Leftists be like, "The Maoist uprising against the landlords," but then when a trans nonbinary vegan stabs their landlord with a katana suddenly they're all like "it's a death cult"
I can't write a good post but yeah, the phenomenal character of being (like, existing, experiencing, etc) is more than mere data.
Your brain is not a computer, putting it in a robot body would be so far from the embodied experience of being you that I don't think even that would be "you".
So, what about a clone body?
Again, thats perhaps the limit. Clone body for the original brain. Cloning the whole thing is no longer you.
If you have a clone brain that has all the same memories as the original brain then is there a difference?
Yes. It's a copy. No longer any attachment to the world that I was born in.
It's like the Joyce line about the omphalos telephone line back to eve. The clone won't have any more attachments to the history of the world in the way that you or I, through our mothers, do.
That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.
It will be a separate existence, born anew, and no longer the "me" born xx years ago.
Btw putting your brain in a clone might well have incredibly weird phenomenological aspects that like, I don't know if I'd want to do.. the ideal future is one where medical technology allows for the repair and maintenance of the bodies we have.
The clone remembers having those attachments, so it does have attachment to the world you were born in.
Let's say your clone with your memories replaces you, like a Star Trek transporter incident. Your mother won't be able to tell the difference, your clone won't be able to tell the difference, and the rest of the world won't be able to tell the difference. What's the actual physical difference between your clone remembering your mother and you remembering your mother? Seems to me that nothing actually changed.
It's no longer me. The clone doesn't actually have the material connection to my mother, to the historical world we live in. It's made of different stuff.
Again, for others, it might be able to play the role of "me". But it isn't me, will never be me. It will have been created in a new way, and brought into history in a different way.
I think that as historical materialists we need to hold the line on this kind of thing. Just as the bringing into being of a commodity imprints the history, the labor, the life into it, so does the bringing into being (continually and autopoetically) of the self constitute the historical and material conditions of its life.
The material conditions that create the clone are not me. It will never be me even if it "remembers" being me.
I don't see it. If you copy a book it doesn't become a different story, just because it's written on different paper.
Yes but the history of the book is different. The text of Augustine's confessions is the same but the copy produced by penguin is DIFFERENT from a manuscript produced by a medieval scribe. They have different histories and are different things in the world.
You can't say that my book and your book are the same. The "text" may be the same, but they aren't the same thing.
Unless you discount the materiality of life entirely you will never be your clone.
I see what you're saying, but I think I'd be happy if I got a new book after my old book was destroyed, even if I'd rather my old book not be destroyed. I'll take the clone body with the clone brain, and I'll still consider myself alive even if the original is long gone. It's a new copy of the book, but it's still the same story.
