Cloning is not duplication. Restoring the blueprint is not resurrection. A true copy has to copy the memory layer, and the memory layer is the one thing a blueprint does not contain.
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The previous essay said that death is the thermodynamic irrecoverability of the memory layer.
This essay asks what happens when the body plan can be recovered but the memory layer cannot.
That is the cleanest possible copy problem, because it removes the sentimental fog. If clever beings rebuild a beetle from the information in a fossil, they may make a perfect beetle. They may even make two. But unless they recover the particular layer of learned world that belonged to the dead beetle, they have not resurrected it.
They have made new beetles.
That is not a failure. New beetles are real. But they are not continuations of the one whose tunnels were erased.
Cloning is not duplication.
Restoring the blueprint is not resurrection.
9. Two beetles on a bright table
A very, very long time after that, in a place that was not woods any more, some very clever beings dug a stone out of the ground with a beetle inside it.
They were clever enough to read what the beetle had been made of. They were clever enough to build it again. And because they could, they built two.
The two beetles woke up side by side on a bright table, exactly alike, with shimmering green shells.
Six legs each. Good antennae. A head shaped for making maps.
And the maps were empty.
Neither of them had ever been down a tunnel. Neither of them had ever met a rude centipede. Neither of them was the beetle, and neither of them was a copy of the beetle either, because the part that would have had to be copied had been erased a very long time before.
They were two perfect beetles and there was nothing left for them to be perfect copies of.