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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Consciousness may not reside entirely in the brain
SC ( 11/26/2003, 17:03:53 )Unless a fresh portion of the body was set aside before or perhaps just after death, a cremated body couldn't be cloned. I've heard of a steer being cloned from a piece of skin that was kept in a freezer for a considerable amount of time, but that was the most spectacular case I know of.Memories can be "transferred" through books, videotapes, audiotapes, and so on. There was a guy at British Telecom's Artificial Life division who dreamed of something called a Soulcatcher Chip back in about 1997 (this concept later appeared in video games). The idea was to have a superpowerful computer chip implanted behind the eye that would record everything that happened in one's lifetime. Even this, however, would capture only information, not consciousness. It would just be a more powerful version of a video camera. We can't capture and attempt to transfer consciousness because we don't know where it is, or even what it is.I caught only a snippet of what sounded like an interesting feature related to this question, on a show called Daily Planet. I don't have Windows Media Player on my computer, so I haven't seen what the archived feature said yet, but here's the web address (sorry I didn't link it, I haven't figured out how to do that here yet).http://www.exn.ca/dailyplanet/view.asp?date=11/4/2003The feature was called "Going with your gut." I think it may have dealt with the possibility that what we think of as consciousness may not reside entirely in the brain. I'd like to hear what anyone thinks of it if they manage to get the clip to play.The main problem I see with memories is that in order to transfer a lifetime's worth of memories, one's clone would have to spend a lifetime learning them. I doubt that most people would even spend more than a fraction of that much time reviewing their own memories, let alone someone else's. For some people, it would be like watching eighty years of someone else's home movies. Most people are too busy making new memories to review all of their past ones. I would be interested in the memories of my earlier born twin if I had one, but I would hope my twin would have thought of some means of sorting out the interesting stuff.In addition, growing a clone just to put information or consciousness in, assuming a means could be found to do so, would be at least as ethically problematic as growing a clone just to take an organ out. What if the clone didn't want all your memories? Do you have the right to force your consciousness on someone else? I presume a clone, like anyone else, would usually choose to take in some bits of information and reject others.In general, it's much easier to preserve someone's genetic code than it is to preserve someone's consciousness. Means of doing this are still in the realm of science fiction, as far as I know. One such scenario I could imagine which would allow something like a transfer of consciousness would be some sort of interface between the brain and an artificial intelligence, like that which people are working on creating with computers.
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