Yes…philosophy on Eve forums. Well, actually a specific well known philosophy issue. Stifle that yawn and you may find this interesting…
Most people know about the teleporter conundrum. You get destroyed and an ‘identical’ copy of you is made elsewhere…which is ostensibly ‘you’ and a direct continuation of your conscious experience. But…what happens if the original you does not get destroyed ? There are now two of you…one of which is a copy.
The conundrum is, how can the copy be you, when you are already being you and were never destroyed. Surely there is now an imposter out there. And, if the copy out there is an imposter when you don’t get destroyed…it is equally an imposter if you do !
Likewise with clone jumping…which is essentially the same thing. Which of those clones is the real you ? Eve has it that we are immortal, but it is arguable that a copy of you is not the ‘real’ you or a direct continuation of your specific consciousness.
And what happens if the teleporter doubles or triples the input matter? One could actually build a clone army like that.
Whichever clone has the transfered consciousness. But really, they both have the potential to be you depending on the circumstance, being: which clone have you jumped in.
It’s arguable, but it’s also arguable that they’re both you. Not too far-fetched when they say that there could be multiple dimentions of our reality. They’re guessing we each have a “twin” in any of those dimensions, effectively saying that two, three or a hundred of you is still you.
But a car factory turns out loads of identical cars yet they are not the ‘same’ car.
When I wake up in the morning, I do not ask myself if I am the same person who went to bed the night before. If an identical clone of me was placed in the bed too, they can think they are me all they like, but why would the fact that a clone was placed in the bed next to me change anything about my certainty that I am the same person who went to bed ?
Someone else cannot be me while I am already being me.
Cars have no consciousness, they’re “dead matter”.
I hope not.
I don’t ask myself anything, except “Where’s the coffee”.
It shouldn’t. But if it’s a clone of yourSelf, possessing your same consciousness then it would also have the right to not ask if itself is the same person because it is.
It all depends where your consciousness is. If it is clone nr.8 then clone nr.8 is you but if consciousness can be split then you may find yourSelf inhabiting several clones at once.
I think your ‘real’ body has been destroyed long time ago when you were turned into a capsuleer and all of your clones are just that: clones. Copies.
And when you jump, your current consciousness is uploaded to the system, transferred to your other clone and the old clone is either left frozen or destroyed, depending on your choice.
This is also why you’re immortal: as long as this system is kept intact and whoever is maintaining is is uploading you to a fresh clone any time your previous clone is destroyed, you will keep coming back from the dead.
Does this mean you could theoretically have multiple clones active at the same time if the clone you jumped out of is not frozen after uploading consciousness? I guess that’s technically possible with the cloning technique in New Eden, but I don’t know enough of EVE lore to know what kind of safeguards exist have to make sure only one clone is active at a time.
I think the original body is just modified into a capsuleer. You still have it until your 1st podding. Then its destroyed and you start going through clones. Never get podded (indy/trader) watch yourself grow old!
That’s only if you jump to a freshly installed clone.
If you jump to that one clone that you installed those expensive learning implants in 4 years ago, you wake up with the same lungs and liver that you’ve been smoking and drinking in for the last 4 years while training.
What happens then if I jump out of my original capsuleer (had it never been podded) as soon as I could, jump into clones and smoke and drink on them. Would I have to jump back to my original clone to get a fully healthy replacement clone again? Or if I clone off a 4 yr old clone with health issues, should it matter?
But a copy of you isn’t actually you, as you could have the copy in the same room as you and you have your distinct consciousness and he has his. How can he have your consciousness when you already have it ?
Which means if you died and the copy lived on…it would not actually be a continuation of your specific consciousness carrying on. An imposter who looked and acted just like you would be living on.
Its been a philosophical conundrum for centuries…in fact even the Greek ‘ship of Theseus’ problem touches the same issue…
So. A copy isn’t the original, that’s established. I thought that’s why we called them copies after all.
So what’s the big deal? One clone = one person, two clones = two persons with their very own experiences.
Because a copy of you isn’t actually ‘you’…the claim of immortality can’t be true. The copy is not carrying on your specific consciousness.
Worth noting that some are already claiming that people will be able to ‘upload’ their minds onto computer systems within 20 or 30 years. The Eve cloning technology is actually not that far off. Thus this debate really isn’t something in the far off future.
