Hi Squad
Question:
"Suppose there is a teleportation system that copies your DNA, kills
you then instantaneously builds a perfect copy of you at a different
location would you agree to travel by it?
Or suppose it doesn't kill you, would it create another you?
What does it take? Is it enough to copy your DNA? Are "you" defined
by your DNA?"
On 1 Feb 99, at 21:52, diana@hongkong.com wrote:
DIANA:
> I would say that according to the MOQ our DNA only reflects our biological
> value. So, this transporter would create a perfect biological copy but
> mentally it would be like a baby with no social or intellectual patterns.
I think the above would be true from either a MOQ point of view or from a current
scientific point of view. The mind/brain would be (a) tabula rasa as DNA appears to be no
more than a carrirer of physical information. It seemed to work OK for Dolly the sheep
though, who (correct me if I'm wrong) was a clone in the classic sense.
DIANA:
> On the other hand if you could include memory in the package, the social
> and intellectual patterns would be retained. Somehow that still doesn't
> satisfy though. The patterns might be there, but I'm not so sure about the
> consciousness.
If the memories were copied exactly would it not be the case that an exact duplicate of
the original _would_ exist in the static sense, including the consciousness of the
original - unless the developing human physical structure carries with it some other form
of additional information. This makes the assumption that memories are the carriers of
information regarding experience. From that point on the experiences of the original and
the 'copy' would diverge so there would in fact be two originals.
On 1 Feb 99, at 22:50, Magnus Berg wrote:
MAGNUS:
> What bothers me is this. If patterns of the four levels are
> all there is, and if we can make an exact copy of a set of patterns of
> those levels, then we really should have an exact copy. But as you say,
> what we call consciousness might not be copied after all, it would kind'a
> not *be* consciousness since consciousness hardly can be at two places at
> the same time, (supposing the original wasn't killed).
Under ordinary circunstances I would agree but in this case we are talking about an exact
copy of the original, including all the experiences of the original extracted from the
memories. What is left out?
MAGNUS:
> I simply don't think it's enough to only copy the patterns of the four
> levels. A person is more than that, but what? I guess the easy way out
> is to call it DQ, but I'm not very satisfied with that either.
If the four levels and DQ are all there is, as Pirsig suggests, then at this point we
would have to diverge from the MOQ. If it were the case that an exact duplicate,
including the memories, could be constructed then this would imply that our 'self' is
firmly grounded in our physical or material body.
The above raises two further interesting problems:
1) If memory, the result of experience, could be extracted/copied from the original then
this could be transferred to ANY other body, not necessarily the copied original.
2) If fake memories could be constructed, memories that are not necessarily the result of
any one persons experience, would they be distinguishable from those memories that do
result from experience.
DIANA:
> > The DNA is only the information about the body, it is not in
> > itself the actual experiencing body. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding DNA, but
> > you might be able to write down all the information, but how would you make
> > the new body actually alive?
>
MAGNUS:
> Right, I don't think DNA is the key to instant cloning, its only purpose
> is to transfer genes from one generation to the next. It's useless in the
> time scopes we're talking about here.
I would have thought that bringing the body to life would be a technical problem, not a
philosophical one, although I could be wrong. Reproducing the body and/or parts of the
body does raise ethical issues but the real issue here, in terms of the question posed,
is the experiences and interaction with the world that the original body gained over the
course of a life. The physical medium within which the consciousness/mind resides is
pretty irrelevant in many ways, although it would be interesting to ascertain the extent
to which the physical medium dictates the range of experiences possible. At a simplistic
level, genes appear to be physical/biological information carriers (which is interesting
from an MOQ point of view - which level(s) are we talking about here) and as such do not
carry social/environmental or intellectual information. Unless the experiences and
memories of the person are transferred along with the physical medium each journey would
effectively be the start of a new life.
So I suppose, considering only the above, the answers to all three parts of the main
question would have to be NO. *I* am more than a dolllop of DNA.
Horse
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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