A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an interesting thought (at least for me) while I was driving.
Let's see if I can explain it well. Also, I couldn't find a suitable name for this thread.

Let's imagine an hypothetical situation, where an 8 years old children drowns in the pool. The father is in chock, but a man gets in contact with him and tells him that he can "create" another children, an exact copy of the kid that drowned. That includes memories, genetic data and all sorts of habits and preferences the kid had before dying.

Is the "new kid" the same has the one that drowned? This might seem an easy answer question, but take a deeper look at it.

The "new kid" has all the memories, that includes the memories of the drowning. Can he accept death, if the dad tells him what happened?

This subject also makes me wonder if a clone really is a copy of someone, because memories will not be the same. But do memories play an important role in this?

Tell me your opinions, and If you have more questions related to this subject please post them. I want to have a deeper view on this (if possible) and for that to happen I need your opinions.

Memories are not contained within genes, genetic cloning would not have memories.

Molecular cloning would replicate the structure on a molecular level thus memories would be replicated.

For an understandable analogy, the cloning techniques we use today are essentially the same as looking up the blueprints for something and making a new one from scratch. As such, you could create two of exactly the same thing and then blow one up with TNT. They're still clones of each other, but now one is in a significantly different condition.

Now, if you want molecular cloning... information theory does not like that, so you're also probably going to lose memories there anyways.

Now, if you assume that your cloning method is perfect in every way and quantum physics isn't out to kill this idea dead... the only way to figure it out would be to actually do it. The human mind is incredible to the extent of what it can manage to deal with.

Watch either Moon or Astroboy, and you'd see what a horrifying reality being a copy would be.

Vox Moderated Message:

You cite both 'Moon' and 'Astroboy', making your citations more specific with links and references to particular dialogue or episodes would help get your point across more effectively.

Thread was derailed, I've deleted the off topic chat and I hope we can get back on topic now.

even if the clone had his memories it wouldnt be the same.

imagine if you father tells you that you are a clone of the original son? basicly you are a substitute but you have every memories and you cant remember "dieing".
you would start think "who am i?" or "what am i?"

about the father:
he would probably have problems at looking at his "new" son because he would remember the original dieing and all.

the life that the father had with his son would never be the same again :P

atleast i think so...

I still think it's a bad idea giving them memories from another person. Furthermore, why are we cloning people and keeping them conscious? The real way to go is to clone people who have highly compatible organs and blood, but then again if we can clone whole humans then surely by that stage we can clone the important bit and therefore not need clones at all?

When a creature is cloned, it starts as a baby. So it would have to grow up again. Meaning that it would have new memories, new habits, a new lifestyle, etc.

In your hypothetical scenario though, the clone would indeed remember drowning and traumatize it. However, if someone were to tell him that the doctors "brought him back to life", he wouldn't have to accept his previous "death". At only 8 years old, it would be easy to convince him.

I'm not entirely sure an 8 year old would be traumatised by discovering that he was once dead, it's the same as once being not born, and an 8 year old isn't either scared nor, normally capable of understanding either, then again maybe, here is a brief train of thought on the matter:

(NOTE: I am not a neural scientist, the following is abstracted by my own understanding and simplified for the purposes of the explanation.)
A) The brain is a large neural network with segmented areas designed to cope with senses and motor neurons, but not entirely isolated from the whole.
B) Memories in the brain are structures in the neural network that are held by variably strong synapses between the neurons.
C) A child's brain is more susceptible to changes in the brain as it is still in the learning phase of human development.

Problem A) Can the human brain be capable of learning all the information of a past life without destroying the old brains memory?
Answer: The past memories would be all but destroyed with an imperfect 'copy all' technique for memory cloning, unless we gained the ability to selectively give the child memories the old memories would be gone.

Problem B) Can we actually mould the synapses of a different brain to gain all the memories of a past brain?
Answer: Brains are not all identical, the difference between one brain and the next will make this hard, it may take several decades to fully upload the new memories.

Conclusion: We need to learn more about how the brain stores memories and experiment with memory transfusion to fully understand this problem, perhaps training a rat to run a maze, and transferring that memory to a new rat who had never run that maze, then seeing with what success the new rat ran that maze would be a sufficient test.

Watch the 6th Day. They did quite well on the concept of cloning. Also Arnold Shwarzenegger, His Clone, and his stunt double is pretty good. Or watch Moon, you'll get an idea what it's like when a seclusive clone gets in contact with himself.

Also why would it be traumatising if you were dead and then cloned and brought back to life, knowing you are a clone of your original self that obviously died. If I were a clone I would be thinking well I'm still here.

Also being philosophical aksing Who am I? What am I? You would be a dumbass. Because you know what you are especially if all previous thought was transferred. The only thing they should be wondering is if their memories are the original not some copy from the original because if it werent the original memory and just the copy of the memory, things could go wrong.

I also don't think Reproducing as clones would be a good idea, I'm not sure why, but something is telling me that it isn't a good idea for down the road.