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> I would experience death, and then a backup would experience the simulation. But would it even know it's a backup? If it (or say, "he") has your memories, he

> I would experience death, and then a backup would experience the simulation. But would it even know it's a backup? If it (or say, "he") has your memories, he will remember your first kiss as his first kiss, he'll look at your SO and feel the feelings you have looking at your SO, and think "Oh, let me greet them the way I usually do, 'What's up buttercup?'.". I think we're just the sum of our memories, and if the memories are identical, wouldn't it add up to the same person?

LoganDark 3y ago
It's not that the backup will somehow not be identical to me. It's that I won't get to experience waking up as the backup. It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone. It's basically like the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. You get to experience waking into one end and then you die. Your life is over. The fact that something walks out the other end doesn't matter anymore. Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you simply having moved - the clone will even describe the experience of moving - you are now dead.
- netsharc 3y ago
  > It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone. But will you even be aware of that? > Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you And how about the inside observer? I used to think like you do. But now I think, Logan2 will have your memory, it should even think "well that's done, now where's my wife, she said she'll meet me and after this procedure we'll go get ice cream.". Or things like "Ah yeah I got to deal with my brother, he said something hurtful and we need to fix this conflict.". And your "soul" should not notice anything being different. If the copies are identical, shouldn't they generate the same thoughts, be triggered by the same things, like the smell of the wife's perfume or be e.g. irrationally angry at someone revving their car, and are we aware enough to think "Hang on, something's different?". To be technical about it, it's like having a virtual machine's state be copied onto a new host system, I think even the process called awareness or soul is a result of our software/hardware configuration, and nothing external, and the awareness would be an identical copy.
  - brhsagain 3y ago
    Thought experiment: what if you copied and restored the backup into two bodies, and both bodies were a state continuation of the original? Would the two existences be simultaneously the smae person? I think it would make more sense to say that at the moment of cloning the two bodies are separate consciousnesses with the same state. In your analogy, if you copied the VM state onto two different host systems, I would think each host system would be a separate conscious experience. It's whatever being a host system is that generates consciousness, not the state itself.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      I'm sure there's been movies about the scenario.. But yeah, it'd be weird to look at another person and he thinks he's me. It'd be hard to look from the outside at my copy and think "That's me, with all my knowledge and my thought processes", but.. it'd be the case.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > But will you even be aware of that? Can people stop missing the point and asking if the clone will know that it's a clone or not? Because that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what the clone thinks - I still died.
    - netsharc 3y ago
      RIP. I see you're in no mood to argue, but to me this death seems like the view of an external observer. As I say, I think my clone will happily live on thinking he's me, with all his (my) memories and his feelings and thoughts about the world, and about his own mind...
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        It's not that I'm not in the mood to argue, it's that the life and experiences of my clone won't matter to me. If I wanted to carry on a legacy or something that was larger than myself, then sure, I'd want that clone in the world even if I wouldn't get to see it myself. But in the sense of "I want to carry on living", I'd rather not die to get there, you know?

LoganDark 3y ago

It's not that the backup will somehow not be identical to me. It's that I won't get to experience waking up as the backup. It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone. It's basically like the teleporter that deconstructs you and then reconstructs you somewhere else. You get to experience waking into one end and then you die. Your life is over. The fact that something walks out the other end doesn't matter anymore. Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you simply having moved - the clone will even describe the experience of moving - you are now dead.

netsharc 3y ago
> It'll be a different being, that just so happens to be a perfect clone. But will you even be aware of that? > Even if to an outside observer it'll be indistinguishable from you And how about the inside observer? I used to think like you do. But now I think, Logan2 will have your memory, it should even think "well that's done, now where's my wife, she said she'll meet me and after this procedure we'll go get ice cream.". Or things like "Ah yeah I got to deal with my brother, he said something hurtful and we need to fix this conflict.". And your "soul" should not notice anything being different. If the copies are identical, shouldn't they generate the same thoughts, be triggered by the same things, like the smell of the wife's perfume or be e.g. irrationally angry at someone revving their car, and are we aware enough to think "Hang on, something's different?". To be technical about it, it's like having a virtual machine's state be copied onto a new host system, I think even the process called awareness or soul is a result of our software/hardware configuration, and nothing external, and the awareness would be an identical copy.
- brhsagain 3y ago
  Thought experiment: what if you copied and restored the backup into two bodies, and both bodies were a state continuation of the original? Would the two existences be simultaneously the smae person? I think it would make more sense to say that at the moment of cloning the two bodies are separate consciousnesses with the same state. In your analogy, if you copied the VM state onto two different host systems, I would think each host system would be a separate conscious experience. It's whatever being a host system is that generates consciousness, not the state itself.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    I'm sure there's been movies about the scenario.. But yeah, it'd be weird to look at another person and he thinks he's me. It'd be hard to look from the outside at my copy and think "That's me, with all my knowledge and my thought processes", but.. it'd be the case.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > But will you even be aware of that? Can people stop missing the point and asking if the clone will know that it's a clone or not? Because that doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter what the clone thinks - I still died.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    RIP. I see you're in no mood to argue, but to me this death seems like the view of an external observer. As I say, I think my clone will happily live on thinking he's me, with all his (my) memories and his feelings and thoughts about the world, and about his own mind...
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      It's not that I'm not in the mood to argue, it's that the life and experiences of my clone won't matter to me. If I wanted to carry on a legacy or something that was larger than myself, then sure, I'd want that clone in the world even if I wouldn't get to see it myself. But in the sense of "I want to carry on living", I'd rather not die to get there, you know?