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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s a weakness in the comic, but you can fix it by imagining being frozen (in a sci-fi way that doesn’t form ice crystals that kill you) then thawed.

    You’d awake just like from sleep and there would have been a period of true nothing in between.

    Did you die and a new you was woken up? I say there is no “true you”. There’s a body having your memories and behavior, thinking it’s you and that’s all that matters. There is no magic piece that actually gets loost when you get frozen or teleported. A you enters, a you leaves, so nobody died and nothing is lost.

    There are no souls, there is no magic continuous bit that gets handed over to the next moment, there just the pattern, so as long as it persists, you are alive.


  • Believe me, I’ve been there. I’ve thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.

    My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.

    Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?


  • A you died. A you remains. Nothing is lost, so calling it a “death” is like calling sleep “a small death”: purely philosophical and with no relevance to your ability to live your life after.

    It’s a trick of perspective. If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you’re just like a computer program: only defined by what’s happening, not which CPU is running it.