Making copies

This is not funny anymore. I'm sweating after having done precisely nothing all afternoon. Ah well, time to riff on some silly subject for a while.

Oh, a couple of posts ago, I mentioned something about the nature of individuality and the illumination given it by the complexity and inevitability of the life that is composed of near-infinite decisions. If everything we do is predetermined or at least previously scripted by ourselves, and subject to identical conditions, the paths of our lives will never diverge from a single, particular route, then there appears to be little existence of individuality and the self-determinism or freedom of choice that it affords us.

What we are is essentially what we encounter. The conscious and unconscious decisions we make are up to the individual, but the choices the individual takes are dictated by the circumstances and experiences prior to the decision itself. Every tiny little thing affects who we are, and it is the aggregate of this that creates the person. Take two people of identical genetics, raise them in absolutely identical situations, as in every last detail, and consider if there can possibly in any difference between the two. It is a tricky and pretty much impossible to test question, as it is virtually impossible to provide an exactly identical environment for any two persons. In fact, even a near perfect simulation will suffice. Chances are, these two persons will turn out very similar, but will they be entirely similar? Will they be the same person, in effect? Say we take the exact same person and throw him in two parallel universes, but with varying circumstances, will the reactions, character, and so on, of the person be the same? Unlikely. It is like in an experiment, with all variables kept constant except for one, the results will vary. If all variables are kept the same, the results should be the same. Failure to achieve this is generally looked upon as a failure of the experimenter to produce sufficiently similar conditions. But if the same can be said of people, then what is the individual?

Why are you the person you are? Or rather, why are you, you? If there had been an identical twin, and he or she had been placed in your position, would that genetically identical person then be you? If so, then the concept of uniqueness that people like to attach themselves to has no meaning, for each individual has no existence except as a collection of the experiences and interactions he or she goes through. So each person is nothing more than a series of data, and if the data can be faithfully recreated, the person will be faithfully recreated. The awareness and consciousness of this recreated simulacrum would then be the original individual, not a recreation at all. At the same time, the original would also be the original. It would not be a matter of the two being indistinguishable, but of the two actually being the same individual. Recreate this a million times, you would have a million yous. Then what value do you have?

If there were a way to extract everything from your brain, all the data, and place it in a body exactly identical to yours, you would then be looking at yourself. Not a copy, but yourself. So there would be multiple pieces of your own individuality running about, and the loss of one or the other would have no consequence. If such a copy were to be made, then you yourself were to be eliminated from existence, would you continue to exist then? The continuous existence is interrupted, but immediately followed up seamlessly by another existence completely identical to the original, and the second is in fact the same as the first, then the existence can be said to be continuous as well.

The major argument against this would be the soul, but it is far too hot for me to continue right now, so I shall return to it later.