There will never be two of me in my bed when I wake up, so I’m the same.
If my mind could be copied and embedded in a robot or whatever, then there are two of me, each now diverging. That other one is not me, as far as I, the other, am concerned.
If you are cloned while you are sleeping, and both the original and the copy are moved into different rooms before you wake up, both of you think themself is you, and both of you think the other is not you. So, who is correct?
The one that wasn’t the clone.
A world where two of me exist is fundamentally and irreconcilably different than a world where I simply go to bed and wake up each day. It makes no difference if I personally am aware.
if having copies of you walking around was a normal thing, our language and expectations would reflect that.
right now if another copy of you comes by and claims your wife and your house, you'd be miffed. but the whole concept of one of you owning the house is just an artefact of how individuality and possessions happen to be right now. it doesn't have to be forever. there was a time you could steal a picture and have the only copy - now you can save a copy on your phone and you don't deprive another of theirs. some day people and stuff could behave the same.
Or search engines.
I don't know how the legal cases will go, all I can say is that my suspicion is that, like search, such AI are simply too useful to be outlawed… but my armchair opinions are almost as far as possible from a guarantee, and even search had to change in response to copyright infringement laws.
A world where I get cloned and an unaware is distinctly divergent from a world where there is only one of me each time I wake up, regardless of how society handles it.
Yes, and if the law of excluded middle didn't hold, then all kind of magical things would happen too.
But it does, and they don't.
If you tell me this will happen tonight, I would right now call both "me". Both of them after the event would agree that I am them. Both of them would agree they are different people to each other, even if they say so in perfect stereo unison.
You're in effect saying "Assume there is a cloning process that is instant and creates a complete copy of you, both mentally and physically," and sure, in that theoretical world, you can talk about there being no way to know which was you, the clone or the original.
But IRL, we have no way of knowing what the properties of such a cloning process would be - maybe it's impossible to create a cloning process such that mentally, it is a complete copy. Maybe you can always tell whether you're the original or the clone. Similarly, maybe we simply cannot create a digital copy of a mind that cannot immediately tell it is the copy. We have literally no way of knowing.
So instead of living in the philosphical realm, we can have a lot more productive conversation in the practical one. Practically, it strongly appears to me that I have continuity every time I wake up, and practically, if you copied my mind and ran it on a computer, that mind would not be the "me" that appears to experience continuity. Practically, it would bring me no comfort to know that this other mind that used to be a copy of my own continues onwards while I die, no more so than it would bring me comfort to know a twin of mine continues onwards.
Moreover, if randomly one of the two dies and the other survives then either the original or the clone experiences death. So from the point of view of the original before the experiment, he has a 50% chance of dying. If we change the experiment to say that he has a 100% chance of dying but the clone has a 100% chance of surviving, the original would not agree to the experiment unless he was suicidal; obviously he has no reason to care that a different person will live on assuming his identity after he dies.
Obviously the original one is.
Whether the clone also things that it's me doesn't make it any more so, than if a paranoid person thought it was Napoleon would make them Napoleon.
After the first 'Clone Settlement' and the pains of splitting someone's belongings between the same person; it would have to be made illegal. No other way around it.
How do you tell which one is the original? Atoms don't have labels. But atom-level copy isn't possible. Say we made the scan at large enough scale that has fidelity but it isn't identical.
Reality doesn't care about the labels. One of the two pre-existed, which is the original.
>How do you tell which one is the original? Atoms don't have labels.
That's a problem regarding our knowledge. There's still an original, regardless if we know which or not.
There's an original even regardless whether the original has a way to prove to themselves they are so (as opposed to simply believing they are, which the clone would believe too).