Perhaps that is the same thing as meditation; trying to connect your consciousness to a wider field of frequencies to experience a more focused reality.

Thanks for the mind candy!

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung has an excellent TED talk called “I Am My Connectome” that indirectly addresses this very issue, and articulates it far better than I could hope to. Regardless of where you stand on the question, I think it’s well worth watching:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_seung.html

So now, given this, there are some conclusions at odds with the intuition that “you” would come to an end should you be killed and your mindclone come into being (though I have problems with the concept of “mindclone” I’ll get to in a bit). Before I get to those, I need to clarify one thing: it simply isn’t true that you are continually conscious. This is under most standard definitions of consciousness out there. For example, we are all comfortable with saying that under general anesthesia, we lose consciousness. In all important respects, this is no different from most states of sleep. So, suppose you go into one such state of sleep. Then I make a mindlclone. Then I kill you, and your mindclone awakes. Continuity of pattern is preserved; and there is no confusing second consciousness to concern ourselves with. I don’t know on what basis you would claim not to be you, unless you had a particular affinity for the particular kind of tissue that all the dynamic patterns that make you are running on (the hardware). I’ll argue below that we need to properly copy the hardware too — but there’s no basis for saying that it has to be the original hardware and no other.

What I refer to as Multiple Person Disorder is a side effect of keeping all the copies around. Given our that our social life, family dynamics, laws and so on are all geared around single instances of a person, this would lead to problems (nicely explored in the play On Ego http://is.gd/jOPse). The problem is not alleviated by pointing out that each person has a separate consciousness. It seems obvious that for a while, at least, clones would be easily mistaken — much more so than are identical twins. This is true even though they are having different experiences from the moment the cloning has occurred. In the my post, and in the movie, the interesting question then becomes how much would you sacrifice for this nearly identical other, and to what extent would you put the continuity of your particular instance ahead of the other instance(s). Like Datanode, to the extent that I have not diverged from my other copies, I don’t see why I would have any particular allegiance to which version of me survives in a situation in which for some reason all but one copy has to be killed. But as I get more and more dissimilar from my other instances, I would become more and more uncomfortable with giving up my existence for another instance.

But one thing to be clear about is that selves are all bound up with having a body, and a particular one at that. So mindcloning is not sufficient to maintain self. Having your mindclone put into a different body would be as alarming as suddenly being paralyzed. While “you” could sustain this for a little while, after a few months of being paralyzed, you’d be a different person in some respects. So too if your mindclone was put into a different body. With all that we understand about the interconnections between brain activity and body activity there’s simply no rational basis for the mind-body dualism that is pervasive in our culture. We need to make distinctions and simplifications to be able to think at all, but that particular distinction is counterproductive.

I apologize if my first post came across as condescending, it’s just that I adamantly believe in my philosophy of self. To me it seems obvious that existence is conscious experience, and since I and my mindclone experience consciousness seperately, we are clearly two different people. A mind is qualitatively different from mere software. Though millions of copies of books may all have the same story, since a mind must be conscious, and consciousness cannot be shared, even between identical minds, each occurence of a mind is a seperate individual. If mindclones ever do come into existence, I think it will be obvious that they are seperate people, since your interactions with one mindclone will not carry over to the others. i.e anything you discuss with one clone will not be automatically known to the others. They’re obviously seperate people just as identical twins are seperate people.

Sigh.

You don’t “have to keep explaining this to transhumanists.” We get it. Really. Some of us even agree with you. However, many of us (including me) disagree with that stance for reasons which have nothing to do with a lack of understanding.

It’s a philosophical question hinging on one’s internal definition of “self”. Your definition requires continuity within your own instance. The other definition (I realize I’m creating a false dichotomy here for the sake of ease of communication.) sees identity as a neural pattern or range of neural patterns. As long as lineage between patterns is maintained then each individual instance has equal claim to the title of “me”. I say “range of patterns” because while I am very different now than I was when I was 18, I was still “me” in both cases.

For you the fact that two instances are identical is irrelevant. To me the continuity of a single physical instance is irrelevant, because it’s the dynamic pattern that makes the person. We see it much like software. If I have a program installed on one machine, and install that same program on a different machine, neither copy is more “real”, and they both remain the same program even though they may be configured differently. To push the analogy a bit further, even as one of the instances I’m comfortable recognizing the equal legitimacy of other instances of me, to the point where unless there are extenuating circumstances I would have zero preference over “which me” survives in a situation where one must be sacrificed to preserve another. Extenuating circumstances might include one instance having developed a valuable skill or having either more memories or more significant memories than another.

I honestly think that resistance to this idea is nothing more than the result of us having evolved in a world where there is only ever one instance of each of us. As technology advances to the point where this question is no longer hypothetical (assuming it ever does) I hope that our thinking will gradually catch up with it and overcome the instinctive revulsion that many people have to the idea.

The fact that you’re identical is irrelevant. You still have completely seperate consciousnesses. I cannot experience consciousness through my clone, nor he through me. If I die, I lose consciousnesses, and the fact that my clone could still be conscious doesn’t do me any good. This would still apply even if I was killed first and my clone was created after my death, because there is no continuity of conciousness (And you don’t lose continuity during sleep. Your brain is still active, and you can even have conscious experiences; dreams). A clone or AI programmed to behave exactly like me is still not me, ergo any form of mindclone would not be a form of immortality. It would have to be mind transfer, where continuity of consciousness was preserved, such as gradually replacing brain cells with nanites.

So no, having a clone would not make death easier, and I don’t know why I have to keep explaining this to Transhumanists.