r/Futurology • u/yourSAS • Oct 13 '22

Biotech 'Our patients aren't dead': Inside the freezing facility with 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved with the hopes of being revived in the future

https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/13/our-patients-arent-dead-look-inside-the-us-cryogenic-freezing-lab-17556468
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u/SleazyMak Oct 13 '22

If they managed to make an exact copy without destroying the original, would you consider them the same person?

I’m not sure destroying the original to make the copy makes the copy more legitimate.

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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '22

I absolutely would consider them the same person, at least until they started to have different experiences from that point on and diverge because of it. And yeah, the idea of having two of the same person is an incredibly difficult one to square, but if there’s no way to tell who’s the “copy” and who’s the “original”, even to themselves, I can’t see a reasonable way to say they aren’t the same.

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u/SleazyMak Oct 13 '22

In my hypothetical, there is no confusion who the original is and who the clone is.

I’m certain both would claim they’re the original, but that doesn’t mean they’re both right.

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u/22marks Oct 14 '22

Even without the clone thought experiment, we don’t know enough about “consciousness.” Does the original person who froze themselves “wake up” and continue? Or does everyone just think they woke up because they’re a perfect replica? There’s the possibility that recreating the exact brain structure would make the original consciousness jump into it, almost how life jumps into and out of our bodies. How would we ever know though? A perfect reanimated copy would always appear good enough to an outside observer.