It's interesting that you entertain the possibility with a robot, but reject it with a clone. Even if a clone has minor genetic differences, would it not be a lot easier and faithful to re-imprint a neural pattern on a clone than on a robot?
Well, I brought up robots in an attempt to differentiate between a biological entity and a mechanical one. While a biological living being must be considered as individuals, mechanical beings cannot be considered as living. That was my thinking.
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Another note on twins vs clones. In my particular scenario, I feel that clones differ from twins in a fundamental way.
Although twins are born genetically identical, they are not necessarily born self-aware. Psychologically, we still don't understand how infants learn self-awareness, but it does seem to be acquired after birth. So twins would be two separate streams of consciousness because their consciousness developed separately. On the other hand, in the clone scenario, I was talking about somehow imprinting this consciousness instead of allowing the clone to develop its own.
You cannot separate the self-consciousness and a living body. Your scenario describes a process to force a new self-consciousness onto a perfectly living human being (the clone) with normal human intelligence. The whole premise is based on the assumption that, once born, clones are simply sheets of blank paper, waiting to be "imprinted". Do you see the problem in this? The self-awareness and consciousness come from the ability to think and the ability to analyze. This means that, as long as you have average human intelligence, you will have the ability to obtain self-awareness and consciousness. Thus, the human clones WILL develop their own self-awareness as soon as they are born because they have the same ability to think and to analyze as natural-born human. In this sense, clones and twins are the same. And biologically speaking and on the cellular and molecular levels, developing clones and having twins are exactly the same process. What we do in the lab is simply increasing the probability of having a set of homozygotic twin to almost 100% while the chance of having a set of homozygotic twins naturally is slim.
This is also why I brought up robots. Robots are only beings that can exist as a blank sheet of paper before "imprinting". Any biological being would obtain self-awareness on its own, provided that their intelligence level is high enough to do that. Then these clones WILL automatically develop their own identity, completely independent of their originals. Then you will have to wipe out their consciousness and "imprint" the consciousness of the originals onto these clones. You see the problem?
PLEASE NOTE, we now can develop human babies partially in the lab. Ever heard of
in vitro fertilization (test tube babies)? The actual medical procedure to develop a test tube baby is shockingly similar to cloning. Many couples who cannot get pregnant naturally use medical procedures to have babies. Many of these procedures, such as
in vitro fertilization, utilize
in vitro techniques (procedures done outside of human body using equipment in labs) to develop embryos. And we have sperm / egg banks for that. Cloning involves pretty much the exact same procedures as
in vitro fertilization, plus some minor differences (of course, the devil is in the details. It is those few minor differences that make human cloning impossible as of now). However, let me emphasize again that the whole experimental strategy behind human cloning is almost exactly the same as
in vitro fertilization. We now treat people born from these procedures exactly as other natural born humans. Since human clones will be developed using extremely similar procedure, I don't see how we should treat human clones any different. If we cannot simply take a person on the street and wipe his mind and put a new one in, we still cannot do it to the human clones in the future.
Of course, this could very well be impossible. How do you modify a brain's neural patterns? It might be feasible if it's just a pattern of neural signals, then you could stimulate individual neurons into firing at a specific rate until you get the desired result. However, what if it requires a rearrangement of cells? Then that becomes an impossible task.
But then if we come back to the whole "downloading your memory into a robot", if we assume that it can be done almost flawlessly, does your stream of consciousness then get carried over? Sure a computer is different from an organic brain, but people who suffer brain damage are essentially working with a "different" hardware as well, and it would be hard to argue in those cases that their previous stream of consciousness was terminated.
What do you guys think?
It is still a huge mystery as to how memory is developed in a human brain. It involves a mysterious switch from electrical signal to cell signaling cascades that modify cell behavior. Keep in mind that it is the cell signaling events that eventually determine long-term potentiation and memory development. That switch is still a black box. No one knows exactly how brain cells convert plasma membrane depolarizaton and action potentials to
modify cell behavior. So can we actually change the neuronal pattern and modify brain cells to change memory? No one knows. It may never be done.
All in all, human clones, if it can ever be done, will be and shall be treated as separate individuals. If we cannot simply take a person off the street and wipe his mind and put a new one in, we still cannot do it to the clones.
