Journal 3 - By Lyric

Summary

Marcilo Gleiser’s article entitled “Is an Identical Copy of You, You?” (2015) states the argument of consciousness of selfsame copy and his disagreement caused by errors that the identical copy is self.

Do you think an identical copy of yourself would actually be you?

Generally, in my perspective, there is only one situation that the identical copy is the same as self. The moment, completely same between myself and the copy, is that the copy is just produced, or means that all of my and the copy’s thought and experience are definitely selfsame. After that short moment, when there is just a few differences between the copy and the person, they are not identical and are the individual and different people who have independent consciousness and separate human rights in the world. There are several reasons why I think so.

First, the genetic same is not identical. There is an example that is a common thing in the world, identical twins. In the genetic level, the identical twins is completely same just like the identical copy hypothetically produced by scientist, however it is the consensus of the society that they are different and independent people. Just like Gleiser arguing in the article “Is an Identical Copy of You, You?” (2015), there are always some inevitable errors in the copy processes. As a result, the precondition, genetic same, even cannot be satisfied rather than the identical for the copy. How can we recognize the copy is the same as the model person?

Furthermore, even though we suppose that there is no physiological diversity between the copy and model person, the identical cannot be confirm as well. The identical means completely same including everything of people, such as memories, feelings, experiences, thoughts, decisions, etc. After the moment that I have described in the first paragraph, the copy would have experience and memories. Even they always in the same space, they have different view angles or other very small differences that make them distinctive during their experience. Were they have some differences, they would not be identical at all.

In conclusion, I believe the copy and the model person is independent and individual people in the world, except the moment of copy just finished.

Thank you for reading.