theory of mind, what reason is there for you not to believe you could recreate a persons consciousness? Just exactly replicate all their brain processes.
‘If you’re entirely a physicalist and believe in computational theory of mind, what reason is there for you not to believe you could recreate a persons consciousness? Just exactly replicate all their brain processes.’ This is confusing 2 different kinds of identity, “qualitative” and “numerical”. :
Qualitative identity=I can have 2 different (qualitatively) identical apples, if one is a perfect duplicate of the other
Numerical identity=X is numerically identical to Y, if they’re the same object, for example ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ are numerically identical, since these are both old names for the planet Venus.
What physicalism implies is that if you build someone who has all the same physical properties as me then they will be qualitatively identical to me, full-stop, because physicalism just is the view that all properties of things are fixed by their physical properties. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’d be numerically identical to me, any more than if I create a perfect duplicate of an apple, their both the same apple. Common-sense says ‘no they are not the same apple, because I started with only one apple and now I have 2, and if there are 2 apples, they are (numerically) distinct from each other’. You could of course have a theory that ‘same person’ is special, in that any perfect duplicate of me just is me. But I don’t think that is very plausible: build a perfect duplicate of me while I am alive, and it seems like you have two (qualitatively) identical people, not just one person who is somehow in 2 places at once.
I think some people are confused about this because they’ve heard philosophers have “psychological” theories of personal identity, where if the informational contents of your brain get wiped and moved to another new brain, then you are the person with the new brain. But actually, the theories that philosophers take seriously which imply this don’t say that if two people have exactly the same mental properties, they must be the same person. What they say is that if there’s a future person who’s psychological state depends on your current state in the right way, then that future person is you*, and they then combined this with the idea that if info is deliberately transferred from your brain to another brain, this is a connection of the right sort for the person with the new brain to count as you.
*Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that: you need to add a clause saying ‘and no other person at the same point in the future has mental states that depend on yours in the right way’. Can’t have 2 future people who are identical to you but not each other. That’s the key insight behind Derek Parfit’s famous argument that there are situations as selfishly good as survival for you but where you cease to exist: this happens when there are multiple duplicates of you whose mental states are each connected to yours in the right way.