Comment by HornyPosadist [undecided]@hexbear.net on *Permanently Deleted*

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You don’t actually continually die. You continually change. Death is when there is a change that actually breaks the continuum.

Even teleportation doesn’t actually kill you, unless that continuum is broken relative to itself which it doesn’t have to.

The ship is still Theseus’ ship. It is made to do what a ship does, and the replacement parts all go into the model; the parts have no meaning except in the context of and composition with each other; there is no one place that holds the essence of the ship. The ship is a continuum.

I’m not sure I can even conceptualize what it would mean to exist in a constant state through time. If experience changed me (i.e. killed my “time clone”), would I not be able to experience things?

Maybe this will help:

Consider that there’s a strand of You that exists throughout your time and includes all time-states. Your self is then an aggregate of all those time-states. They’re all connected like a long spinal column. Just because you don’t have a direct experience of them (like a muscle cell doesn’t have a direct experience of a fat cell) doesn’t mean they don’t exist or aren’t connected to you. They exist whether they’re right in front of your nose or not.

I’ve had lots more mantras that I’ve come up with over the past year that frame life whimsically, constructively, beautifully, amd consistent with a theory of consciousness that mirrors our understanding of matter.

To channel R. Buckminster Fuller, “I seem to be a verb”. Not a noun. Viewing yourself as a process is a lot more accurate, and coincidentally rewarding, than viewing yourself as a fixture.

The you from 2 seconds ago isn’t in the void, it’s simply changed to become the you of right now. Perhaps this is easier to consider if we take a single electron - is the electron from a second ago eternally in the void, or did it simply move? In the same way, the you from the past simply moved and changed slightly, but it’s not in the void.

Actually, it`s more complicated than that.

Speed of light is the speed of causality, so two events that are a lightyear appart and happen a yearfrom each other are actually perfectly simultaneous (I know, it`s fucked up to wrap your head around, took me a solid day directly before my special relativity exam).

If the machine continuously dissassembles you while assembling you at your destination in such a way that you switch from being at one place to 50/50 in both places to being in the second place continuously you wouldn’t be killed, you would simply continuously change from a place to another.

Obviously this is pretty hard to do, but if theoretically it was possible you wouldn’t be dying, and it’s a thought experiment anyways.

Technically, “you from two seconds ago” is living through their own iteration of this conversation in another parallel thread of the multiverse.

That’s fucking stupid. To say that a sodium pump in one of my cells trading out a sodium ion for another sodium ion or potassium ion, or anything else is the equivalent of death is fundamentally stupid. To go above that and say that having a cell die and be replaced by a newer cell is tantamount to my death is also stupid. The basic premise of your existential crisis doesn’t make any sense, and even if it did, why not take the path of the man in the comic? Present self has no right to kill future self, nor any reason to do so. Even if you are right, there are a million moments of happiness and contentment that future you can experience, even if they are ultimately fleeting, and even if their existence is ultimately fleeting.

Yeah, I think that the comic is pretty dumb, the conception of hedonism is dumb, and his life being essentially a day-laboring hermit doesn’t sound great, but beyond that, I don’t see this as an existential thing at all. You continue living continuously, no matter how many individual cells of yours die. And if you live for a while, you’ll recognize that who you are and how you see the world changes over time too. The way you process things changes, the way you live changes. I can look back and see my life 20 years ago completely differently than the one 10 years ago, which is also completely different than my life now. I am the same. The same person, the same consciousness, but also, different.

Change does not equal death, if anything change equals life. All living things are in a state of continuous change.

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