The cloned consciousness problem.

General Philosophy
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There are many variations of the cloned consciousness problem, including the hypothetical scenario of translating our pattern of neural activity into computer code or recreating a dead person’s brain down to individual neurons.

One question which arises out of such hypotheticals is the question of whether a clone of your consciousness is actually you. In different words: if a digital or biological clone of you were to be created immediately before your death, would your stream of consciousness continue through the cloned version, which has your memories.

I’m not so sure about the digital clone, but at least with regards to the biological clone scenario the answer would probably be yes since an analogue of this already happens in real life with molecular-level recycling. Looking into the subject, there’s debate on how frequently cells in your body replace, but the general consensus is that most of the cells in your body are replaced every 7 years or so. Neurons don’t get replaced at the cellular level like other cells of the body do, but the individual lipids, proteins and other molecules making up these cells do undergo recycling. Thus even your brain is mostly made up of different atoms than it was 7 years ago.

Despite the fact that you are materially different from the you that existed 7 years ago, it nonetheless seems that both “yous” are part of the same stream of consciousness. Therefore it seems to be not the preservation of substance-identity which allows for continuity of consciousness, but rather the patterns of connectivity and neural transmission within the brain.

If a person is biologically cloned and then dies, therefore, the stream of consciousness should continue when the clone is awakened no? If the only difference between this hypothetical and the actual process of biomolecular replacement is that in the second case the change occurs “bit by bit”, do we have any good rational as to why this difference should matter as far as stream of consciousness is concerned?

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I’ve been listening to/reading Federico Faggin, who’s book Irreducible presents an admittedly far-out theory of consciousnes which I’m still trying to come to grips with. But one point he makes that I think I understand is the application of the ‘no-cloning’ theorem to conscious states. The no-cloning theorem says (off the top of my head) that no quantum state can be replicated or copied, because to do so means ‘collapsing’ it into a definite state. Whereas the actual quantum state is in some fundamental sense indeterminate. In physics itself that indeterminate state is described as being in superposition, meaning that the entities or objects that are captured by measurement or registration, don’t have exact characteristics prior to their being captured. So you can’t replicate them!

Faggin argues that the same principles apply to conscious states, in that their characteristics are not fully determinable by the disposition of all of their constituents parts. So this undermines the idea that humans (or organisms of any kind) are simply collections of particles. Particles themselves, as he also points out, are nowadays understood as ‘excitations of field states’ and do not exist independently of those fields as discrete particulars. And also that in organisms, the whole organism is represented in every cell by the presence of DNA , they’re holographic in nature, again not simply the sum of the elemental particles that comprise them.

Of course it is true that most of the body is continually replenished with new cells, although I had the idea that the brain was somewhat different. It used to be thought that you were born with all the brain cells you’d ever had, but I think neuroplasticity studies have changed that in that even if brain cells themselves are not replaced, new neural pathways can and are forged all the time.

But nevertheless, as a general principle, organisms are able to maintain their identity through change. In fact they’re uniquely able to do that, in a way that mineral substances cannot. Which again mitigates against the idea that this can be understood solely in terms of molecular interactions.

So - I think biological cloning is out the window, for the above reason. As to whether continuity can be maintained from one life to another, that gets into the realm of past-life memory research, which is generally a taboo subject here.

However I will mention a rather fascinating individual that came up in my youtube feed recently, Jo Nagai, a young (primary school age! ) Japanese scientist, who, working with an experienced American biologist many years his senior, demonstrated that butterflies can retain memories they acquired before pupation, which was thought to be impossible previously. He also has some findings which suggest inheritance of acquired characteristics, another no-no as far as biology is concerned (as it’s something like lemarcianism). More info here https://youtu.be/nhESxrqPjfU?si=6tYSV6H97neGbcFR

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Depends on whether that stream of consciousness arises from what’s physically constituitive for it (that brain), or from a higher level syntactic structure that could be reproduced by other means (other brains). The latter can be cloned, at least in theory. The former, probably not.

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A popular illustration of this problem is the transporter problem.

The two main position are:

bodily continuity – as long as the physical substrate of the brain, including potentially brainwaves persists, then it is numerically the same consciousness (regardless of whether it is qualitatively the same)

and psychological continuity – that as long as there’s a continuation of the memories and full mental state then that’s a continuation of the numerically same consciousness, so it does allow for the mind to be moved to a different substrate.

While both of these position appear common sense, they both have trouble with hypothetical situations where brains can be duplicated, recreated, spliced or just modified an arbitrary amount.
In my experience, almost everyone when faced with these paradoxes tends to immediately conclude that one of the two options is right and the other is magical thinking. However, it’s pretty much a 50:50 split between the two positions.

