Question of the Day: January 21, 2019

[brin_bellway]

questionoftheday asks: How do you think you would get along with clones of yourself? Would your clones be able to get along with each other?

My answer:

Pedantic answer: I know my parents wanted more kids, but I think one sibling is probably enough for me. The exact answer depends on how much younger the twin is, since "clone" tends to indicate that your twin is significantly younger than you (rather than gestating alongside you).

Colloquial answer: I feel like I would probably get along pretty well with my forks, though if they're, like, Opia levels of accuracy we're going to have to spend some time diverging first in order to get anything done.

I'm not sure why "clones getting along with each other" would have a different answer from "getting along with your clones". Are we not equals?

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

Biological clones are basically siblings, yes. I already have one of those, don't really see the need for more.

Clones in the sense of mind-forks with identical bodies? I think we'd get on unless we were competing for resources (i.e. access to money/family/friends/prized possessions). I don't know how I'd react under those conditions. We'd diverge quickly in the ways which allow for interesting conversation, because I'm the sort of person who'd respond to "There's five of me" with "Okay, time to make some *real* progress on the ole' infinite reading list."

If the clones aren't perfect copies, then they might not have a equal dynamic. Ditto if the prime gets to have your life, the others might be jealous?

[brin_bellway]

>>Ditto if the prime gets to have your life, the others might be jealous?<<

Mm, there's that. I'm not sure if "jealous of prime's life" would be quite the right framing, but it could lead to some similar results.

I think if it were me, there would be [the trouble adjusting to the upheaval in life circumstances] and [getting pissed at *other* people for thinking the me holding down the fort is More Real], and if these occurred at the same time† they could blend together.

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>>unless we were competing for resources (i.e. access to money/family/friends/prized possessions)<<

Time with family and friends might be a problem. There isn't *all* that much money lying around to have access to, and each me has equal ability to work (not at *exactly* the same job, but could find a very similar one with relative ease). Luckily I don't tend to get attached to objects much beyond becoming accustomed to their sensory input (so it *would* suck having to get new ones but only as part of the general-life-upheaval suckiness; I'd get used to it): my most prized possessions are all information and can be easily copied.

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>>We'd diverge quickly in the ways which allow for interesting conversation, because I'm the sort of person who'd respond to "There's five of me" with "Okay, time to make some *real* progress on the ole' infinite reading list."<<

:)

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†As opposed to something more Thomas-Riker-style, where you don't find out there's another you living your old life until after you've gotten used to your new one.

[contrarianarchon]

... It just occurred to me, if you're the kind of person who believes all clones are inferior, then your clones will think that too? ... That could lead to some fucked up tautological dynamics.

(Do the you's have a legal existence? IDK, that's too specific a part of the scenario, I guess)

[thedarlingone]

I have to get a bunch of shit done in the next few hours so I don't have time to delve into this right now, but I feel like this might be a really interesting conversation for the two of us to have at some point, because my perception of mind and memory as they relate to identity seems to be so different from yours. (I think there was a conversation at some point where I was talking about reincarnation without the memories of your past self, and you said that from your point of view that's essentially perma-death since you perceive your memories as being... as I understand it, your core self? I know when you were talking about Men In Black you mentioned having a really strong reaction to the idea of having your memories rewritten at all.) Specifically, my assumption about clones tends to be that they would be physical-only with their own sets of experiences, whether they were same-physical-age xerox copies or much younger gestated copies.

Huh. Actually -- I don't think I actually know how or whether this relates to your experience, we may have talked about it but a lot of the time we've known each other has been while I wasn't forming terribly coherent memories even of written words (which may also have something to do with the way my sense of self these days tends to be pretty detached from my sense of my past?)... uh. I lost track of that sentence somewhere. What I was going to say is, I wonder what any of that may have to do with my ability to more or less consciously edit a lot of my own feelings and prejudices. Like the thing with Ethan when he first showed up a few years back, me pretty much taking my psychological self completely apart and putting it back together again with different assumptions. That kind of zeroth-level questioning doesn't seem to be something that comes natural to a lot of people, I don't think I've seen much of anybody else do it quite the way I do, so.

Anyway. Yeah. I guess if a clone was xeroxed like in the story they would have at least your recent memories, possibly all of them since memory has to be stored physically within the brain, but... like. I wonder how long it would take to diverge. That would actually be a really interesting scientific study to do if that kind of cloning were possible; the ethics of it would of course be a hell of a thing to work out, but like - that would be an opportunity to determine just how much randomness there is in the firing of neurons. I don't know if you could get a solid conclusion on whether thought is completely deterministic and affected only by outside stimuli or whether there's some kind of metaphysical component to the self, a "soul" or whatnot, separate from the stored electronic memories. (Can you clone a soul? If not, would all the clones just be corpses? I'm sure there would be a lot of religious discussion on whether clones have "real" souls or some kind of lesser existence...)

