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IS it impossible to duplicate ourselves?

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IS it impossible to duplicate ourselves?

jsidelko
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Posted 10/25/09 - 09:16 AM:
Subject: IS it impossible to duplicate ourselves?

Is it impossible to duplicate ourselves?

Even if we accept that it is technologically possible to replicate ourselves, I propose that it is physically impossible to create an exact copy. The barrier to such an achievement is the quantum foam at the Planck distance. As a result of the uncertainty at this level with virtual particles randomly popping in and out of existence, we would never achieve precision beyond this boundary. Because of the slight differences resulting from such uncertainty, the end product would deviate widely because of nonlinear effects. Consequently, we would only be able to replicate rough grained copies of ourselves.

thanatos

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Posted 10/25/09 - 09:52 AM:	#2
Yes it would be impossible, teleportation is theoretically possible (copy the information of one source and reconstruct the object with particles in other place) but it is impossible to reconstruct an object to another location and leave the first object intact because quantum uncertainty puts limits on how we obtain our information.
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Posted 10/25/09 - 12:19 PM:	#3
Well, wouldn't it be possible to make an exact copy of a non-planck scale object, that is to say, at the molecular level instead of down to the atomic? Since quantum effects are classically consequential only at extreme low temperatures, would planck-scale resolution, or precision, matter one way or another? For instance, microchips are replicated in which one cannot be discerned from the other except at near planck-scales.
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Wosret
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Posted 10/25/09 - 12:49 PM:	#4
Is a difference that makes no difference a difference at all?
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Samuel Locke
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Posted 10/26/09 - 04:53 PM:	#5
Is it impossible? I would not go that far but extremely unlikely.

Samuel Locke
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Posted 10/26/09 - 04:56 PM:	#6
Wosret wrote: Is a difference that makes no difference a difference at all? Well if it was not different than there would not be anything different, so yes it is a difference.

jsidelko
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Posted 10/26/09 - 05:25 PM:	#7
An undectable difference for human perception is still a difference.
thanatos

wuliheron
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Posted 10/26/09 - 06:31 PM:	#8
As far as anyone can tell one subatomic particle is identical to another, but this might be a limitation of our current technology. Quantum Indeterminacy only says that if you do manage to make a copy you will never be able to determine just how exact it is. However, the odds that they will remain identical for any humanly appreciable amount of time are incredibly bad. It also used to be thought that atoms and molecules are extremely orderly, but experiments have indicated there is more chaotic movement among them than was ever suspected. Displaced molecules on the order of parts per thousand are not unheard of. Nonetheless, so much of what makes us who we are is evidently the result of emergent properties that are much higher up the causal chain than the molecular level. So much so that even identical twins can have distinctive dna. Which begs the question of whether or not "identical" really only has meaning in a given context.

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Posted 10/26/09 - 07:36 PM:	#9
It is not impossible. This appears to be a mash-up of several fallacies. First you have a classic "argument from ignorance". Quantum indeterminacy seems to be the swiss army knife for this approach. Because of QM, there are a host of things that seem impossible to determine at the macro level? It is as if a multitude of QM butterflies flapping their wings simultaneously causing a quantum hurricane/typhoon/cyclone? It is used to keep consciousness and reality away from objective analysis. But actually, QM indeterminacy doesn't prevent us from measuring a lot of things to a precision great enough for all practical purposes. So I would say it is possible to duplicate something to a point where it would be indistinguishable from the original for all practical purposes. If you could reproduce a diamond or a $100 bill to such an accuracy that it would pass every possible test, we couldn't justify the claim that it is different. The older swiss army knife, chaos theory, would probably be more efficient here. You could claim that an exact duplicate would start to diverge from the original due to strange attractors that we couldn't measure -- or just random influence from the environment. But since chaos predicts that the future effect is virtually unpredictable, you still couldn't determine which one was original and which one is a copy unless you were told. I still think the concept of "original" and "duplicate" is a subjective concept. As far as the physical universe is concerned, there is no such thing as "duplicate", just two arrangements of matter that happened to have similar arrangements.
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thewatcher
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Posted 11/02/09 - 04:53 PM:	#10
It would depend upon one's view of modality. If one is inclined to buy into things like "possible world" semantics, then yes it would seem that duplicating oneself would at least in principle be possible. For my part, I would think that duplication is not possible. One could make a copy of oneself, but that copy would still be a copy and not the originally; it would, so to speak, occupy a different modal position (as, I think, would an alternate "me" in some possible world).

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