
Originally Posted by
rjc79
Hmm.....I was just thinking........in a way to explain myself more......
Its the future, we can do so much more!!!
I have myself replicated atom by atom, to the last one. I then Kill myself, shouldn't I then still realize I am alive, so thus shouldn't I at the time of replication, be knowledgable of life from the point of two people?
Here you're definitely in philosophy territory (apologies for calling it pseudoscience earlier) and this discussion is probably best off on that forum.
Many philosophers have already considered the sort of scenario you speak of, though usually in the context of a thought experiement regarding teleportation:
If, in order to teleport myself from here (say Brisbane) to there (say Vladivostok) I step into a machine in Brisbane that 'reads' the quantum state of every single particle in my body and then transfers the information regarding those states to a machine in Vladivostok, then the teleportation mechanism could be said to destroy the Brisbane body, and create a body in Vladivostok.
Since the quantum states of all the particles involved are dientical from one to the other (currently considered a physical impossibility thanks to Uncertainty) then the person emerging in Vladivostok would still be me. The memories would be the same and so on.
The interesting philosophical niggle occurs when (as you have pointed out) the Brisbane machine fails to destroy the body that enters it. Suddenly there are two Sunshine Warriors. But which one of them is married to my wife?
The Seventh Day (??) and Arnie film, explores some of these issues (probably based on a Philip K Dick story!). Daniel Dennett, in Kinds of Minds, also plays an interesting thought experiment on this one.
But these are not scientific questions and are limited to the realms of philosophy. Should there be the prospect of their ever becoming physical reality, then they will also enter the world of jurisprudence. But they are not matters for scientists to adjudicate upon.
Happy to discuss this further on the philosophy forum...