| AN ESSAY ON THE CLONING-TRANSFERING OF CONSCIOUSNESS As described by Corry Doctorow in Magic Kingdom |
| Written by Jan Strasser | |
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Cloning yourself and in effect never dying has a certain appeal. We naturally don’t want to die, avoid thinking about it, and dream of utopias where it does not occur. However, I take exception to the way it is described in “Magic Kingdom” and indeed other science fiction stories. I don’t want you to think I don’t like the idea. If we could truly move our “souls”, that part of us that is truly “us” into another body and hop skip our way through eternity, I would certainly look into it. I don’t know how bored I would get, but the idea of nothing does seem much worse. It is the description in the novel “Magic Kingdom”, where the hero has a recording made and then goes diving. There, while diving, he has an accident and dies. Luckily he did have his recording made and, with the help of friends, is reborn. This whole scenario has a big drawback. Who is the person that is reborn. Is it the hero? How could it be the hero, if the hero walked out of the recording office and off to his diving, leaving the recording behind? The trouble I have is that at some point there were two of the same “soul” and by definition that cannot be, a “soul” is unique. I am not arguing that this new person is not a person. I will give you that he is a whole person, sentient with a “soul”, but how can it be the hero? At the most it is a clone of the hero, in essence it is a twin. More of an exact copy than any human twin is now, since the new one has the same experiences and the same brain as the hero. I stipulate that a true transfer would be more complicated. Let’s say that the “soul” can be coaxed out of one body and into another. Let’s say that the new body has to have something to attract the “soul”, say a cloned copy of the original, and that the “soul’ transfers under certain circumstances; i.e. the death of the original body. In this case I would agree it is a true transfer and we go on living. Think of it like changing cars. You get out of one car, into another, but the “you” is moving, not copied into the other car. In the “Magic Kingdom” scenario, the new “clone” is a duplicate of the old and at that point will go on to be a new, and different person, as a twin is now. This would be true regardless of whether the original person, our hero, is alive or dead. While it is interesting to think about, it is not a way for me to live forever. It is more like the idea that a part of me goes on forever, not as enticing. |
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