Why Uploading Creates Only a Clone | Roman Yampolskiy

Roman Yampolskiy argues that a perfect digital upload would still only be a copy rather than the original person. If every physical detail could be duplicated exactly, do you think anything meaningful would still distinguish “you” from the copy?

Good questions, Robert!!!

The identity of the first person is the set of experiences of the first person- call it memory. Call it a personality. Not just the conscious experiences, but the unconscious glue of experiences that knits a being together. If that is somehow copied so that some other conscious entity has your set of experiences and your structure, it is you the original you. You can tell this because it can remember all the things that you did and experienced from the first person. And it is conscious those are the only two ingredients, consciousness and specific experiences that can define an individual.

Ship of theseus with gradual implants => its you

Is the clone a Chalmers-zombie or is it conscious? If it is conscious then it has de same memories and experiences and thinks it's you. If the original you dies, then you are the other you, the one who is cloned. So you' re basically transported and the only thing which dies are the memories of the original you which has diffentiated from the clone after the cloning.

Mr. Kuhn excellently argues that if your consciousness is nothing but a specific configuration of physical particls, then a physical copy of that physical configuration must also be you. That just logically follows. But because it's logically impossible that you can consciously be two separate bodies with each body having their own and different experiences, either your consciousness is not physical to begin with or it is inherently impossible that a physical duplicate can ever theoretically happen.

They say those who are pure materialists should be all for a.i. and cloning, but even if you can copy everything precisely down to skin cells and body fluids, it would be impossible to program everything each one of carries from the Big Bang to now (including DNA, genes, family histories, relationships and experiences I’ve had over the past 40+ years, etc.).

But if you merge with your copy and suddenly will be aware of your copy as you? Creation can make that trick

fracturé le temps ? découpage atomique fin en temps réel? emplacement dans l'espace de cette univers ? ia possible mais avec un humain impossible. de devrais détruire les règles de cette univers ?

Question for the guest: if someone made a perfect copy of you along with the world you live in, so that everything happens exactly the same way in that parallel world, so that every thought, feeling, perception, decision of that clone was identical to yours - would that person be you?