MovieChat Forums > Moon (2009) Discussion > could you ever get to the point

could you ever get to the point


where you met your clone who shared all your memories that you would live on through him when you died?

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Unlikely. The only way I could think of to transfer our thoughts and memories and personality into a new body would be to transplant the brain. It might be possible one day but that doesn't exactly let us live indefinitely since the brain still grows older. Eventually we'd end up with Alzheimer or some other neuro-degeneration and if not that it's a only a matter of time until you develop cancer in the brain.

If cloning will ever be used to prolong our lives it will probably be by using clones as spare parts.

If we ever find a way to live indefinitely I think it will be because we've managed to manipulate the mechanisms behind aging in such a way that we don't grow older.

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But all of Sam-5’s thoughts and memories are limited to the moon base. Not a rich life. All the clones only cause so much variation from their daily drudgery, so Sam-6 is the product of what's been done in the base by each clone since Sam 1. Each clone "comes to" from an "accident" and Gerty explains their "memory loss." They seem to assume the deterioration/decoration in the base is pre-accident and they've lost the memory.

The big question then is: Was using clone slaves planned corporate greed? Or was there really an accident and the clones were sent and set up? (Or just a cloning lab was sent and the worker(s) left when enough Sams were produced?)

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My impression was that all the Sam's had the memories of the original Sam up to arrival on the moon. So they all remember their wife, and that she had been pregnant, and that they had agreed to a three-year hitch.

To the OP, no, I would feel that the clone was a different person from me. Even if our memories were identical. If someone told me, "I'm going to kill you, but this clone of you will continue on," I would not be comforted at all.

I think the clone slaves is not a bad plan, unless you think of the clones as people, which Sam6 clearly did. It was a cost effective plan and seems to have run without a hitch for over a decade. It's disgustingly unethical, IMO, but what is my opinion worth?

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I don't wanna see that day come because everything comes to an end eventually, only natural. Unless you believe in reincarnation, cause that's kinda like cloning.

You live one life, then start over. You may not have memories like a clone, but there are deep spiritual feelings that can't be explained. Not to get too preachy, but I've always felt like I was around during an earlier time.

Do all humans have just one life? Where do all the trillions of souls go? Not just people, but all living things. Do they just disappear?

Good movie, btw.

 me.

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This opens up a philosophical can of worms, to be honest. Lets take the idea that someone (say John Smith) has himself cloned and somehow transfers his entire memories into the clone just before death (never mind the question as to what memories the clone previously had - let's just say it's a blank slate). So the clone now has all of John Smith's memories and experiences and now believes himself to be John Smith. However, he is simply a duplicate. The original John Smith is now dead and thus completely unaware of the clone's life and experiences, so has not actually achieved any immortality, beyond the fact that a perfect copy of him now exists. If you do a perfect digital copy of the Mona Lisa, say, is it actually the real Mona Lisa? And what happens if you then destroy the original? If the original John Smith died in, say 2016, there might be a version of him still alive in 3016, if he's cloned himself again and again, although, by now, his memories would be far more extensive than the original's - so is the clone still John Smith, or has he taken on an identity of his own? However, the original John Smith would still have been dead and gone for a thousand years by then - as would his consciousness.

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none of the original cells in the original john smith's body will be alive at his death. how is this different from your scenario? the body is simply a vessel for john smith's consciousness - if you transport that consciousness (via his memories) from one body to another john smith lives on.

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I was going to say that as well.

Even if the flesh is duplicated and new every time the memories are implanted, John Smith's consciousness is still the same John Smith that was born a 1000 years ago, he could theoretically remember his childhood or his first kiss etc.
Even if his current shell or body did not actually kiss that girl, but like Phantom said, cells regenerate anyway, changes are slim that by the time youre 80, that your lips are the exact same ones as that you first kissed your wife with.
hah, i dont know why im using a kissing example, but yeah.

But if you would destroy the first Mona Lisa, that would just be screwed up, because you can duplicate it, but it does not have a consciousness, so you would effectively be destroying the original, whatever you are left with is merely a reproduction, not a continuation, unlike John Smith's identity.

If the memory remains of doing the memory transplant, if it is done with knowledge and consciously, then John Smith is mentally immortal, he just needs to change his exterior every once in a while.

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in a semi-sorta-similar vein...i highly recommend reading roger zelazny's "lord of light". it has the memory transference to new bodies issue as one of the main features. and clones too, now that i think of it. great book!