But the game says so: “transfer your consciousness” did Aura say.
It may be possible but I don’t think our crazy civilization can live that long, not when we have madmen pointing nuclear weapons at each other and their “councilors” pushing for mutual destruction like they’re discussing Weight Prevention.
They’ll first have to make sure that the clones survive first. That cloned sheep did die, and not of old age.
It’s all for nothing if they insist on calling each other terrorists while missile rattling and lying like the priest who just turned the corner from behind his church.
I believe what you are referring to is colloquially known as a “fork.” Back when warclones were a hot ticket infomorph psychologists drew a thin line in the sand between capsule clones and warclones due to a disparity in the biological equipment available to a warclone. A personality stack contains thoughts, but the body still contains the mind.
Genolution, and Capsuleers by extension, take conistency of mind and form very seriously. In stark contrast, the brain chemistry of a mass-produced bioweapon would surely affect an infomorph that wraps themselves in disposable flesh for the purpose of combat. Who can say whether a personality stack that comes from or goes into a capsule clone is still the same person? If your warclone doppleganger commits a crime are you accountable? CONCORD would probably say so.
At the end of the day it’s the individual that affirms its own existence. That is one thing that even the ancients spoke of: “Ego sum, Ego existo.” If I believe that I exist then I must exist. If I believe that I am two people, and it is in my power to become two people, then why should it not be true? Why stop at two? Why not ten, or twenty, or a million? Think about Sansha Kuvakei and how he would answer that question.
What I mean by that is: A warclone’s central nervous system and indeed even their brain was constructed to be as conducive to soldiering as possible. A clone soldier’s fifth lobe is the only part of its body that makes it different from any other, and even that is essentially digitized thoughts running on the fabricated body’s wetware. The organic mind within was produced to be identical to every other in its batch.
According to current lore (this was originally in EVE Source, not in the lore we had at launch):
Once a candidate makes it through the entire five years of mental and physical hardship and exertion, he is ready to face the final test: in order to gain his certification and become a full-fledged capsuleer, he must submit to voluntary euthanasia, give up the body he was born in, and clone into a new version of himself, for the first time coming squarely face to face with death. Despite the prodigious investment of time and energy the preceding years have demanded, it’s surprising to note how many candidates cannot make this final step, forgoing all they’ve learned because they can’t bear to cross the Rubicon into posthumanity.
It’s based on a physical reality called “entanglement”. All clones are entangled on the quantum level. That is achieved at the moment the blank clones are grown. In the recent past it could still happen that clones lost their perma-entanglement for mere femtoseconds, but long enough that the new clone would wake up with fewer skills than the last active clone. Thankfully, progress in link integrity and entanglement monitoring equipment has solved that problem.
If it’s too complicated, consider joining the Amarrian Church as a True Believer, and thou willst see the Light.
I think nature itself protects us from having clones that are exactly the same. More precisely, quantum physics does not allow it.
In a Newtonian world, you could observe the state of every atom in your body, record its positions and momenta and internal state with arbitrary precision, and then assemble a perfect copy.
However, we now know that it is fundamentally impossible to make such a perfect record of the state of your atoms. Quantum mechanics tells us that act of measuring the state of a particle alters its state, irrevocably. And there is worse news: the outcome of such a measurement is a random new state - we can only compute the probability distribution for the measurement outcomes. So we can not really find out what the quantum state of the particle was before the measurement.
There is a way out: quantum teleportation. It uses entanglement, as mr. Yong noted, and you do not need to figure out what the state of the particle is! You can teleport an unknown state of a particle to a particle far away. However, the way this works is that the original particle will have lost its original state with no way to retrieve it. So, you cannot make a clone, and if the operators make a mistake, the outcome is that the teleportation fails, and the information is lost on both sides of the teleportation channel. “You” are gone.
So, TLDR: you can only teleport an exact state by destroying the original. If you try to make a clone any other way, it won’t be exactly you - however, it can probably be close enough to you that it fools everyone, including yourself!
Of course, there is the related philosophical question of how to define this concept of “you”. If we think mechanically, “you” are defined by a collection of particles in specific states and relation to each other. But then this “you” is constantly changing in time anyway. You are a Ship of Theseus, whether you have clone jumped or not.
