I’m curious how we distinguish copies of ourselves and near-copies of ourselves from ourselves. I mean, this intuition runs strongly through personal identity discussions: in this post you are identifying possible candidates for “clone of me”, not “me”. If it was the latter, we’d just go looking for ourselves in the Big World, which is a much simpler problem: “I’m me, and there’s 863 of me here and there, some brighter than others.” No concerns for them needing to be closer to some canonical source.
But we keep dragging in this “clone of me” designation.
An exact clone is more me than a clone with different ice cream preferences, who is more me than a clone who is a Hindu fundamentalist, who is more me than LeBron James is.
Put another way, I grant that you have a function that returns the “more-me”-ness of a clone (I do too). Should we dig into this function and find out what it cares about, hoping to find some variable we haven’t yet treated in personal identity discussions?
I’m curious how we distinguish copies of ourselves and near-copies of ourselves from ourselves. I mean, this intuition runs strongly through personal identity discussions: in this post you are identifying possible candidates for “clone of me”, not “me”. If it was the latter, we’d just go looking for ourselves in the Big World, which is a much simpler problem: “I’m me, and there’s 863 of me here and there, some brighter than others.” No concerns for them needing to be closer to some canonical source.
But we keep dragging in this “clone of me” designation.
Put another way, I grant that you have a function that returns the “more-me”-ness of a clone (I do too). Should we dig into this function and find out what it cares about, hoping to find some variable we haven’t yet treated in personal identity discussions?
Well, for starters, would you distinguish between a “more me” function and a “similar to me” function?
Because there’s been a lot of cogsci research done on what underlies human similarity judgments, so that would be a fine place to start, I suppose.