The technology for it exists, but even if you managed to extract someone’s DNA injecting it onto a new set of stem cells: once the baby is born, the only thing that genetic code is inheriting is the appearance. They would resemble that person by looks only, however what remains a total mystery is: whether he or she’ll have the same personality or behavior as that individual. (You won’t know until they gotten older).
For example: this dog passed away, then extracting the genes from that carcass now injecting that onto a pregnant dog of the same breed who’ll soon give birth to a familiar looking pup but despite it looking similar to the one you knew: why won’t it inherit the same behavior or mannerisms as the source gene? Will that dog recognize the dead dog’s owner or would it behave like it’s someone else’s animal?
Genetic duplication sounds “fun” at first but, it comes at a cost:
- Slated memory (this person looks like someone you knew but they have zero recollection of their life)
- Varying behavior and traits (they look like someone you knew, although they display different personalities)
- The consensus is that the first gene holder is dead, a clone won’t be considered the same as “original”
- The family of the deceased considers them dead even if you have a genetic clone of their relative
First, genetics are only a blueprint for the structure of the body. It’s not the final structuee. It’s like asking why a building collapses when the blueprints look sound. The blueprints might have physically impossible information for the location it’s being built on, or something could have interfered with the building process, or there might not be good quality materials to do the construction properly, etc. Identical twins often are not identical right out of the womb.
But let’s assume you could accurately create the exact structure out of the womb. The initial physical body might have some effect on your ability to develop intelligence or not (e.g. blood flow to the brain, etc.), ability to generate and use certain hormones that affect mood, etc. This might make the two copies have the same disorders like ADHD, propensity towards violence, or other things, but is every person with ADHD exactly the same? So, no even that isnt enough to create the same personality.
Then there are environmental factors, nutrition, radiation, pollution, etc., all of which could alter the brain in different ways over the person’s lifetime.
But personality has a lot to do with the neural connections and memories you create throughout your lifetime than just the brain you were born with and the physical environment you grew up in. Just look at twins raised in the same home. They can have significantly different personalities based on different experiences, different memories that were impactful, etc.
And personalities change over time because of all of this. So someone at age 30 and the same person at age 50 is often going to have somewhat different personalities based on all of this.
What might be possible, though it would take technology we may never have, would be to individually copy every single atom in a person’s brain with something like a star trek style replicator, and implant that in a cloned body that was as close as possible to their body at the age you copied the brain. This would include every single neuron and neural pathway, every single drop of hormones, etc. And somehow do this instantly or at absolute zero temperatures and then instantly bring them to normal temperature to prevent any damage to the cells. Of course that would be absurdly difficult and is only science fiction, of likely to ever be reality. Too many variables, too many ridiculous technological dependencies, etc.
You don’t need to talk about it like it’s some kind of hypothetical—the end result would just be identical twins (albeit with an age difference). People have no conceptual trouble with the idea that identical twins are distinct people.
Your genes do not change from the moment after conception.
Cloning will get you the same outcome as if someone gave birth to twins (or triplets etc). They might resemble each other, but they won’t share memories and (if they are raised in different environments), they won’t necessarily act the same way
Why should it? Your personality is defined in many ways by your upbringing and the experiences you made. Just think about some traumatic thing happening to you and how this might shape your personality. Or how different you will get when choosing different jobs to be in. If you go to the military, you will be a different person afterward than choosing some social profession or being a teacher. Go to business or sales and you will be different from being a long range driver or in production.
Genes can’t know that because it’s the stuff that is happening to you while you are living. Grow up in a loving, careful home and you will be different than growing up in an abusive home. Take twins, put one into Afghanistan and the other in New York and you will get different personalities.
Experience, what happens to you in life shapes your brain equally if not more then your genes
DNA is like a blueprint which describes how to make a person, but it doesn’t actually describe the person. There are a whole bunch of things which are slightly random, and will come out differently every time.
Also, there are a lot of things which change over your lifetime because of things you experience. Since your DNA doesn’t change*, a clone has to start from scratch and would change differently unless it experiences the same things, including things like the food they eat.
*Strictly speaking DNA can kind-of change, but nowhere near enough to store the kinds of things you’re talking about
You could even expand on that. DNA is the blueprint (genotype). However you are talking about life, and life will find a way to live to the best of its abilities. Let’s dig on that:
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imagine your original dog lacked some nutrients at some point, it may seem minor, ridiculous even but the expression of some sub-recipe could not activate properly during growth. So the recipe(genotype) was there but did not complete. The result (phenotype) is different.
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Life is alive. Lots of things are active, well everything. Ex: for black and white cats, the black spots are due to hot spot on the body. So if you shave your cat, cover some area, it will grow black instead of white.
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Plus you are assuming that the same blueprint, the same conditions give the same results. When replicating cells make mistakes that could radically change behavior, physical appearance, health conditions,etc
The last is more philosophical and less sciency. The more you love a companion, the greater the loss. You regret everything that will be no more. Loss is an expression of the care you gave each other and you still give to each other. It was and is an existence that impacts and affects you.