Anyway. Uh. Yes. I have to shower and go shopping and do laundry and yeah. (Personally, I think the main issue my clones would have / the main issue I'd have with being cloned from a prime!me, would be that then we'd all have to support ourselves and find places to live and shit, and it's hard enough for one of me. I've been so dependent on my friends to get me anywhere, and unless the clones were all the gestated type and started out with different adoptive families (which would diverge them pretty damn quick), they'd be starting completely from scratch and I don't know how they'd support themselves long enough to get relevant experience or make friends or like... learn the life skills I'm still tussling with, or make anything work. I mean if they were xeroxed I guess they'd have as many life skills as I do, but they'd also all have to get IUDs and CPAP machines and expensive shoes and diabetes meds and brain meds just in order to start being halfway functional. It seems like a bad idea. ^_^

I think I also have a bunch of other thoughts on clones related to Star Wars, because even though I haven't actually seen the Clone Wars TV show, there are complicated Leverage-AU-related reasons I'm having thoughts about clones and clone culture related to specifically the Star Wars clones setup, and specifically when you have that many clones and they have formed basically their own culture or at least subculture, what happens when you have clones essentially raising a kid who's not physically a clone? Like the idea of being culturally a clone is one that's gonna wind up being relevant if/when I ever wind up writing this X-Wing/Leverage fusion AU (Star Wars X-wing characters and setting, Leverage setup and roles). Which is less relevant but is somewhat relevant. God, I gotta run, I have so many thoughts on this, hopefully I remember to come back to it later.

(addenda on rereading after posting: I think with the soul thing I was going to mention a third option but got distracted, which is that the whole chaos theory fractals thing, you know with randomness just naturally randomizing itself because entropy, could in that case potentially be a confounding factor / could potentially maybe be argued if I tried hard enough to be on some level a soul. Or at least a metaphysical concept causing the clones to diverge, so not so much a soul but still... something interesting along those lines. Can a scientific concept also be metaphysical? There are probably reasons I've never really tumbled into the rationalist sphere despite you reblogging people from it.)

(the other addendum is about the star wars thing: i was thinking in terms of clones raising an adopted child, and actually the way the leverage au is gonna wind up it's less fully raising one because the relevant "child" is a teen/young adult being trained by clone commandos, but he still gets pretty heavily assimilated, and so i also wanted to note down for later that i never did figure out whether if two clones of the same person had a biological kid, whether that kid would be genetically identical to both parents or what, or if that would even be possible at all.)

[brin_bellway]

I know you saw the thread a few weeks ago where I was talking with swimmer963 about different senses of self, but I'm not sure whether you saw the whole thing (since it was shortly *before* I adopted a policy of reblogging responses to me even if I have nothing further to say about them, and I haven't reached that point yet in my retroactive implementing of the policy).

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>>we may have talked about it but a lot of the time we've known each other has been while I wasn't forming terribly coherent memories even of written words<<

There's a bit of previous talking about it, but not much, I think:

I think that’s what they call “self-modification”?

I don’t think I’ve done much in the way of re-jiggering, but then I haven’t really tried. Most of the things I do are attempts to better understand the way I currently am, which is also something I see a lot of in your posts.

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>>Like the thing with Ethan when he first showed up a few years back<<

Even apart from the zeroth-level-questioning thing per se, you being rather more plural than I am is bound to have some effect on sense of self too. I'm not the *most* singlet person I've ever met--that'd be Chris Witham, I think--but I'm pretty far down that end of the spectrum.

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>>they'd also all have to get IUDs and CPAP machines and expensive shoes and diabetes meds and brain meds just in order to start being halfway functional<<

Well, some forms of copying (like the teleporter in the story) would also copy the IUD and perhaps the shoes (if you were wearing them at the time), but yeah.

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>>randomness just naturally randomizing itself because entropy, could in that case potentially be a confounding factor / could potentially maybe be argued if I tried hard enough to *be* on some level a soul. Or at least a metaphysical concept causing the clones to diverge, so not so much *a* soul but still... something interesting along those lines. Can a scientific concept also be metaphysical? There are probably reasons I've never really tumbled into the rationalist sphere despite you reblogging people from it.<<

I have seen people (I think they were rationalists, now that you mention it) say that there's a good possibility that because of quantum shit it might not actually be possible even in theory to copy a brain to that level of fidelity, and so the philosophy of mind-copying collapses to "it's impossible, so it never comes up". I know there's a lot of people out there who use "because quantum" on stuff that you cannot actually use quantum for, and I am not a quantum mechanic and cannot vouch for the plausibility of their claim; it was, at least, not *blatantly* bullshit the way some ~quantum~ explanations are.

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>>i never did figure out whether if two clones of the same person had a biological kid, whether that kid would be genetically identical to both parents or what, or if that would even be possible at all.<<

There was a bit in Randall Munroe's book What If? in which he talked about this, and the conclusion he came to was "it's kind of like being a clone but with a *lot* more genetic disorders from recessive genes emerging; don't do it, just clone them outright instead". Basically, a child produced by mixing two identical genomes is maximally inbred.