Although I suppose that some people would call it an ethical one, despite the fact that the ethics are largely straightforward. For background, Schlock Mercenary is a far-future webcomic where one of the lead characters (Captain Tagon) recently got himself killed doing something heroic in order to save his crew. The thing is, it’s a far-future world, and the technology for braintaping people just got introduced. Tagon had a backup made, forty minutes before he hand-delivered an armed ship’s missile to a boarding party invading his ship. This is important because there was no body to retrieve: the new Tagon is only genetically identical to the old one, with 99.9999% all of his memories and presumably his entire personality.
Now, I think that the ethics are fairly straightforward, here – Tagon chose to have a backup made, and he knew that it wouldn’t be like closing his eyes in one body and opening them in another. The dude died. And it was his choice to have a copy activated. You can get into the weeds over whether it’d be different if Tagon hadn’t made a copy, or if he had left instructions on not being duplicated; I’d say that it is. But that’s not the interesting question for me.
My question is, does this new Tagon have a soul? If he does, what does that mean in terms of any possible separation between the mind and the psyche. If he doesn’t, did the old Tagon? If the old one did and the new one didn’t, how do you argue that position without falling back on “I don’t think God would use a process I pretty much by definition cannot understand* in this fashion?” And if both had souls, then what about all those artificial intelligences in the webcomic as well?
I have no answers on this one, but the questions are pretty interesting anyway.
Moe Lane
*It’s called a Mystery for a reason.
Given that the new Kaff Tagon has already demonstrated agency, I think it is beyond question that he has an animating spirit.
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There are distinctions that can be drawn between such a spirit and a soul, but they’re almost entirely theological abstractions or rank speculation about something we cannot empirically understand.
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Which you could certainly play with in a story, most likely with a building sense of horror. (I’m thinking some vampire or possession tropes might be especially appropriate.)
But I see no sign that this is going to happen. It doesn’t fit the tone and focus of the story. I think it’ll be noodled over a bit, before being firmly planted under the Reset Button and Status Quo is God tropes.
Especially given the prior story arc about time clones.
True, but I’m mildly hoping that Howard Tayler does something with it, though.
For stories like this, I think it important to remember the way in which we understand and see identical twins. If this new version of Tagon isn’t a completely different person with his own soul, then identical twins aren’t separate individuals with different souls. Though we don’t think of them as clones because they are created naturally, that is exactly what identical twins are: clones. If we should ever get to the point of artificially creating clones, each one will be the equivalent of an identical twin: a unique unrepeatable person with their own soul.
That’s a good point, but there is one interesting difference: both Tagons would have different souls, but effectively the same mind and personality. Obviously, if both had lived there would have been divergence over time, as each changed in response to different life experiences, but so much of what we consider as being ‘us’ is tied into our memories and cumulative reaction to events. I don’t know if that makes any real difference, but it’s interesting to consider.
But Howard Tayler has already done that, with the time-clone of Kevyn Andreyasn. They were literally the same person, until they weren’t.
And then there are the Gavs … all nine hundred million of them. That “Which one is real, which one has a soul?” business also applies to everyone else who’s used the F’sherl-Ganni wormgate teleportation system, too.
He’s also killed Schlock’s mind and enabled Petey to reload him from backup memories, back on Oisri.
And do the AIs go to church? At least one of them has committed suicide …
I think that in the current strips Howard is putting a model of Tagon into a simulation with the objective of asking him if he wants to be recreated; the alternative would be to let Tagon’s soul go to wherever it was going to go … if he has a soul.
I think it’s interesting that Howard is a devout Mormon, yet the rules that govern his Schlock Mercenary universe easily could be interpreted either as ambiguously agnostic or downright atheist.
(Well, aside from the fact that Howard has inserted himself on multiple occasions as the Creator of that universe. But in that capacity he’s never let on whether any of the characters have souls …)
(Dang. Everything after asking and before Schlock should be in the normal non-italiized typeface. I wish these comments had a “preview” function …)
I can’t wait for The Reverend Lieutenant Phobius to weigh in at some point. The Neo-Orthodox LasVegan Church probably has some interesting views on cloning.
The important factor here is the co-creative act. God is the source of all life. He invites us to create life with Him. The moment we create something new (even if that something new has memories of someone else’s life) God is involved. Therefore, there is a new soul and a new person. To riff off of your interesting difference, this new Tagon still experiences the life of the old Tagon in a unique way: the new one never experienced them corporeally. He only has memories.
That’s more or less where I am on this. It seems like a good way to distinguish mind from soul when discussions of the difference between the two come up.
How do AIs like Ennesby fit into that mold? For that matter, how about the one who committed suicide — did he have a soul? (The black bowling ball who succeeded Ennesby as controller of Tagon’s ship, I don’t remember his name.)
I guess you could say that since we all inhabit the universe that God created, He has a hand in everything we create …
Its the same dilemma that the idea of a multiverse of parallel universes faces:
If we presume a soul, and if we presume that there are multiple universes (either finite or infinite) running simultaneously, do all our simultaneous versions of ourselves share the same soul?
Does the Adolph Hitler who became an artist and retired without ever influencing world history in any meaningful fashion have the same soul as the genocidal murderer we all know? Does the Fidel Castro that became a major league baseball player have the same soul as the communist dictator? Does the General Fred Rogers that precipitated World War III have the same soul as the children’s TV show host?
Really, at the end of the day, if there are an infinite number of universes, then there are infinite version of us, including every possible range of virtue.
Ok in 12-10 script Taylor is touching upon that.