Just like having a ready clone waiting for your pod to go pop, the "soft clone double" could be circumvented by having the mindstate kept separately and burned to the new body only after the old body is certainly dead. This would, however, cause some legal issues with the question of what makes a person dead. Also, if the blank brain still "functions" while the clone is not activated, I could see that there could be issues with the template brain starting to spontaneously make connections, which might mess with uploading the intended consciousness, or waking up if something goes wrong with storage.
The same thing with regular clones as well, though. I understand the Good Guy in TEA had a partial mind transfer done, interrupted by the Bad Guy, so he did not wake up in a completely blank state. The question is, which parts need to be functional while the clone is waiting activation and are these parts sufficient to call the clone a person? If they are, we have the case of accidental Frankenstein's monsters if clones are prematurely awakened. Therefore, let us assume that clone templates, before activation, have levels of brain damage (or rather, no brain) such that before the new brain is burned to the icky gooey parts, it does not have personality nor any ability to stay biologically alive without life support. Which makes the Good Guy Amarrian from TEA extremely lucky to have just enough stuff written in the brain to have only amnesia and a personality change. (And probably SP loss, though he demonstrated still very high level of subconsciously knowing how spaceships work.)
As such, the problem with soft clones comes down to two questions: First, the legal problem of how to secure the stored mind state in such of a way that accidental activation or theft is very, very, very difficult and unlikely to happen. Second, how the mind can be scanned for storage. The technically easiest way would be to use a regular, destructive scan and instead of burning the mind state, store it and burn a copy. However, the way soft cloning seems to be "intended to work" in many cases is a non-destructive scan, leaving the origin body alive and well. This has some extra complications. First, of course, is non-destructiveness of the scan. Second is accuracy of the scan to avoid changes or errors in the mind state (it is only partially understood, after all). Third is sufficient speed, shortness of time or otherwise ensuring that the patient's mind state stays constant during the scan, or I imagine the copy would not be of sufficient coherence. The case of Theseus's ship: Legend says the people of ancient Athens saved the ship the hero Theseus used when he went to kill the minotaur. When the ship rotted, they exchanged parts, eventually making part-by-part a new ship. The question with mind state is how much it can be allowed to change so that the person is still the same? In this case, I'd expect a chance of incoherence or schizophrenia/multiple personality, if the mind state changes during the scan.
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Topic: Soft clones, how do they work exactly ? (Read 4996 times)