motorollin wrote:
Karlos wrote:
if the original person is not destroyed before their clone is reconstructed at the receiving end, they are not the same person anymore
How do you know that? How do you know that an exact duplicate of the same brain physiology and chemical layout would not result in an identical, or even shared, consciousness?
This is the famous no-clone theorem in quantum information theory, which states that you cannot create perfect copies of arbitrary and unknown quantum states. And it's all Heisenberg's fault that we cannot know exactly what all quantum states in a given object are. Ergo, by definition the clone cannot be an
exact replica of the person going into the transporter.
This, by the way, makes no assumption whether what we refer to as 'consciousness' is actually a quantum or classical phenomenon. It has been argued on quite good grounds that it is classical, and that means you
can copy it. But there would be tiny, tiny changes in its 'structure' which could eventually destroy it, much like Mandelbrot's butterfly hypothesis.
Karlos wrote:
I would imagine the cloned entity would eventually develop some form of neuroses deriving from the knowledge of the destruction of their original self
I'm not sure about that. Assuming that their body was *exactly* as it was before, and they retained all of their memories and personality traits, then their sense of continuity of the self would be preserved (as in your sleep example). I don't think the destruction of their old body would be as much of an issue for most people as you think since they don't 'lose' anything. But again, we just don't know.
I'm in agreement with Karlos here, not because of the knowledge of having been destructed (although it could be a factor), but simply because there is no such thing as an
exact copy. That means you invite (mathematical) chaos in with open arms, and I'm not at all convinced at the moment that the human mind is capable of quelling the neurological storms which stem from such artifical causes. We'll be able to answer this question a whole lot better once IBM's BlueBrain project is well underway.