The position which is immune to the hypotheticals is perhaps the most uncomfortable: that there’s no such thing as persistence of consciousness. That the “you” of now, is completely, and numerically, a different entity to the “you” of 5 minutes ago. It just happens to have inherited the memories, and so the belief, that it existed 5 minutes ago.

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This depends on the identity convention chosen. The one we use typically doesn’t handle well the case where a pair of clones can interact with each other, so a replicator booth would require a new convention, but a teleporter would not.

The clone (copied from some particular state of some ‘original’, not say a grown clone like they’ve done) will experience a continuation from the moment of the snapshot of the original. The clone can be awakened long before the original dies, and that challenges the convention. I.E. there’s no need to wait for the original to die. It’s a way to say create an army of trained soldiers without taking the time to train them.

Such a digital scan could be subsequently simulated, and that simulated person in its simulated environment would be conscious, but it wouldn’t live long for the same reason the original was near death. If that part was altered, it would cease to be a simulation of the original.

Not in one world, no. Such would be in violation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. So while they’ve teleported a quantum particle, they cannot clone one.
Hence any clone of a person would not be exact down to the quantum state since. A person doesn’t even have an exact quantum state. This does not preclude say MWI from ‘cloning’ humans (down to the quantum level) since the clones cannot interact with each other, thus presenting no challenges to our classical identity convention.

Well, it begs the idea that life forms are special in this regard. He asserts the first sentence without demonstrating that it cannot be otherwise.

Particles themselves, as he also points out, are nowadays understood as ‘excitations of field states’ and do not exist independently of those fields as discrete particulars.

That’s right. Physics actually has no notion of discrete particulars, or say ‘objects’. Assigning identity or grouping collections as a particular object seems to be a mental designation only.

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Yes and no. You are materially the same in that any conditions you have are still there, barring some that improve over time. So in a sense substance identity is preserved. Although life it far more complex than simply moving an atom here or there so this might be the wrong view.

Maybe the answer to identity isn’t in looking too finely at the atoms.

Well not exactly, it’s complicated. Despite the fact that our atoms “replace” we remain physically the same. Atoms are part of the picture, but we are processes not parts per se. You cannot find the answer to identity in atoms.

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Not exactly, they do have that but it is more depending on what you are talking about. Even excitations of fields is still discrete particulars. I asked this before to physicists and they corrected me.

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I recalled this, the memories they had as a caterpillar still remain when they transform, and if you know anything about butterflies changing their process is essentially akin to the drastic hypothetical in OP. So if they retain their identity then…I guess that begs the question of how and what consciousness is and where it comes from.

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It doesn’t ‘beg the question’. It ‘raises the question’. A very different thing! Jo Nagai’s work seems to suggest a means beyond the strictly chemical or material by which memories can be preserved. The transmission of memories across generations is supposed not to be allowed by orthodox biology yet there are indications that it can happen e.g. 'Memories' pass between generations - BBC News

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I don’t know if this is biological per se but it does raise some interesting stuff. This combined with my experience with certain…events has me thinking there might be more than we can currently observe.

It’s either that or we “reset” every 7 years and clone into someone else though I don’t know if I believe that.

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You can perfectly clone compositions of music by copying notational sheets. Each performance may sound a bit different, but thanks to notation the music is preserved through generations.

But could you copy a performance “bit by bit” in order to preserve the music? I think it would eventually disappear like a word in a game of whisper.

Notation makes the music independent of its varying “substrates” i.e. performances. In computers you have the Turing computation. It is also relatively independent of the varying computers on which it can function. This means that expressions can be copied and preserved in computers.

But notational and computational systems are artificial inventions, their meanings are observer-dependent. How plausible is it that we can find notation or computation in nature? A lot of people seem to believe that the brain is a computer. I’m not so sure.

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The me of 7 years ago and me of now are not two different “mes”. It’s just part of our nature that the material we are comprised of is gradually replaced. It is all one “me”, my existence being spread out over time.

Two identical things are not the same thing. A consciousness identical to, and, for all intents and purposes, “as good as” me is not me. You would have no way of knowing if you were interacting with original me or clone me, but they are different entities.

Just as someone could borrow your tape measure without you knowing, break it, buy another that was made on the same incredibly precise machinery, and put it in your toolbox. You would have no way of knowing it was not the original one. If they told you what happened one day, you wouldn’t care. But it’s still a different tape measure.

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Er, DNA?

[Btw, glad (or only slightly outraged) to see that I’m not, after all, the only Nelson Goodman admirer in the village.]

