Clone musings...
The first section of this conversation is eerie to read, more specifically because I'm working my way through David Brin's Kiln People for a second time. It's delightfully mind-bending.
The setup in that book is of temporary, one-day-only clay copies of humans. Who can make it home at the end of the day and upload the memories...or not.
The diagram for that would go like this: Being A makes temp copies B C and D. A is always the original, in this case. C and D run errands too tedious to need to remember. Or they engage in a war against other copies and are killed. (There's this great scene that has a golem painted with a target running away from a whole band of hunters...and at least one of the hunters has the same face and therefor the same original as the prey...and is enjoying both roles at the same time)
Meanwhile B narrowly escapes death in a grand adventure, and makes it home to A. Uploads memory, B gains 'afterlife' in A's head.
The difference here is of course not true cloning, the copies are meant to be xeroxed golems, temporary. The copy always knows it is the copy.
Magnify the scale, you get someone whose sole purpose is being the original, gathering in all memories from all copies and distributing this to new ones. A 'continuity being' was the term used. I suspect there are some of those around Puzzlebox already. The theme of grasping for knowledge and experiences already runs all over the Mess, through so many established characters and places.
Or take another slant, having the copies constantly remotely updating. This wasn't in the book per-say, but it's another extension of the concept. Squizzle seems to do this updating, if not constantly at least periodically. How many copy-uploads can one mind-entity take? That's assuming the central uplink is a mind, not a computer storage device. Capacities would only tend towards expansion.
On a side note I was talking to Jeremy late last night on the otherwise empty muck, and he commented that so many PBians seem to be projections. Somewhat of an extreme of mind-body separation. The minds themselves are often somewhere else, or in a different form than the perceived body. Maybe it's unconscious or probably conscious choice to play a character's body removed through some levels from the mind. There's a certain fascinating irony of being literally a mind controlling a body which controls another mind which controls another body... (my physical mind controlling my fingers to tell the computer's mind what do display on the screen which controls the character's mind embedded in the context of the Puzzlebox to control the self/body image...)
*ahem* Sorry, got all meta for a sec.
Getting back to things, the context of the world is a great place to explore originality vs. copies, especially when the copied mind is exactly the same as the original. Barring memory inloads or swapping, cloned beings would tend to diverge. Mental divergence might reach an point-of-no-remerge, depending on outside factors and experiences of beings A and B.
Going along with Twin's statement, if we're the sum of our experiences, then we can subtract from that experiences we did not have (or, upload later). Copy A is killed, copy B is not. Copy B does not instinctively know what it is like to be killed, even from *watching* copy A. But if both A and B were upstreaming to copy C, the combined mix of perspectives would be maddening to C. Being both dead and not-dead forcefully merged could be damaging. One unit at a time is preferable. Saving memory dumps for later would also be safer, but would not work in any potentially fatal situation.
Which is kinda the background for Nikolai's constant updating. He can't afford to lose any data upon death, so he streams all of it. It was only supposed to be one copy at a time, one way straight back to (presumably) the source. At death of any copy an new one would nearly instantly be generated with only a minute or so loss. That's if the system works right. And if the previous copy actually dies or ceases to uplink before a new one is generated. Nothing is perfect, however. Corrupted streams, uplink failures--or perhaps a lost not-yet-dead copy still uploading (hint hint)--would reinforce problems with every new regeneration...and would drive someone mad.
And so it has. :-}
The setup in that book is of temporary, one-day-only clay copies of humans. Who can make it home at the end of the day and upload the memories...or not.
The diagram for that would go like this: Being A makes temp copies B C and D. A is always the original, in this case. C and D run errands too tedious to need to remember. Or they engage in a war against other copies and are killed. (There's this great scene that has a golem painted with a target running away from a whole band of hunters...and at least one of the hunters has the same face and therefor the same original as the prey...and is enjoying both roles at the same time)
Meanwhile B narrowly escapes death in a grand adventure, and makes it home to A. Uploads memory, B gains 'afterlife' in A's head.
The difference here is of course not true cloning, the copies are meant to be xeroxed golems, temporary. The copy always knows it is the copy.
Magnify the scale, you get someone whose sole purpose is being the original, gathering in all memories from all copies and distributing this to new ones. A 'continuity being' was the term used. I suspect there are some of those around Puzzlebox already. The theme of grasping for knowledge and experiences already runs all over the Mess, through so many established characters and places.
Or take another slant, having the copies constantly remotely updating. This wasn't in the book per-say, but it's another extension of the concept. Squizzle seems to do this updating, if not constantly at least periodically. How many copy-uploads can one mind-entity take? That's assuming the central uplink is a mind, not a computer storage device. Capacities would only tend towards expansion.
On a side note I was talking to Jeremy late last night on the otherwise empty muck, and he commented that so many PBians seem to be projections. Somewhat of an extreme of mind-body separation. The minds themselves are often somewhere else, or in a different form than the perceived body. Maybe it's unconscious or probably conscious choice to play a character's body removed through some levels from the mind. There's a certain fascinating irony of being literally a mind controlling a body which controls another mind which controls another body... (my physical mind controlling my fingers to tell the computer's mind what do display on the screen which controls the character's mind embedded in the context of the Puzzlebox to control the self/body image...)
*ahem* Sorry, got all meta for a sec.
Getting back to things, the context of the world is a great place to explore originality vs. copies, especially when the copied mind is exactly the same as the original. Barring memory inloads or swapping, cloned beings would tend to diverge. Mental divergence might reach an point-of-no-remerge, depending on outside factors and experiences of beings A and B.
Going along with Twin's statement, if we're the sum of our experiences, then we can subtract from that experiences we did not have (or, upload later). Copy A is killed, copy B is not. Copy B does not instinctively know what it is like to be killed, even from *watching* copy A. But if both A and B were upstreaming to copy C, the combined mix of perspectives would be maddening to C. Being both dead and not-dead forcefully merged could be damaging. One unit at a time is preferable. Saving memory dumps for later would also be safer, but would not work in any potentially fatal situation.
Which is kinda the background for Nikolai's constant updating. He can't afford to lose any data upon death, so he streams all of it. It was only supposed to be one copy at a time, one way straight back to (presumably) the source. At death of any copy an new one would nearly instantly be generated with only a minute or so loss. That's if the system works right. And if the previous copy actually dies or ceases to uplink before a new one is generated. Nothing is perfect, however. Corrupted streams, uplink failures--or perhaps a lost not-yet-dead copy still uploading (hint hint)--would reinforce problems with every new regeneration...and would drive someone mad.
And so it has. :-}