Under physicalism, should I still be sad if my murdered wife is replaced with a perfect clone?

Question

Context: This question follows up on Under physicalism, can my consciousness reappear in a different body?.

Assume, for the sake of argument, that some form of physicalism is true. Imagine my wife is killed in front of me using advanced technology that ensures her death is instantaneous and painless. I react with anger and sorrow as a result. However, one minute later, the perpetrators—revealed to be "pranksters"—use extremely advanced technology to "fix" the situation by creating an exact replica of my wife. This perfect clone is made from different materials but possesses the exact same memories as my original wife and has no memory of the murder. For all practical purposes, she is identical to my wife before the murder, even though I can still see my original wife's dead body. Suppose the "pranksters" also compensate me with 1 million dollars for the one minute of "inconvenience".

Under physicalism, should I still feel sad about the death of my original wife? In other words, would my being sad about the death of my original wife be justified despite the clone and the monetary compensation?

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Note: for the sake of argument, you can also safely assume that I have a justified true belief that my "new" wife is identical to my murdered wife prior to the murder. In other words, you can safely disregard the epistemological issues associated with how I could possibly know if my new wife is indeed identical. Assume that somehow I know she is.

Answer 1

No, under physicalism there is no rational justification for that.

However, humans may feel differently, and no need to invoke any killing.

Just consider catching the winning home run baseball of some important game. Later thieves steal it but leave behind an identical baseball.

You could still be sad about it, as likely the value of the replacement on the free market would be quite less.

The value humans attach to objects is not necessary tied to objective properties of such objects. So it's a psychological phenomenon that however does not contradict physicalism, it just reveals humans to not generally be as rational as they could be.

(Though for practical reasons, we often cannot be sure whether an identical copy really is identical or faulty, so in some other contexts it's a useful pragmatic opinion to hold that the original is more trustworthy than any copy).

A related and more realistic problem is that due to passage of time and life events, the person one marries might years later have a very changed personality, to the point that if one has met that person later, one would not have married them. In that case, why would we still call the younger and the older version the same person?

Answer 2

We are emotional beings. We may come to some conclusions through reason, but reason doesn't prescribe how you "should" feel (but it could affect your feelings).

Emotions are a-rational. Emotions are neither rationally justified, nor rationally unjustified, they are just felt. One could talk about them being warranted or useful, but that's more about helping you deal with those emotions appropriately and responsibly, rather than trying to convince yourself to stop feeling something because it's unjustified (the latter doesn't typically work and is counter-productive).

The trauma of seeing your wife being killed would certainly be very emotional. We may also have an emotional attachment to our illusionary idea of identity - one might feel that one's replacement wife isn't one's "real" wife. This belief wouldn't be rationally justified under physicalism / reductive materialism (assuming one is rationally justified in believing that they are physically identical, which may not be possible).

* One might say that one's wife is not just some particular arrangement of interchangeable particles, but rather it's those exact particles. But this has some issues if one considers replacing one particle at a time, and asking when your wife would no longer be your wife. Related: the ship of Theseus.

Note: the belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposer is already a thing, even without weird hypotheticals.

Answer 3

The answer to this question heavily depends on the cultural norms and mores in place. In a world where cloning deceased individuals is accepted and normalized, the initial sadness over your wife's death can still be a natural and justified human reaction. However, the reappearance of the clone would quickly alleviate this sadness by providing a perceived continuity of life and identity. Society would have different norms and expectations regarding death and mourning, profoundly transforming how individuals experience and understand loss and resurrection through cloning.

Answer 4

Under physicalism, should I still be sad if my murdered wife is replaced with a perfect clone?

If you are unaware that she has been murdered, you will take the clone to be your real wife, and you will not feel sad.

Otherwise, it will depend on how you felt about your wife. If you really loved your wife, the clone will probably look abhorrent to you. You will probably miss your wife and feel sad about her having been murdered.