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In everyday speech, they are interchangeable. And even in more formal speech, IME other terms are preferred, because “begs the question” has always been an awkward naming for the fallacy of assuming the conclusion.

Right; as I said upthread, the distinction between being qualitative and numerically identical. And there seems no way, even in principle to know.

Let’s say at the moment of your death I make a perfect snapshot of your brain, and then, 10 years later, I’m able to start a new brain, with your memories such that the person who wakes, confidently says he is Wayfarer and thanks me for bringing him back to life.
Some people, some models of consciousness, would have it that this is a totally new and separate consciousness, and the “you” I am talking to now remains very dead. Others would maintain that that’s you – you’re back.

But there seems no test we could ever do, no measurement that would tell us either way.

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I suppose it seems most accurate to say that this is a “different” tape measure. I mean, when it comes to uniformly massed produced products we also use the term “the same” in the sense that an item is the same model with the same specifications. Though I know that’s not what you are referring to here, but the fact that we use the phrase “same” in this way suggests that we see copies of an entity to have an identical-ness in some way.

Also, to make modify your scenario a bit, if the shell of the original tape measure can be split apart into two halves if hit with enough force, and I lose one of the halves after it breaks, then I could take the corresponding half from another tape measurer and use that as a substitute, do we still have the same tape measurer? If no, then the you of 7 years ago is actually a different person than you now, and you just think that is you because your memories tell you it is. What if I break the tape measurer again and swap out the other half of the shell?

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Right. He would not know the difference.

If Aaron Judge hits a home run, the next pitch thrown is with a different baseball. The ball may be identical in every way to the previous one pitched. Identical in every measurable way. Used in exactly the same ways, subject to exactly the same rules of the game, and laws of physics. And nobody would say, “Judge hit the thirty first ball of the game over the center field wall. The next two players were both struck out using the thirty second ball. The thirty second ball was fouled into the stands by the next batter, who flew out to the shortstop on the thirty third ball.”

It’s silly. Maybe amusing. Nobody does that. We all act as though only one ball was used the entire game. But we all know that’s not how it went.

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Unlike the notes in a score, faulty, damaged, mutated DNA result in evolution.

Good stuff (mostly).

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Well in the case where there literally are two balls existing simultaneously, pretty much everyone would agree that they are not numerically identical (even if they are qualitatively identical) because that’s basically the whole definition of numerical identity.

It gets more complex if the ball disappears and a new one is formed that is to-the-atom identical to the original. Or if a new ball used the same atoms as the original.
And if it’s only the latter that “counts”, then that gets weird when we apply it to consciousness. If I disappear your brain and then make a new brain that is X% the same atoms and (100-X)% new atoms, at what X do you survive the process and how can we ever know?

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Not so unlike according to Dawkins, of course. :thinking:

Hi Esseus11

I don’t buy “has your memories”. I tried explaining roughly my doubts a few months ago:

We’ve no grounds to discount the possibility that personal continuity defined spatiotemporally will make an important epistemic difference to memory. Just as (as Goodman argues) we can’t know that autographic authenticity (defined similarly) won’t make an important aesthetic difference to a picture.

Do you like the analogy? I appreciate that you (or anyone) might like it but think it doesn’t help me, and think rather that it supports Parfitt and the theory that we survive teleportation.

After all, Goodman is ready to recognise other criteria of artwork identity than spatiotemporal continuity. Specifically, multiple artworks such as photography (and sound recording) are defined according to a historical chain of reproduction connecting a print (or play-back) to a master film (or tape). Equally he recognises text and other digital symbols as retaining their identity through unlimited replication. And he sees that aesthetic culture is just as likely to thrive on identification and discrimination of multiple artworks as singular.

But that doesn’t deflate or obviate his argument about the potential importance of spatiotemporal continuity in identification of any single print of a photograph, or a single performance of a symphony (or whatever) or even a single copy of a book. And I think a memory (a conscious memory at least) is no criterion of personal identity except as it arises within a spatiotemporally bound organism in its processing and prediction of events in its single life.

Obviously we can create neural disturbances in that organism that it may interpret as vivid recollection of real events in a spatiotemporally separate body. And if it is a philosophical dualist then perhaps it won’t see evidence of the separation as evidence it had been deluded (as a result of the disturbance) in judging its own identity. But this organism would.

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Yes, identical in form and function. We treat and use it the same. No reason not to. But we know it’s not the same one, even though we can’t tell the difference.

Not fully. Most, but it’s been mended.

My memories are why it is. A human isn’t a static object. We exist over a span of time. And the important part of the continuity is the mental.