Brinens and Things

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.