::ponders::

Hmmm, no. I don't think so. I think I used brain earlier as a shorthand (in my own mind, as well) for "brain + consciousness = person."

So, I don't think that an exact copy of the brain would duplicate the self. I think duplicating self requires the consciousness. And while I don't think that consciousness is in any organ beyond the brain, I don't know if it is only in the brain.

Hmmm, things to think about.

If you make a precise physical duplicate of me and then record me and imprint it, where am I?

but they do not have the exact same experiences. similar, but not exact.

Most identical twins that I have known are just that - similar, but not exact(ly the same.) Even physically. I have twin uncles and one is slightly taller. Guess he had better nutrition / calcium.

The new you thinks she is you. If the old you is there you think you are you, but you don't think the new you is you. All your friends think "two itas! Awesome".

I think we're in split Crichton territory on Farscape for the duplicable self.

Alpha was the surprise. Echo was already an Active when he snapped. Have they created any more Actives since?

I think Sierra was created after Alpha went off. Wasn't Sierra getting her first treatment when Echo was in the middle of the kidnapping arc? And Alpha did his thing when Echo's current handler came on board (was kind of responsible for it), so it seems Sierra would have to be a later addition.

I think we're in split Crichton territory on Farscape for the duplicable self.

FARSCAPE is THE PRINCESS BRIDE of TV Sci-Fi - everything comes back to it enventually.

It may be that there are reasons a long-term imprint, even of a single cohesive personality, wouldn't remain stable in a body/brain other than the one it originated in. That would limit some of the more lucrative applications like body swapping for extremely rich and elderly or otherwise dying people. (Hell, we don't even have any real assurance that returning an imprint of the original consciousness to its own body once the 5 years are over would be stable.)

Consciousness doesn't just reside in the brain. It's the brain's relation to the body that determines the whole person (I think). So new body, equals different person. (In my estimation.)

What if, and this has nothing to do with Dollhouse, an exact copy of the brain is made. Can you duplicate the self that way?

There has been a very active movement in psychology over the last 20 years focused on something called "embodied cognition." Embodied cognition says that we can only understand the mind in the context of a particular organism's (i.e. body's) sensorimotor interactions with the environment over a long period of development. It's a reaction against earlier, abstractly mathematical, traditions in cognitive science that saw the mind as a computational device isolated in the brain. The old view is reflected in traditional ideas of artificial intelligence.

Clearly, the people who created the Dollhouse share the older, abstract view of mind and identity. Extract the algorithms, insert them in a new brain, and you have a functioning person. We'll have to see if Echo's story is more like the new view of embodied cognition.

I think Sierra was created after Alpha went off.

Right, and there was clearly some other incident prior to Alpha's massacre. Because the handler was asking about why the dolls were left defenseless and the programmer says that when they were given skills in their null state, it ended in blood. So something else happened then.

I also think we're supposed to think that Alpha has killed B through D, leaving Echo alive. There are only five pods in the floor we see, so though there may be more people being imprinted at any one time, we're only being explicitly shown the five. There are fourteen more between F & S, so either there are another ten dead, or we're not seeing them. (Three sets of five pods?)

Although, from BSG it's clear I can't do show math, so it's possible none of this is relevant.

On the question of identity, it's an interesting exercise. I think it seems like it would be difficult to be an amalgam of different personalities, all with their different bodies. Even if I think I can rock climb and I somehow have the physical strength to do so, it seems like I would be looking up a cliff face and making decisions based on how long I thought my limbs were and how controlled my center of balance was, things that would be difficult with a blended imprint.