Basically it is this. When you look at a proton, to determine its actual affect you can’t simply look at the path it took, but at the average of all possible paths. This suggests that each time a choice, each one happens, reality is the average of these options. In a certain way the future affects the present. That is a portion of quantum mechanics, and some prominent theoretical physicists recently suggested this phenomenon could prevent the LHC from ever functioning at top power level. Paper is here.

Quantum suicide & immortality is a sci-fi spin on this. Basically that each time something could’ve killed you, it probably did in another universe of sorts. You will go on living forever until you’ve been killed in all possible situations, because if you’re killed in a universe you’re gone - you are only aware of what goes on in the the universes where you survive.

Ok that doesn’t do justice to it, but check it out.

When we meet two years later, he will likely be a very different person than me. So the question is - were we really the same person to begin with?

I’d point you to another work of fiction on the subject - Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

One thing to note: human beings already believe in transference of consciousness for thousands of years. The idea that “when i die, i’ll go to heaven or hell” is a notion that consciousness can be mutable, and can leave the body to exist elsewhere. This is echoed by the Law of Conservation of Energy, which stated “energy is neither created nor destroyed, it only changes form”.

So the hard part to grasp isn’t the notion of transferring consciousness, but the commonly-help belief that consciousness is unique (I know, I’m not adding anything new, just summarizing what I’ve read above).

Thus most lean to the side of the argument that supposes that, in order to transfer consciousness (from life to afterlife, or from one human body to another, or from human body to a digital backup), consciousness must LEAVE the origin in order to ARRIVE at the destination.

So, it may be more feasible to say that consciousness could be backed up digitally, but not duplicated.

By backing up consciousness, the substrate changes, but the pattern remains unchanged (whether the substrate is a human body, angelic wings in heaven, or a collection of bits in a server somewhere).

Let me play devil’s advocate for a moment with your opinions on copying consciousness:

The idea of “talking to your clone” supposes that you’ll have a conversation like two unique beings. But what if that didn’t happen. What if you cloned yourself (or backed yourself up to a virtual world). You look at “the other you”, and you begin to speak… at that precise moment so does he. You both pause. Look at each other funny. Then, gradually, you get the sensation that you’re looking into a mirror… every action you take is taken identically and immediately by the clone. You both have a simultaneous though that you want to puke, so you both run to the restroom. Due to differences in position you have to navigate slightly differently to get there, but you keep colliding along the way, choose the same toilet, and blow chunks all over the same dirty bowl.

Sure, there are tons of holes in this possibility, but consider it. Though each body may need to adjust itself to a unique perspective, the mind would issue the same high-level commands simultaneously. To get Freudian, each body would have a unique id (”the part of the psyche, residing in the unconscious, that is the source of instinctive impulses that seek satisfaction in accordance with the pleasure principle and are modified by the ego and the superego before they are given overt expression.”). However, there would be only one ego.

Food for thought…

-=Brian

But, when you talk to your own clone you will be talking to a separate entity that is like you in every possible way, but is not you.

Besides, I’m positive that the very moment after the clone comes to life, it will be someone else due to a divergence in the life you live from that moment on and the life it lives from that moment on. The difference may be infintessimally microscopic at first, but with time you’ll become two different people.

But that brings up a good point. In Star Trek, they actually transport the person after they disassemble them. In modern transport theory they don’t. They use quantum entanglement to reassemble the person on the other end. That’s copying, in Star Trek it’s actually transporting.

Or I think that’s what happened. I’m not very much into trek so who knows…

LOL. In the case of the Shatner example, I think that they’d be better off wrapping the whole process in a transaction block like in SQL. That way, if any part of the thing fails, you just roll it all back and automatically kill the copy. Sounds crazy huh?

I’m gonna try to steer this discussion back to the original topic.

We sort of established that the clone with uploaded memories would be a separate person. Let’s go back to my example where doctors botch the lethal injection and you stay alive. There are huge ramifications here.

From the legal standpoint which one of you is the “real one”? Which one gets the car, the house, and the money? And once we establish that, what happens to the other one that is not recognized by the legal system?

Would they just kill you? Would they force him to get a new social security, and a new drivers license? Or would they just kill him?

And what are the rights of the digital copy of your memories in storage? Would deleting your backup be considered a murder?

Finally, back to the beginning. I think that Startrek style teleportation falls into the same category here. Your body is destroyed here, and then reconstituted at another location via some quantum entanglement crazy physics stuff. It’s the same exact principle as mind transfer though. It’s just here instead of uploading into clone we simply build the exact replica of you, including all your neural connections.

So same issue applies. Let’s say that the teleporter on Enterprise breaks and it fails to dematerialize Capitan Kirk. However it does send the structural data down to the planet and it materializes a second copy of him. Now we have two Kirks.

Thank god that this never happened, because I don’t think the world would be able to handle two William Shatner’s singing as a duet.