Re: Identity

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Dan Fabulich wrote:
>
>Now, here, people have falsely applied Identity of Indiscernables to say
>"Yes, definitely. If the I.o.I. principle is true, then the two copies
>are the same person." Well, again, this requires us to assume that there
>is a "person," a "consciousness" off in Plato's heaven, of which the two
>copies are instances. We have two instances, obviously, but so long as
>they're both instances of the same person, it should be fine if one of
>them dies. The true form of you exists so long as one of your copies
>exists.

Whoa there. Your post was great until this point. As you say, the two identical twins are indeed *two different humans* with the same genetic makeup. However, as soon as awareness (in any capacity) occurs, the cognitive processes become --as John Clark said in his initial post-- slightly different than each other. Therefore, to kill one would mean killing a being that is not *identical* to the other. However, the level of consciousness of each twin *would* be almost identical to each other and would ultimately mean killing a being that is conscious. So truly, the question of ethics surpasses the genetic feasibility...it becomes a question of killing something that is conscious. True, the level of consciousness of a newborn (or two...four is right out!) would be nowhere near as complex as a mature human, but it would be conscious nonetheless. So the next question is this: how developed must the consciousness be before the killing would be considered murder?

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