(and for fun lol trivia...that's the movie ben affleck was pretending to make in "argo". too bad it never made it off the ground, i could see it being awesome. if only james cameron would do lol instead of avatar sequels....)

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It's the old, silly hollyweird idea, that cloning somehow is the same thing as immortality, because a clone is another you.

It doesn't work that way.

You can't clone a human being. You can only clone a body. A clone body wouldn't be 100% identical as the original body, necessarily anyway. Especially considering its whole lifespan (whatever that may be).

You are a soul, energy, vibration, self, a 'true essence', something that cannot be cloned, because it's not a simple data packet, but a living part of the Divine Creator, constantly connected to it (the separation is just a very convincing illusion), and consantly being kept alive by The Great Unnamed.

You can't create life in a laboratory, you can only manipulate already existing -forms- (form is not the same thing as life, because form has to do with body, while life has to do with energy that can live in a body or outside a body (astral plane, for example).

Hollyweird never takes this kind of perspective, even in its wildest fantasy movies.

Memories do not make you (people have lost their memories and are still 'themselves'). You can't 'live through' something 'when you die' (or after).

Furthermore, self never dies, as energy can't be destroyed (Einstein realized this, and thus his view about immortality of the soul is true).

Also, your question is badly formed, nonsensical and incoherent. It's hard to know WHAT exactly you are asking.

A clone will either be:

1) Soulless (and thus lifeless) organic robot, unfeeling and incapable of actual thought (though it can be programmed with some sort of A.I.)

2) An incarnation vessel for an -already-existing-soul- that comes from the same place as all the other souls that incarnate normally. Therefore, being someone that already has incarnated before (most likely, because new souls would probably not be sent to or willingly incarnate first in 'clone bodies'), complete with already-existing personality, values, quirks, and spiritual cultivation level.





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Therefore, a 'clone' would NEVER be 'you'.

But _EVEN_ if we forget everything I just typed, even if we disregard this "clone will never be you" truth, and go with this always-presented, silly hollyweird crapdom, even in such a scenario, the clone would still not really be you.

It would be 100% identical to you as accurately as possible, but when YOU die, you will not become the clone. You are gone. You won't be seeing anything the clone sees, feeling anything the clone feels, doing anything the clone does. You won't be aware of anything together with the clone.

YOU wouldn't be 'living through' anything (as if 'living through' is even possible - or perhaps this term should be clarified). You would be dead. A completely separate individual, regardless of how 'similar', would be living its own life any way it sees fit.

In any case, I don't get where the hollyweird gets this idea that cloning has anything to do with 'immortality'. Even if a clone has memories of 800 clones before it, it still has exactly 1 life, and it hasn't itself lived through those memories, and nothing of the 800 clones is living in it. It just remembers what they remembered (not that memories can be transplanted anyway, since they're not physical any more than thoughts are (and they're not)).

The whole idea is ridiculous, illogical, not supported by anything, except some hollyweirdos' fantasies for some reason that I can't fathom.

It does promote the nihilistic, materialistic and downright demonic values that 'life' is somehow physical, and that you won't exist after your body dies.

One human life is too short for human evolution, spiritual cultivation and learning.


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Mozart didn't compose music things by the time he was around five (or even four, depending on who you ask) just because the Universe just randomly happened to arrange some atoms and molecules in a speficic order because of Darwin's 'evolution'.

He composed music so young, because he had learned about music and had those talents before he incarnated. He had accumulated lots of skill and talent, so he was able to express all this as soon as the physical body had grown enough to make such expression viable. He wasn't a genius per se, a miracle of nature - he had simply learned a very long time.

A young soul without any experience with music, would NOT be able to compose anything comparable even by his seventieth incarnation anniversary.

It takes time to learn, it takes time to cultivate, it takes time to evolve. One human life, or let's say 100 or 150 years, even, is but a tiny grain of sand in the Eternity of the Cosmos. It's NOTHING. Why so many people so stubbornly identify with such smallness, is a mystery to me.

And yet at the same time, their own smallness is too much for them, so they have to bloat their ego and try to seem bigger and better than others (through various ways, from riches to sports to skills, to whatnot).

In some better worlds, this sort of movies are much more interesting, because they don't rely on faulty premises and they don't destroy their own stories (this story is like a rotten apple; it falls to pieces under its own weight - look at my post about automation and existence of Gerty and the other tech).

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