If you can have the Mona Lisa, and a copy of the Mona Lisa simultaneously, the copy is not the original. It is clear that if I burn the original, no harm comes to the copy, and vice versa. I don't think the Mona Lisa has a soul, though. I also don't think any correct arrangement of molecules becomes the Mona Lisa.
If someone made a copy of the mona lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the original (including any kind of sensing technology one could come up with) then I wouldn't mind much one of them getting burned, after all we can mass-produce the artifact now. The aversion about loss is that a "one of a kind" thing gets destroyed which is irreversible because being one of a kind implies there's no redundant information from which it can be recovered.
Nobody mourns the loss of a plastic fork.
What if it was the "copy" you owned? I only have my own set of conscious experiences. My set is not the same as the clones. When people seriously argue this, I start to wonder if they are bots or NPC's that somehow have no conscious experiences. It is clear to me that if I had a clone, I would be just as attached to the idea of this instance of me staying alive--in fact I could have 1000 clones in space now. They are cold comfort to me.
If the copy were perfect you would not be able to tell the difference. In essence there would be no "original" and "copy", just two instances of the same information. This is basic particle physics or information theory. Particles do not come tagged with UUIDs. Once you duplicated all properties the original and the copy become interchangeable. At the macro level we only care about the difference because analog copying processes tend to be lossy.
> I only have my own set of conscious experiences. My set is not the same as the clones.
It is at the moment of "cloning" (assuming that includes memory duplication). They may diverge afterwards, but at the moment the copy is made the sense of self is the same for both.
> When people seriously argue this, I start to wonder if they are bots or NPC's that somehow have no conscious experiences.
Perhaps some people overrate this near-magical concept of consciousness? It temporarily ceases when you sleep or are comatose anyway while your biochemical processes keep shuffling around atoms all the time and that's not the end of the world either. The body ship-of-theseuses itself all the time.
That is both true and terrifying given I foresee a future where we are all, in this analogy, plastic forks.
(Separately: it has been restored many times, and apparently some of these restorations have removed the upper surface of the paint while others have retouched paint, so the Ship Of Theseus could also apply in principle).
I don’t know why you think I’m saying that it does.
I’m saying that: if this body were to die, and a backup of my brain state (made almost immediately before this body’s death) was copied in a new body or simulated on a computer, that would be no different for the entity that wakes up than it was for me to wake up from general anaesthetic having only half of the memory of the countdown the nurse walked me through before I went under.
(Or that weird time where I was right next to a CO2 cylinder when it exploded, resulting in me having a separately sized gap in my visual vs audio episodic memory).
Conversely, the me which did die would absolutely experience that death, would be scared, would try to avoid it — the me that wakes up afterwards might be glad to have missed it or might scream immediately, depending on when the death and the backup happened, but either way the death would still be real.
Killing of a copy would also mean an entity would experience death.
None of these are natural things to think about of course, so there’s no reason to expect that any of our own intuitions should even be close to correct, let alone the most comfortable ones.
