ST:  What do you think determines actual death?

HB:  My absolutely instinctive answer is Time to go, although I'm not quite sure what that really means. I have an overweight friend who's smoked like a train all her life and was 96 on her last birthday. I have another who died from lung cancer in her thirties. You have to ask yourself why. You hear of people falling out of aeroplanes and surviving, others dying because a kitten scratched them. When I researched the medical aspects of death for my book, I discovered that in the absence of disease or accident, old age doesn't actually kill you. One day your heart is beating, the next it's stopped and the doctors can't find any real reason for the change. Then there's the classic situation in which one partner in a happily married couple dies and the second partner goes within a month or so, despite being perfectly healthy. You look at things like that and you can't help wondering if there isn't some element of choice involved, although probably at a purely unconscious level.

ST:  In your discussion of cloning as an answer to keeping one's persona on a continuum, you discuss the notion of capturing memories of the person to be cloned and downloading them to the clone in order to make the clone more than just a physical duplicate of the person. Do you think simply having the memories stored in the brain would create that feeling for the clone or might it be necessary to have actually lived those memories to truly duplicate the feelings associated with the memories?

 

 
HB:  This is a much trickier area than you might imagine. First off, I very much doubt if the downloading of electronic memories will ever be possible. The idea is based on the assumption that memories are stored as electrical traces in the brain - something that could theoretically be duplicated if we had the technology. But there's increasing evidence, from organ transplants among other things, that memory storage is not confined to the brain and may even be holistic - spread throughout the entire body - something that would be infinitely more difficult to duplicate. After this, we come to the point you raise. Would an artificial memory carry the same emotional tone as an actual experience? I don't know the answer to that and I doubt anyone else does, definitively, until such an experiment is actually carried out. But then we have to go beyond your question and ask whether duplicating memories and emotions amounts to duplicating the actual individual. Are you simply the sum of your chemical composition and bio-electrical activity? At our present level of technical knowledge this is a philosophical question, but I strongly suspect the answer is that you are not. There is something of Silence Thayer that stands outside your physical make-up, even if that term includes the subtle electrical activity of your brain.