the English language is adapted to a world where “humans don’t fork” has always been a safe assumption.
If we can clone ourselves, language would probably quickly follow. The bigger change would probably be the one about social reality. What does it mean to make a promise? Who is the entity you make a trade with? Is it the collective of all the yous? Only one? But which one if they split? The yous resulting from one origin will presumably have to share or split their resources. How will they feel about it? Will they compete or agree? If they agree it makes more sense for them to feel more like a distributed being. The thinking of “I” might get replaced by an “us”.
Reproduction and evolution is arguably literally how biology forks. You can also think of it as a tree of consciousness. Cloning would probably work the same in regards to consciousness. My clone would be a distinct branch of consciousness.
There’s little reason to think thought experiment level precision of cloning/duplication and teleportation are at all physically possible though.
It seems like the way we talk about the results of a coin flip would be a good start for how we’d talk about being cloned, although it’s rare for a coin flip to have such a massive impact on our life after that point
If we can clone ourselves, language would probably quickly follow. The bigger change would probably be the one about social reality. What does it mean to make a promise? Who is the entity you make a trade with? Is it the collective of all the yous? Only one? But which one if they split? The yous resulting from one origin will presumably have to share or split their resources. How will they feel about it? Will they compete or agree? If they agree it makes more sense for them to feel more like a distributed being. The thinking of “I” might get replaced by an “us”.
Reproduction and evolution is arguably literally how biology forks. You can also think of it as a tree of consciousness. Cloning would probably work the same in regards to consciousness. My clone would be a distinct branch of consciousness.
There’s little reason to think thought experiment level precision of cloning/duplication and teleportation are at all physically possible though.
It seems like the way we talk about the results of a coin flip would be a good start for how we’d talk about being cloned, although it’s rare for a coin flip to have such a massive impact on our life after that point