These conversations are always frustrating to me because people don’t stop and analyze their actual framework, and it’s nothing but pointless circling as a result. Most of these identity arguments are like cave men arguing about telecommunications.
Imagine writing hasn’t been invented yet and people are debating whether, if you have a phone call with someone, are you really talking to them? If you email them, are you really talking to them?
And the actual answer is that the concept of “talking” as such is something only cavemen would think about
The meaning of words isn’t a product of reality, but of their différance, a deferral of meaning to other signs. A world where we have voice messaging and emails is a world where “talking” no longer exists — that word has been cleaved and amalgamated into a new sign that shares only those letters and the gist of its meaning.
To the caveman, talking is near-synonymous with communication; but that has long stopped being true for a modern humans. If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? Cleave the notion of “sound” into sonic vibrations and auditory experience and at once you have your answer.
People always think this is a philosophical problem, but I think that’s a total distraction. It’s a sociological problem. “Identity” isn’t metaphysical or ontological or moral. It’s a tool, and if and when this technology exists, people will believe whatever is practical and profitable in the resulting social organization of society.
Don’t ask whether your clone is “you”. Ask whether you’ll have to pay taxes separately. Ask whether it’ll make dating simpler.
What would actually be challenged with such a development, I contend, is the the fixation on individual consciousness as the throne of identity.
There’s a lot you can conflate together because of how much bodies, personalities, and subjectivities are bundled up into a singular unit. But it all starts to fray when clones come into the picture
Where this analogy shines, I think, is when you map current arguments onto the pre-telecom cave people. Imagine a cave-philosophy imagined phones as a thought experiment.
You can imagine some of them respond sure, you can communicate, but speaking to someone in person is the only real way to talk to them. You can imagine some of them going so far as is to say I’ll only ever talk to people in person, I’ll never lock up my voice inside a machine!
And of course, there are in fact unique advantages to face to face communication — but the idea that it’s the end-all be-all is ridiculous in the face of the advantages of the alternatives.
There’s a lot of things people assume are essential to the character of consciousness which are really just figments of the scholastic-industrial mindset contingent on the socialization of past century — or worse, wholly illusionary.
(Last time we had this conversation I mentioned (and still maintain) that the view of consciousness as something continuous and whole is laughable in light of neuroscience, and people are too beholden to that illusion. But in truth it is both more robust (an interruption wouldn’t be death) and more flimsy (there are plenty of ‘deaths’ we’re stitching over throughout our lives) than people give it credit for.)
To tie this all back into a hotter take, I’ll reveal the remark that inspired my initial diatribe.
I think the idea that “something that just thinks it’s you isn’t you” is a cultural artifact, and with these technologies I don’t think there’s a long shelf life for this idea of you-ness being this special quality to hoard and jealously gatekeep.
Minds and language and social reality is too flexible not to adapt. I think the ontological vertigo people are experiencing at the prospect of cloning is mostly product of old, untested assumptions confronting problems outside the scope of the world they evolved in.
Sidebar: contentions about the relativity argument
Editor’s note: I include this for continuity and completeness, but I think it’s hard to parse extracted from the conversation it’s quoted from. You’re hearing one side of a phonecall.
Some have objected to the above claims — “I think therefore I am” wasn’t only discovered by white european thinkers, other cultures have had the same insights. “Not everything is relative!”
But I don’t see the relevance; it’s disconnected from the actual terms of the discussion. My objection, to be clear, is not that other cultures don’t have a concept of “perspective” — it was specifically that don’t have an identically delineated conception that can be marshalled as evidence to support the throne of subjective continuity.
Now, if the only hill you’re planting your flag on here is that there is no culture that has outright negated the existence of the internal perspective, that then will be an easier battle for you to fight, but not one whose vindication has much bearing on the original discussion.
So I have, ultimately, limited interest in disputing this (what’s the point?) — but I can make one decisive point. The very nature of the evidence you can cite here entails a surviorship bias — or rather, an existence bias. A culture can, after all, only weigh in on a discourse it’s aware of.
What of the fish who aren’t aware of their waters? (It’s worse: at least the fish factually are swimming in water — what of self-fulling waters created by the fish believing in them?)
The counterexamples you must find to rebut me are not cultures where evil descartes be like “I don’t think because I am not 😈”.
It would be a culture where the concept wouldn’t quite translate, where they’d be having a different philosophical conversation entirely.
Much harder to search for! And it certainly wouldn’t be indexed on the wiki page for a concept that is, arguendo, irrelevant — though you can find some interesting counterarguments on that page.
