Reading a book involving duping (can't remember the author; a relatively new SF author, and the book was written in the past 5-7 years), it occurred to me that the hard part isn't the fissioning; after all, we can imagine giant photocopiers that reproduce brains intact. It's the merging. It's just as bad as merging source code, but even worse, because ideally the brains would still be running while you merged, and in almost every case you'd want *both* versions of stuff, leaving all kinds of weird redundancies.
I mean, I have enough trouble remembering where I parked as the five work days in a week merge into one big blur. Can you imagine doing that with forty Tuesdays!? Not to mention pronoun troubles. You(3) and I(5) had dinner on Tuesday, right?
And...is it the doing, or the having done, that we crave? After the merge, all you're really left with is memories of the having done; actions by another, who is sort of you, but probably slightly different, especially after the split starts acting on your mind. They might be frustrating memories of someone else doing something *you* want to do, but slightly differently. Sort of like the first story in Mind's Eye.
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I share this fantasy, but...
Date: 2006-07-11 07:47 pm (UTC)I mean, I have enough trouble remembering where I parked as the five work days in a week merge into one big blur. Can you imagine doing that with forty Tuesdays!? Not to mention pronoun troubles. You(3) and I(5) had dinner on Tuesday, right?
And...is it the doing, or the having done, that we crave? After the merge, all you're really left with is memories of the having done; actions by another, who is sort of you, but probably slightly different, especially after the split starts acting on your mind. They might be frustrating memories of someone else doing something *you* want to do, but slightly differently. Sort of like the first story in Mind's Eye.
But then, I'm fascinated by identity issues...