Dolly The Sheep's clones and Life After Death

Started by Love And Submission, August 01, 2012, 03:44:21 PM

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Love And Submission

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8169817/Dolly-the-Sheep-reborn-as-four-new-clones-created.html

Quote
The quads, nicknamed “The Dollies”, are said to be exact genetic copies of their predecessor, who was put down seven years ago.
Dolly was plagued by health problems and suffered from premature arthritis. She was put down in 2003 after contracting lung disease.
“Dolly is alive and well. Genetically these are Dolly,” Professor Keith Campbell, who keeps the Dollies as pets on land at Nottingham University, told the Daily Mail.



So I thought of this the other day while debating the existence of life after death and I was wondering  how people who disagree with the notion of life death feel about this?

Is Dolly still living after her death because genetically  these four  sheep are dolly   despite the fact that the original dolly  is dead. Meaning that Dolly is literally alive after death or   is this no proof at all because we don't know   if these sheep share the same consciousnesses as the original  dolly?




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gaggedLouise

#1
Depends on whether scientifically you would consider a person's abilities, personality traits and the direction their life is going to take as essentially hardwired into their "genetic capital", which they have pretty much formed at their conception in the womb or very shortly after. I personally don't think so - Adolf Hitler, John F Kennedy or Ludwig van Beethoven or even your great-grandmother would not have become the same persons if they had been dropped into today's world by rebirth. Still less if they had lived a thousand years ago with the exact same genes. They'd have developed in quite different ways from the characters we know from history. It's absolutely impossible to predict what would have become of Beethoven if he had lived in an age when music as written, finished-in-score and repeatable pieces did not exist - and most cultures have not been elevating the writing composer in that way, have not been using a model where music is written down in a rigorous fashion to make it possible to perform it again in a detailed way hundreds of years later. The same with Carl Lewis - if he had been born in an age when track and field athletics didn't offer stardom and careers of the kind it does today, he'd have been doing some other thing.

Some biologists (not the majority) would like to think evrything is predestined by the genes, but I think that's unlikely, even impossible. We always interact with the times and people we have around us. And a sheep like Dolly doesn't have any kind of cultural assets or possibilities in her world that could affect what she becomes. Humans are massively influenced by their culture, by training and by language.


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Shjade

Quote from: DTW on August 01, 2012, 03:44:21 PM
I was wondering  how people who disagree with the notion of life death feel about this?

I'm not sure what this means.

As for the Dolly thing: they're not Dolly. They are genetic recreations of Dolly's physical traits, but they don't exist in the same space and time that Dolly did, nor will they share the experiences she had. They will, therefore, mature into entities that differ from their shared origin.
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Will

Pretty much what Shjade said.  We are more than just the sum of our DNA.  That's why identical twins aren't just the same person twice over.  As for "sharing the same consciousness," I can't even imagine how that would happen.
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Serephino

Exactly, DNA is nothing more or less than a blueprint.  Consciousness exists in the brain, which died along with the original Dolly.  You could copy my DNA, but you would not get another me, unless maybe you recreated my life moment by moment, and still, there's no guarantee.  My clone wouldn't even necessarily have the same health history since that's mostly determined by lifestyle.

AndyZ

I've heard of primitive cultures that believed that twins would share the same soul, and that if one of them died, the other had to be put down.  No clue if anyone ever actually really did that, though.

Now, personally, I figure that a cloned person would have a brand new soul.  (If you don't believe in the soul, that's a point for another debate.)  However, mind uploading renders that question effectively moot to all but the philosophers and theologists, because once we have the capability for both, we do have a way to make people effectively immortal.

I've heard at least one guy predict mind uploading as soon as the 2030s, so we'll see how accurate that is.  Once you have both, though, you have what appears to be effective immortality.  A chip in the brain can make constant copies of a person's consciousness, and if you perfectly match both the mind and the body, you can consider it effectively identical unless you also believe in a soul.  The only differences would be how much the body changes when you clone a new young adult with the scanned brain of a much older person.
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Serephino

Yes, identical twins, I didn't think about that until after I went to bed.  They have the same DNA, and are not the  exact same people.  A friend of mine has identical twin brothers, and his mother is a twin too.  They were raised by the same parents in the same household, but they are not  two copies of the same person.  Hell, one is straight, and one is bi.  They often finish each other's sentences, but other than that, they're not much more alike than the rest of the siblings.

Yotna

Sounds to me like this argument is an example of Shrodinger's cat...

The problem is you have to be in the box to know the answer as we are alive we are clearly outside the box QED.
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