The pain is so unbearable that it crush to dust the “is it possible to do this” part of your reasoning. It obliterates the “should i do this”. And finally it even makes you miss the “should my companion would want that”.
It is the thing that i find ugly.The lack of consent. Without consent, There is no care, no love. You love each other so much that even in the absence of the other the effect is so great yet you would disrespect all the things that you have been through, all the lessons and mistakes, all the moments that were precious because they happened once instead of never, all the things you have built together (including yourselfs).
Plus it is a slippery slope. Your companion dumped you (it is a loss!). You clone it, put the same memories, everything in it. You comodified your relationship, your companion. You disrespect their freedom and consent to even leave you.
It dumps you again, those memories of them should be the problem. Do you alter them ? So convenient. Obviously, it is not a relationship but a shitty product, a mere convenience for someone that refuses to grow, to learn.
You could give and receive so much care yet you prefer a farce, a lie where every moment reminds you that those moments are passed and gone. It is not about both of you anymore, it is only about yourself. You have a problem, not a relationship.
I will moderate myself a bit. In all the bits that make us humans you have the fear of pain and loss and the need to control everything. Your way of thinking is not ugly but human. However should you put that into practice in one form or another it will become ugly very fast.
If anyone reading is experiencing such emotions. Take care of yourself, ask for help and share your experience if you are able to. Your relationship is unique. The emotion you experience is a part of human nature.We are not alone.
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That’s “Nature vs. Nurture”. The basic structure of the neuronal network in your brain will be the same at birth (mostly - these things are based on chemistry, which means things like concentration gradients and some sheer thermodynamic randomness come into play, and there seems to be evidence that we start experiencing things even before we are born). But the creation of new connections and pruning of unused ones are based on sensory input, which can never be replicated 1:1 - even if you were able to “replay” the experience of a human over the course of 2 decades, you cannot control the internal state of the person at the moment they experience something, which can fundamentally change how one and the same situation will be perceived.
Even if you would create 1000 clones of me, not one of them would result in the same person that i am. That is somewhat of a comforting thought.
Even if you would create 1000 clones of me, not one of them would result in the same person that i am. That is somewhat of a comforting thought.
Clone 1001 will be implanted with a cyborg brain and massaged to retain a specific shape in its widdle folds, all the way down.
We even tacked on the rest of a programmable nervous system. We based it on the specific shape of yours, as it was in the 10 seconds after your original death, when we zapped you up like a frog at a High School experiment and scanned you down to the electron interactions within you before your meat could begin to decay.
We thought that was pretty good enough, but we figured you also left all this digital trail full of your life experiences behind, so we used those in reinforcement training.
We think we found where the anarchism comes from, by the way. But we didn’t want to take it out. We need you to work on the Europa Ice mines, and foment some of that so we can root it out of the wild worker specimens, then we can see about updating you into the proper capitalist frame.
OH, and yes, you’re technically an LLM of yourself, but don’t think about that too much.
-Some billionaire’s wet dream
? Personality doesn’t only come from genes. In nature/nurture, genes are mostly ‘tendencies’, or recipe’s and needs to be activated by environment. In the West, environment - nurture - are usually dismissed, and peoples behaviour is deemed ‘nature’ - ‘who they are’, but that is untrue, cruel and just a relic from current anti-scientific ideological claims. You can guess which ideology currently shames, and harass people deemed ‘not good enough’ as they are. It allows any elite establishment to jail and mistreat people bc ‘they just ARE bad’, and ignore the environment that led them to behave that way. Every prisoner are a prisoner bco environment, and bc the elite believe in what is convenient. We are NOT our genes, and general behaviour is much more associated with nurture after the initial fast development. Twins had the ~same environment until birth, so are very alike later. However, any ideology/religion that fail to include environment in behaviour, will have the same problem.
In short: every time we experience something, our genes get enabled/disabled accordingly. No neuron or cell stays the same in all environments, or throughout our lives. We even get behaviour from how our parents felt in their environment when they fucked us into existence.
Besides, genes are just accumulated environmental influences, so in the big picture all behaviour is really just environment.
Genetics provides a very loose framework to register, process, and act on learned information. The vast majority of however we define “personality” is a product of learning, not hard-coded by physical gene expression.
Personality is certainly influenced by genes: there have been cases of identical twins separated at birth allowing similarities between the twins to be studied https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/genetic/5-true-stories-twins-separated-at-birth.htm
The idea that memories of lived experience can be inherited was historically popular, but has been very much disproven unless you count quite tenuous examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_memory_(psychology)
The personality bit also makes a sort of sense if you think about it. Whether you frame it as “nature or/and nurture” or “genetics and epigenetics”, it takes both sides to make a person.
The genetic component is sorta like the blueprint to make a person’s hardware, and everyone is made up of very hyper specialized micromachines. Then life experience gives you the software that runs them.
So twins would share the same sort of specific hardware that makes it more likely to optimize for running certain software.
Why can’t you ask your dumb questions to chatGPT?
