X-Message-Number: 5572 Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 09:13:16 -0800 (PST) From: Joseph Strout <> Subject: Clones, Identity, and the Church of Man On Fri, 12 Jan -1, CryoNet wrote: In Message #5563, Dwight Jones wrote in reply to Bob Ettinger: > > If Mr. Jones only wants his DNA preserved, and would be satisfied with a new > > "instantiation" as a "clone" of himself--as his message seems to say--then he > > has made assumptions about the nature of identity and criteria of survival > > that are not warranted by available evidence. > > What evidence? The Church of Man takes the view that your clone is you, > if only because two pieces of chemistry with 6 billion identical parts > (DNA) cannot be anything but identical. I would think this sufficient reason to question the wisdom (not to mention knowledge) of that Church. If personal identity is defined by genes, then identical twins are the same person. If you have a twin brother, then you should be able to calmly kill yourself, since you live on just as well in him. (A clone, of course, is exactly a twin brother or sister, no more or less.) My father and uncle in law are twins, but I'd really rather you didn't kill either one of them. This is a very interesting viewpoint. I've been doing quite a bit of reading on personal identity in the last couple years, and this is the first time I've ever heard anyone, from a religious OR secular viewpoint, seriously suggest that identity is defined by genotype. > That is evidence, what evidence do you have that these idividuals are > different? The evidence is overwhelming. For example: one answers to "Bob", and the other to "Tom", therefore they are different (and I'd say that's a pretty important difference, too). One's an engineer, the other a business manager; each can do things the other can't do. One sleeps with Martha, the other with Betsy. The list goes on and on... [names were changed] > The key question: would nature and evolution regard them as > different or as the same phenomenon in two iterations? No, the key question is: WHO are they? If you make a contract with one, must the other honor it? If one commits a crime, do we lock up them both? If you're baptized into the Church of Man, is your twin brother also saved? If he sins, do you confess? (Please excuse my ignorance of your Church's customs: I mean no disrespect, but only to illustrate a point.) It appears that your viewpoint arises from an emphasis on genetic evolution. But as you pointed out, the human gene pool has not changed significantly in ten thousand years or more. Yet in that time, human *culture* has evolved tremendously. Not just in technology, but in religion, philosophy, arts, language, mathematics, etc. To me, this is no mystery: when a species reaches a level of intelligence and communication where information can readily be passed from parent to child, and from family to family, culture is born. Cultural evolution quickly outpaces genetic evolution, though the driving forces are the same: customs and knowledge which increase reproductive success are selected for; detrimental customs (such as incest) are selected against. Genetic evolution brought us to a key threshold many thousands of years ago; cultural evolution has brought us the rest of the way. So it would seem that nowadays, genetic makeup is not what we need to preserve; our identity is much more defined by what we have absorbed from culture: ideas, skills, knowledge, habits, personality traits. What say you? ,------------------------------------------------------------------. | Joseph J. Strout Department of Neuroscience, UCSD | | http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/ | `------------------------------------------------------------------' Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5572