this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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Pure materialist response:
'You', your consciousness, is not a thing, but a process, produced by mainly your brain, along with your sensory organs and nervous system.
Because it is a process, it is always changing, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically, and is never really exactly the same same as it was 10 years ago, or even 5 minutes ago.
Death is when this ongoing process of being conscious ceases, permenantly, totally, due to the failure of the biological systems and processes that produce your consciousness.
It is a total termination of the process of 'you', of your consciousness.
Even if some set of conditions somehow allowed for your exact body, brain, nervous system, exact electro chemical state of all of them that would give rise to the exact same memories, whatever, even if all of that was to somehow reconstitute themselves, that would not suddenly be an awakening, a continuation of your previous consciousness.
It would be an independent copy, which, depending on whether or not it had somehow been constructed in sufficient detail as to share all your memories up until your death, still would not be you.
It may believe it is you, but it isn't.
'You' died.
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The teleporter in Star Trek kills you and makes a reconstructed clone of you, with your memories, when you use it.
Even if your pattern is capable of being stuck in the frame buffer and saved or lost, if it is saved, the thing that walks out is a very convincing and very convinced copy of you, despite this way of thinking being largely, but not entirely, stigmatized in the societies of the show.
The actual 'you' was obliterated upon being energized, but the illusion of this not being the case is socially normalized... somewhat comparable to how individual car ownership and usage is extremely normalized in the US, despite the well understood dangers and costs of this.
Everything 'just works' if you go along with it, and if you don't, it kind of demands a reformation of much of society, and makes people think about a lot of things that they would rather not.
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