The freedom to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, or even remake your own mind, goes along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, they will be like amputated souls.
Platt envisioned tele-presencing and some digital prosthetics that might reach in limited fashion into the concrete universe, but these would be re-creations; if a Ditto feared for its life, why lurk fully in the dangerous real world?
Also, "rights" for Dittos also get tied up with our own deep- seated fears -- of digital immortals who amass wealth and like fungus reach into every avenue of natural, real lives; parasites, nothing less. Platt plainly foresees issues looming over the horizon, as soon as the digital world amasses financial power. Tycoon Dittos!
Running a Ditto of your Self, then giving it autonomy, means it could get rich and also change itself. Your Ditto could shape its own motivations, goals, habits, edit away memories and tastes. It then stops mimicking your own evolution. Your Ditto could erase any liking for Impressionist Opera and overlay instead a passion for rap, enjoying rhythms that would have bored the true Self into a coma. The easy access of a Ditto to his entire underpinning -- unlike ourselves, with much of our personality lying in our subconscious and not consciously fixable -- implies constant change, personality tinkering, perhaps worse.
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Is consciousness just a property of special algorithms, sliding sheets of information, digital packets jumping through conceptual hoops? How we envision our selfness depends on this huge question, now a hot topic.
Does a model simulating watching a sunset have to feel the same way its Original did? Why doubt simulated consciousness, when nobody asked the same question of programs that balance checkbooks? Such issues perplex many philosophers today, but I think feeling one's way through them in fiction is a rather more revealing path than abstract argument.
Consider that a Ditto is forcefully reminded that he is not the Original, but a mere fog of digits. All that gives him a sense of Self as continuity is the endless stepping forward of pattern. In people, the "real algorithm", computes itself by firing synapses, ringing nerves, getting the feel of continuity from the dance of cause and effect.
Dittos on the other hand are simply time-stepped forward, in processes that could just as easily run backward without the Ditto even noticing. Even time is fragile, a convention, in a digital universe.
Dittos surely would stand on shaky metaphysical ground here. Would we find that a Ditto fidgeted out of pure self-anxiety? His digital stress chem shoots up, metabolics lurch, heart-sims hammer, lungs flutter in intense uneasiness? Would typical Dittos talk incessantly, acutely uncomfortable, and make odd demands of their keepers?--that they be edited, truncated, improved, perhaps finally killed?
The dream of bodiless existence does not imply the end of the human condition, if we are still truly simulating humans.
Consider how well one would have to describe what our everyday life is like. Making a Ditto's body seem right to its critical intelligence demands sets of overlapping rules. After all, the Ditto remembers what a pleasure eating, say, used to be, back there in the gritty, real world.
As he (or she) chews, teeth have to thunk down on food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes started to work to extract the right nutrient ratios. The program can bypass the involved stomach and colon processes, simplifying into a satisfying concentration of blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated with patchwork templates for the appropriate emotional levels.
The body becomes a set of recipes for seeming like oneself. No underlying physics or biology at work, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand--the unseen hand of some Programmer God. So emerges an existential angst as profound as anything Camus felt, surely.
All other detail can be discarded, once the subroutines got right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. All this is to ground a visceral sense of Self, seemingly rock-solid, though really just a patched-in slug of digits, orchestrated by a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together.
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