(sorry about this one... there isn't any insight in this post that smarter minds haven't already been thinking of for several man-years. I just wrote it for
a different forum after a little argument on IRC over whether killing an exact clone of oneself is morally wrong, and it seemed poetically appropriate to copy over here...)
Oh no! You've just caught Dennett's disease (*)! This syndrome causes in its sufferers a debilitating doubt about one's personal identity, including constant questioning of whether you are the same person when you wake up in the morning as you were when you went to sleep, and time wasted pondering whether you'd notice it if every particle in your body was simultaneously swapped out and replaced with a different one with exactly the same identifying characteristics (location, speed, particle type, etc). Untreated, it eventually leads to complete mental deadlock.
Fortunately, there is a cure: To shock you with an even greater reason to doubt your identity! Unfortunately, the development of medicine and psychology has not yet produced a technique to produce this shock directly. Fortunately, physicists have recently unveiled the Duplication Machine, which as the name says is able to produce an exact duplicate of any object, particle by particle.
The treatment, then, is as simple as this: You are anaesthetised and put in the duplication machine. The machine turns you into you and a perfect duplicate of you, both fast asleep. The duplicate is checked to ensure it's perfectly the same creature as the original, by every imaging technique the doctors have access to. Then, in order to avoid the permanent introduction of a superfluous copy, a fair coin is flpped to decide which of the two should be given a lethal injection. Afterward, the remaining you is woken up, now completely shocked out of the disease.
Your task: Explain what, exactly, has been lost by proceeding with this treatment. If it is an economical or legal reason, just pretend society has simply changed a lot and this treatment is considered right in the future. If it is the potential life the other you could lead, please explain how to justify any action leading to the nonexistence of a creature that could potentially lead a life as rich as the other you. If it's an intrinsic moral principle not related to potential life, please describe that principle.
Extra credit: Oh no! During the clone consistency check, one of you woke up by accident for several seconds. He/she was soon put back to sleep, though, and the procedure went smoothly otherwise. You have no recollection of this occurring, so it seems obvious it was the other you that had those experiences - until the doctors explain that as a standard procedure, patients are given a drug that inhibits the imprinting of memories if they wake up before the designated time. That is, either you had those experiences and forgot, or the other you had those experiences and died, but you can't tell the difference. Investigate the ways in which the difference is important, if any.
(*) I made up the name, Daniel Dennett does work in approximately this area of philosophy, but hasn't actually had a disease named after him - certainly not one like this. Or, rather, he just did, but it's not commonly used in literature
No-one should be without a parasol, Sirocco.