But, and here’s where I tie it back to my original point:
My argument all along as been that the idea of identity and individuality is mental technology, a social construct — and the thing about technology is that evolves to solve a problem.
Thus, the very framework I’m arguing for is one in which you should expect multiple different societies to have come up with it, because it’s in the human tech tree; we came up with it for a reason!
And if you look into the context of the philosophers cited in that wikipedia article, you’ll find that their societies have certain similarities.
Now, is the reason for this the trivial fact that in order to have a record of someone saying something philosophical, they had to live in a society with a tradition of writing down what dedicated philosophers say (but in truth everyone everywhere was also saying it)?
Or is it actually that “I’ve yet to see a society dismiss the internal perspective” is a statement that would be on par with “I’ve yet to see a organized society that doesn’t do agriculture”, if only it wasn’t quite so easy to see people presently not doing agriculture?
i don’t know! But crucially, this is where we should be looking to answer that question
It depends~
Anyway.
I don’t necessarily want to do futurist etymology here — just imagine how “calling” or “texting” would sound as verbs three hundred years ago.
More useful, I think, to pick apart the inherent faultlines of the concept.
But even that is contingent on what the technology does!
Teleporters are different from cloning are different from (non)destructive mind uploads.
Imagine how differently we’d view the technology if copying was only 99% accurate, or 99.99% accurate?
Consider the difference between a world where copies are legally bound to their originals, versus one where they immediately get separate personhood and rights.
You easily imagine cultures where there’s social pressure for clones to distance themselves from their original and seize an identity of their own, and cultures where there’s a pressure to stay in (un)comfortable lockstep.
(Imagine “family planning”, except it’s you plotting out which parts of your identity and possessions get inherited by which of your clones.)
I don’t want to get carried away in hypotheticals, but I just had two thoughts — a world where cloning is a luxury of a rich, full of high minded thinkpieces about how copies are essential to self-actualization and how grounding and reassuring it feels to have one person you can always count on; versus a world where the rat race incentivizes poor people to fork off a bunch of uploads because they can cheaply do remote work you then profit from.
But you can see how much this matters when we’re talking conceptual connotations, right? There’s worlds where “copy” is a term that hits like “best friend” or “spouse” (my better half!), and there’s worlds where “original” is as charged as “landlord” or “owner.”
There are some tempting lines to draw from first principles, though.
For instance, in that old essay I draw a distinction (in more awkward, pretentious terms) between “identity chains” and “identity clans.”
All your life you’ve lived along one you-chain, the sole population of your you-clan. If you had a clone, you’d both be part of the you-clan, but different you-chains.
But before you clone yourself, which (if any) of the copies bear your you-chain — does it fork? Does it simply stop, the way you stop being a minor? It depends on the how the copying happens.
Can you-chains break without copying?
Imagine how different our notion of consciousness would be, were we to upload ourselves into perfect emulations and then, with the fine control those emulations offer, could turn off regions of the brain and observe exactly how it (doesn’t) affect our perception of continuity?
Say you get cloned with 99.99% fidelity, then suffer a car accident that gives you severe brain damage. Which one is still you?
Heck, imagine if, in a world full of this sort of brainscan-copy, you could objectively evaluate how much a particular neural pattern has diverged, and people could write a kind of will stating that only the most similar-to-you mental descendent has the rights to your property — so the inheritance changes hands in the event of and accident (or character development value drift).
(Imagine if you could adopt someone into your you-clan if their psychology grew similar enough!)
There are a lot of different edges cases to consider, and different terminological proposals can handle them with differing degrees of elegance. Which one catches on depends on which edges cases people would encounter so often we need to narrativize and cope with.
Now, the use of “clan” here was intended as a nod to the idea of claiming descent from a common ancestor but you may ask what exactly it encompasses — only “you”s that share an original? Are “paraphyletic” you-clans invalid?
But very specific particulars of terminology are part of why I don’t wish to commit in the abstract. Is there utility in having a word for “things that could be described as you” that you’d also use for existing clones? Is there utility in having a word for “possible versions of you” that you also use for existing clones?
I lean towards no, mostly because I’m imagining “you-clan” as like “family”; in practice it’s not generally children you might have, it’s your actual relatives (and for some, adopted members).
Though that’s another line I thought about and forgot to include in the original post — to what extent you have obligations and expectations of your clones, and how this is enforced/manifested?
I think the line between self and clone would be a lot sharper or a lot blurrier depending on what extent the two of you are at odds or in this together.