dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:27 am
Why would a clone of you after you are gone be you? And how does that amount to an afterlife? ...
For one the proposal of aliens is only a possibility and how would such recreations identify with us? Would such a recreation have your memories? If so how would you know?
The proposal of aliens is only a conceivable possibility meant to illustrate a point. It's kind of a thought experiment. How likely it is to really occur is beside the point, unless you're in a certain kind of UFO cult.
The hypothesis is that the aliens would make much more than a clone of me. A clone merely duplicates DNA. My clone would not even have my fingerprints—identical twins don't have identical fingerprints. Its brain would not be a copy of mine, because brain growth is affected by many epigenetic factors including life experience. My memories consist of certain patterns among my neurons—exactly what kind of patterns, nobody knows today, but this is the plausible and accepted assumption in neuroscience. So a clone with my DNA but with an even slightly different brain from mine would not have my memories, no.
The reconstruction of my brain history by the hypothetical aliens, however, would indeed include all of my memories, both conscious and unconscious, over all of my life. The reconstruction would even include mental experiences that I had early in life and forgot about later—the reconstruction would not when and how I forgot them. Whatever they made, or simulated, it would have all my memories. It would think it was me.
Would it really be me? I'm not actually sure if it would be. I don't see how it would be any less me, though, than the me of this morning is the me of last night. In between I was asleep; time passed but I have no memory of the interval. How do I know that I'm not just a new and different person now, who happens to have the same memories?
Does that question even make sense? Does "being the same person" actually only mean "having the same memories"? I don't think anyone knows at this point. Consciousness is an unsolved scientific problem. We don't know how it works. We don't even know what it is. If you want to write a scientific book about consciousness, Rule #1 is that you do not define consciousness, because if you do, then no matter how you define consciousness people will quickly show that your definition is idiotic in some way. You have to talk around this point. Since it's your subject, this can be kind of tricky. Rule #2 for scientific books about consciousness should probably just be, Don't write one until we learn more.
What I think we really have to abandon, though, is any idea that "being me" means "having my body". Mind is not a substance. It's not any set of atoms. All atoms of the same element are exactly identical, to the point where not even God can tell two of them apart, because they are mathematically identical, the way the two twos in four are identical. So there is nothing which can possibly mark my particular atoms as mine. And mind is not any other kind of substantial thing besides atoms, either. There is no "fine matter" from which our spirits can be composed. Minds can only be software, not hardware.
I’m not seeing how postulating an advanced civilization of aliens who, for some reason, recreates people from earth by disentangling with precise measurements of everything means our information persists after we die.
If you don't see how this can be true, then you may need to ask what "information" means. Have you ever used an encrypted volume on a hard drive? The information is preserved by encryption. The data is just rearranged, according to a definite rule, which allows you to decrypt it again, if you know the rule—and the key.
Conversely, this is what it means to preserve information: that the original form of the data can be recovered from the rearranged form, no matter what the data is. If there is a way to reconstruct the original values then the information has been preserved, by definition.
In the case of the universe, as opposed to a data volume, the present still determines the future, one-to-one. The future is different from the present, but it is only different in a specific, predetermined way. That's what natural law means. Nothing is random; the future only seems unpredictable to us because we don't know enough about the present. The passage of time is a kind of encryption that rearranges the information of the state of the world, while preserving it.
That's not some idiosyncratic view on my part. It's basic physics, though it's not normally taught until maybe junior year undergrad, because it's basic in the sense of being fundamental, but it's harder to get your head around than
F =
ma. And it's not always emphasised. In classical mechanics, though, time evolution is a continuous family of canonical transformations, acting in the phase space of all positions and momenta; in quantum mechanics, the transformations are instead unitary, acting in the Hilbert space of state vectors. Both unitary and canonical transformations are logically invertible: they preserve information, by definition. In advanced textbooks, these statements are set forth as the first axioms of physics. Continuous transformations are defined by generators; we call the generator of time evolution "energy".