I personally just don’t see a difference. It’s not like you’d necessarily perceive the transfer even if it were gradual- there’s a lot of factors there. I don’t believe in any sort of “soul” or anything- we are a pattern in the end, and as long as that pattern is preserved, so are we.

I don’t see why there needs to be any sort of direct continuity. We have no real reason to say consciousness can’t stop and restart- although no one can experience it to this extent without the kind of tech we’re talking about, we can still extrapolate from things like sleep and anesthesia.

I think of it like a timeline. The new body is the same “you” if its “start” can connect to the end of the “line” of your old body, even if there’s a time gap. With a “branch,” however, the old “line” still ends entirely, with the “branch” continuing as a separate person.

I know this is a little hard to put into words, I might try and create a visual representation- though you’ll have to bear with my poor art skills if I do.

I mean, there are other forms of unconsciousness besides sleep, too. If someone’s brain completely shut down due to some severe injury, but then they miraculously recovered, no one would question whether they were still them.

In the end, our consciousness is an emergent phenomenon caused by the pattern of neurons that expresses our unique mind. As long as that pattern is preserved, I argue the persistent “self” is too.

Now, the natural follow-up is, what if you create the “clone” BEFORE destroying the original? In that case, it’s dying, because the “clone” has had time to “branch off”, so to speak. It’s become its own person, similar to, but separate from, you.

I mean, you can’t move through space faster than light, but there’s still stuff like Alcubierre drives that could at least theoretically work. We simply can’t know what we don’t know- that is, we can’t know how much knowledge we have yet to attain.

Plus, there’s, to my knowledge, nothing about our current understanding of physics that explicitly rules QA out anyway.

I mean, there is one way. Technically, information can never be completely destroyed- there’s always some way to recover it, no matter how complex and difficult. If we were to build a supercomputer capable of recovering the brain structure of those who’ve already died, we could save even them. The idea is called quantum archaeology, and even if it’s a long way off, it doesn’t matter- because all that means is a larger backlog of people to revive. Of course, this is assuming it’s possible to implement in practice, which we really can’t know yet.

But we already know that consciousness doesn’t exist as a unique instance, at least not in this sense. Our life is already broken up into individual sessions of consciousness, lasting a matter of hours. If your persistent “self” survives even something like sleep, would it not survive this?

The thing is, we have no way of knowing what “max technology” could look like.

This has actually been proposed as a serious idea, although only in very early conceptual stages- it’s referred to as “quantum archaeology” and, simply put, it involves abusing the law of conservation of information to “observe” the past. Obviously, we’re nowhere near this, but to claim it to be impossible? That seems excessive.

At the risk of sounding callous, I don’t care about any “cycles.” In the end, boredom is a problem with many potential solutions- we don’t need death specifically. Even in the worst-case, where we’ve “done everything,” couldn’t we develop a way to modify or suppress our own memories to make experiences “fresh” again?

Arguments like these, where the problem created is so much milder than the one that’s solved, feel like philosophical sour grapes. We are mortal, and without extreme technological advances, we’re going to stay that way, so we come up with excuses as to why it’s ostensibly a good thing, so we don’t have to confront the problem.

We do not need death. One could argue that, under the right definition of “need,” that is an outright contradiction. Even an unsolvable problem would still be a problem.