First, let me welcome you to the forums! I find this topic extremely intriguing, as I've myself put a great deal of thought into the issue of of
mental immortality, which seems to be the type of immortality about which you're speaking.
The conclusion I have come to is that our reality is made of energy and matter. If everything is energy and matter then thought and memory would have to be a form of energy. Now, I like to think that in death these energies just change form (energy cannot be created or destroyed) and one simply enters a different state of mind so to speak.
Let me ask you: Into what other form might these 'energies' change that would allow them to continue performing the functions of the mind's thought and memory systems?
Recall that while all things may share the similarity of being matter and/or energy in
composition, they differ in the arrangement, special functioning, and relationships of the composite parts to other partsthemselves being also matter and/or energy, of course. We may recycle our old television set and end up with parts of it in other products now available for sale, and while we may say that parts of our TV are existing after being recycled (dying), it is something of a stretch to say that we still have our same old TV; what we have no longer looks like a TV, it no longer functions like a TV, no one would buy it as a TV, and we'd be hard-pressed to identify the new products that now contain parts of our old set.
In short, form and function often go hand-in-hand. When we destroy the form of the matter on which the energies operate to give us the mental functions of thought and memory, we quite undoubtedly destroy also the functioning of the matter and so render the ability of the energies to perform the functions of thought and memory defunctmuch like the recycling of the electrical components of our TV makes them incapable of harboring an energy system that can produce a nice colored picture and good sound.
Do I find immortality of thoughts, memory, and ultimately the mind to be ridiculous? Not at all. In fact, I firmly believe that the possibility exists to maintain at least a large portion of the self after the brain inside which that self resides ceases to operate. However, it would also seem that such cannot occur simply through the transference of the matter-energy states into other forms, but that these matter-energy states must be held, at least in part, to the structural-relational 'blueprint', as it were, of the original design if they are to perform an even minor number of their original functions. I believe we can keep the functions of the mind living, but not simply through haphazard redistributions of the original matters and energies.
Jon
Edited by Jon, : Commas...
"Can we say the chair on the cat, for example? Or the basket in the person? No, we can't..." - Harriet J. Ottenheimer
"Dim bulbs save on energy..." - jar