What constitutes human cloning? When can you say that this person is a clone of this other person? Is it the similarity in their physical features like face, height, eye color? Or is it their mental state?
Today I was listening to Lex Friedman’s podcast with Mr. Beast where he brought up this point that effectively clones could be where two people's mental state is the same. What does this mean? This means, given a situation, both people would make the same decision every time. Mr. Beast also mentioned that he likes to work with people who are open to listen and can eventually make decisions without any help from him but they would make the exact same decision which he would’ve made. How does Mr Beast achieve this now? He says that some of his colleagues have stayed with him for years and talked with him for 7-8 hours a day everyday and learned his way of decision making. Now he doesn’t have to make those decisions and he can trust this person.
According to Wikipedia:
Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical or virtually identical DNA, either by natural or artificial means. In nature, some organisms produce clones through asexual reproduction.
So it seems like there could be two different variations of cloning, biological one and behavioral one. What Mr. Beast was mentioning in the podcast seems more on the behavioral side. It also seems to me that it’s easier to achieve a behavioral one than a biological one with some error margin of course.
Imagine there’s a person who at their time of mental growth is just bound to stay with another person, observe their behavior, decisions etc. Given long enough time, they might always make similar decisions too. I feel you can even break it into more contextual cloning. For example: I behave in a certain way in a certain context like in a party. And of course if someone behaves exactly like another person in the majority of context, we should be able to say that they are a behavioral clone of each other.
It’s a pretty fascinating subject and maybe I will read more about it.