As Bo suggests, this thread has turned into an inquiry into the SELF.
Below are 3 reasons why I believe we can theoretically duplicate the "self".
1) As Pirsig explains on p178, you are a collection of patterns. In
scientific terms, according to autopoiesis, or the "self forming" theory of
life, you are a system. Life is defined by an organized circular feedback
loop that is open to energy and matter. It selectively couples the pattern
and the universe. Direct experience creates and changes the pattern and the
universe. Destroy the pattern and you kill the life.
If all we are is patterns, then to copy all the patterns is to duplicate us.
For info on the self forming theory of life, go to
http://www.informatik.umu.se/~rwhit/AT.html
better yet, read Capra’s "Web Of Life". Conceptually, it is completely
consistent with the MOQ.
2) Your cells regenerate constantly – as often as monthly for major organs.
Your organization system is a self-forming cloning machine. It just isn’t
instantaneous.
3) Consciousness is an abstract objectification of the self. As RMP states
on p179, the mind is an intellectual pattern formed from social patterns, out
of biological, out of inorganic. You are not your body or your synapses. In
fact, these are actually intellectual abstracts of value patterns too. If you
can duplicate these intellectual patterns, why can’t you duplicate the "self"
intellectual pattern? You can!
Now for the objections that have arisen…….
1) The copy will be static – This is silly and has already been dismissed
effectively. An exact copy of a self-forming system is a self forming system.
An exact copy of a car is quite drive-able.
2) What about life forces and souls – Go to Bodvars MOQ kindergarten! This
is the antithesis of the MOQ.
3) It can’t be done – Who cares? The point is to come to grips with the
concept of self. Don’t spoil the fun.
4) Copying "objectifies" the self – The self is an objectified, or
subjectified, intellectual abstraction. Per p229, RMP sarcastically refers to
the self as the "little editor," and an "impossible fiction". Why can't this
fiction be recreated?
5) Where is it centered? Or what about the greater context? -- This is a
good one. I will admit that we are clearly not duplicating the whole system.
In both the scientific and the MOQ versions, you are only cloning what is
perceived as the inorganic and biological patterns. Intellectually, you call
these BODY. I can attack this criticism on two levels…
Scientifically, you don’t need to duplicate the whole system. If you
duplicate a car in a vacuum with no people or roads or time or space, you have
not duplicated the car. Our experiment assumes the contextual environment
remains the same around the car, or the clone. You therefore don’t have to
copy society and the world… just share the one that is already there. The car
is not centered around just its physical "structure" as SOM implies. It is
the entire universe of patterns of all levels. The BODY is an essential part
of the pattern, but it ain’t the only part.
>From a deeper MOQ level though, this whole question is forgetting that the
BODY itself isn’t real material stuff. Bodies are abstract intellectual
patterns too. Bodies are mental. Mental patterns are of the body. You are
duplicating a mental clone just as much as a physical clone. Everything is
one.
6) You can’t duplicate DQ – Excellent objection. I buy this argument to some
extent. Direct experience is what the MOQ’s empiricism subscribes to. It is
prior to subject and object, prior to self and universe. Direct experience
may well be unduplicatable. I agree that from the instant cloned, the two
beings would experience different DQ. Or in MOQ terms, DQ would create
different selves. This was the point of my sci-fi story.
In summary, though this may well never be possible, there is no reason to
assume that you couldn’t copy yourself and make two versions UP TO THE POINT
of duplication. From that point on they would differ.
I am absolutely sure of this, but then again, I am a clone whose cells have
been replenished 23 times since birth.
Roger
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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