From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 21:28:09 PDT
JTS - MCDLXXXVI wrote:
> Sentience of Clones:
> Answer 1: well, if it's a question, I guess we'll just have to clone a
> few and find out. My money says that they'll be like twins several
> minutes apart.
Aw, geez, people, is this really in question? We're all meat computers, we've
got loosely the same OS and even more loosely the same (heavily customized,
evolving) software. That doesn't keep us from being individuals. No more so
for clones than twins. The only way to believe otherwise is to believe
heredity totally trumps environment. Makes no sense to me.
>
> Answer 2: It depends on how you define sentience. And *we* define
> sentience. If there is any advantage to declaring clones to be
> "non-sentient", we'll probably try to do that. And then we will have
> PETC running around saying "clones are people too", and hollywood stars
> wil join the popular cause, and the radicals will throw dishes of agar
> onto politicians. Or something.
>
Aside from record-keeping, how will we ever know that somebody is a clone? I
suppose a comparison test between tissue resilience and other forms of
chronological age markers vs. age as implied by telomere length...
> I think it's probably more likely that spontaneous human luddite response
> will destroy and ban the technology before we get to making the real hard
> choices.
Yeah, dammit. :-(
jb
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