RE: Thoughts about cloning, our consciousness, and more...
Some people might argue about the clone not being the same, but honestly I don’t think anyone could give a rational reason explaining why, because they will literally be the same, no difference whatsoever.
My intuition tells me it is not possible. I go down this rabbit hole and what I come up with is this. Most of us are on autopilot for much if not all of our "awake" time. Deferring to the internal dialogue as we react to its direction. Many never examine this paradigm, and operate as though they are their thoughts.
But we are not our thoughts. We are what witnesses the thoughts, what experiences the stimulation that helped shape those thoughts. I am unconvinced that our true self, the observer, is something that can be duplicated. I question that duplicating the program (our thought patterns) is really cloning our real essence, or simply the markers and programs that many abdicate their free will to.
A cloned version of myself may be capable of running the same programs, but it is not me. I am not my program.
If the observer is not information (that can be duplicated), that what is it?
what do you mean by real essence? Is not that essence, in its very raw essence, just information?
Thanks for your interesting comment!
Much smarter men than I have attempted to tackle these questions, but will give it my best. There was a time when we were new to life, our memory banks empty and ready to receive. I believe we were there, despite not having any reference points to draw thoughts from. If we were not, I do not know what was there then to begin holding these thoughts. It seems logical to conclude we pre existed our thoughts. A very poor example that I can offer is one would not think their hard drive is the information that has been placed upon it.
Thoughts are either recalling the past or speculating on the past and future. Yet we exist now. They are a part of us, but they are not us. I find myself lacking a good way to describe this, and suspect that some things such as this will never be able to find itself contained with descriptions. Because just as I say that we are not our thoughts, it can also be said that words too are not the things they point to/describe.
I do not know how to convey properly ideas such as body intelligence, thinking in pictures etc. Much like Hesse alluded to in his book the Siddhartha, experience cannot be conveyed from one to another. One can merely describe. If we were the thoughts themselves, this would not be the case as the words would have the intensity of the experience bound up within them. They are almost more like keys that unlocks intensities that a person (not the thought) experiences.
That's the best I can offer in the way of explaining further. My apologies if it feels a lot like the "you just need to have faith" response one gets from various religious people. Thanks for asking, as it gave me a reason to try to explain, which was quite a mental workout.