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

[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.