In an RGT thread someone claimed that eventually we will be able to download our consciousness into robot bodies. That person claimed that if they downloaded their consciousness into a robot body at thier death...then they would live on in a robot body. Good for them but if your going to do that...might as well download your consciousness into lots of robot bodies....that way you can party in two places at once.

Anyways that got me thinking. Suppose you could make exact clones of yourself. By exact copies I mean that the moment your clone is created your bodies and state of mind are exactly the same. Suppose you step into a machine...it scans you instantaneously and makes 10,000 copies of you. Suppose then within a week 5000 copies go out, get drunk, and kill someone. Obviously we lock up the 5000 murderers because they are a danger to society. What about the other 5001? Do we actually wait until they actuall commit a crime before we lock them up too? Or should we lock them up now before they commit a crime they seem to have a prepensity to commit?

If they are your clones, then legally they have the same status as you do. It depends on how the clone is developed. If you raise one from infancy, then sure, the usual parents' responsibility laws apply.

Otherwise you are only guilty of making too many copies of yourself if you suck at life.

So don't do that please. Your word count would probably induce a technological singularity that would throw humanity back 3 centuries.

There is no such thing as exact clones of oneself. QM prohibits this in the perfect sense even if it was remotely technologically possible to try it in the approximate one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_theorem


In any case you can start from 2 humans of identical DNA (not clones in the QM sense though) and eventually they are 2 different people in many respects. Every second that passes the difference gets stronger.

Same applies to memories too.

Think there was a Michael Keaton movie sometime back that dumbed that down rather well.

I honestly did not expect the nit picking(but I appreciate the link so its all good)...Anyways Suppose the clones were not exact copies but instead a copies that are as close to being exact as is allowed by the laws of physics. What then? Do you lock up people who have not committed crimes if they have been show thru the actions of their "clones" to have a prepensity to commit a crime?

Is this a joke? (honestly?) Obviously the answer to the OP is no. You would only be the same for about 1 milisecond when the clone is first "born" or whatever. After that, you wont be looking at exactly the same thing (as the "two" of you were before you split) and wont have the same experiences anymore and will therefore be two different people. Completely different. As different as identical twins are at 1day old.

Just push it to the extremes and you will see. For instance, right when the clone was "born" from you, your life goes on normally and your clone is tortured brutally for 5 years. Then the clone kills the guy who tortures him. Would you be held responsible as well? **** no. You had different experiences and for the general public to think that you are any sort of danger to society b/c your clone killed someone is just retarded.

And if you should be held responsible, i.e. the public is right in their assumption that ur clone killed someone and u should be responsible, then you would have been there killing the same person at the same time lolz.

edit: you control yourself only. this is why you are responsible for your actions and not those of others.

To bring the word QM into this discussion is absurd. You can tell there is no such thing as an exact clone of anything with a magnifying glass.

I think your question is close to the same as asking this hypothetical:

If a certain neighborhood of youths had a 50% tendency or perhaps more, of getting drunk and committing murder, should we lock up the other 50%?

The only real difference is in one case the cause is a mental "defect", and in the other the "defect" is environmental.

Absurd? Are you serious? I wasnt being nit at all here actually. QM is at the root of all these issues of who someone is. If you establish a difference in principle then the interaction of the 2 different systems with different environments will eventually produce substantial differences in the large scale systems (people). Its important to establish identity at the most fundamental of levels before anything else can be debated.


It is true that there are qualities of a person that are strongly correlated to DNA. If one can establish an "addiction" for example to some kind of criminal behavior that is triggered by chemistry that the particular DNA enables then he who cloned this problem to others is ethically responsible clearly. It may be possible to establish that if they were aware of the issue. But they will never be the same people.

I suppose you are responsible then only for these kinds of behavior that are highly depending on DNA structure if that can be established beyond doubt. I mean something stronger than alcoholism say. Not all people are addicted to drinking and even those that are, are not all equally eager to get drunk and drive. But if you can find some other very strong correlation of behavior to DNA that is extremely tough to resist /oppose then i suppose one can claim always that by cloning your problem you proliferated it and you are indeed ethically responsible. Of course something similar can be argued against parents that know that all their offspring will share a horrible genetic problem and yet they go on to have them. Still one needs to be careful with such claims to avoid entering sensitive areas of eugenics and racism etc

My post originally had the intention to establish carefully the direction of how blame can be assigned by not allowing the trivial acceptance that cloning in the ultimate sense is doable.

The correlation one requires here must be a very strong one that cannot be resisted (so strong that the QM no cloning argument cannot alter the outcome ie 2 very close starting systems will inevitably exhibit identical patterns of behavior is some well selected subset of their "life", even if in principle different at large in several regards within that "life" to be technically unable to call them the "same person") and one must be aware of it as well for legitimate ethical blame to exist. Even 2 people that are destined to have an affinity for a substance say to abuse it, can due to different upbringing react in different ways to the stimulation. If you have been educated and taught empathy by example it will be a lot harder to disregard human life which is what one does when they get drunk and then drive for example. But i am clearly looking for something extremely strong in correlation that is impossible to avoid and that the person cloning themselves is aware of and would result in a crime if themselves were brought to the right conditions that the clones eventually arrive to.

#5: Yep, provided there is enough of a sample size.

No, it is not. Nor are atoms, or anything like this. Carbon atoms are not relevant in who we are on the subject of accountability. You are waaaaaaaaaaaay too far zoomed in.

Are you prepared to defend that the unpredictability in human behavior is not at all related to its quantum origin? I can imagine a full sequence of things that started with the decay of a particular atom that triggers an entirely different macroscopic future (ie a rare mutation, cancer etc). I do believe also that in some broader (non rare i mean) level the dependence on initial conditions some of which quantum in origin and chaos theory combine to produce a radically different result in some even limited aspect of behavior given enough time.


Consider a woman about to get pregnant. She has digested some radioactive material via food recently, without knowing, that is now part of her body. It produces decay radiation that is non trivial but still very hard to target a specific location of her body that is critical (her eggs) (the woman wont die from radiation poisoning i mean and her eggs wont be destroyed at all, its a minor form of poisoning). A random decay produces a mutation in the DNA of her egg (real rare event actually) . Out of thousands/millions of decays that one made a very rare collision to the macromolecule base that produced a gene alteration (a very low probability event) . As a result the child that is born later after that egg is fertilized and brought to full term has a rare genetic disorder that completely alters the daily habits and behavior of that woman for the rest of her life as it relates to caring for that child. All because of that one atom that did decay in that particular manner vs all other possibilities. A completely quantum random event.

In exactly the same way as an identical twins should always suffer the same punishment.

I remember seeing a program when DNA evidence of a murder pointed to one of identical twins being guilty but the jury could not convict because they could not prove one of them innocence. What you suggest would make things much easier, just lock them both up. They have the same genes anyway, and it gets the case of your books.

Yes but in that case of the 2 twins each one is not responsible for the existence of the other. The one cloning himself however is (if the strong correlation i suggested earlier can be established).

I see, in the same way that parents are responsable for the actions of their children?