Existence After Death

If you're going to talk life after death, then you have to assume one of two rather fanciful thingseithera) there is some part of you that is eternal, outside of the brain infact, as otherwise when your brain goes away the electrical dance therein that thinks it is you will sublime away into the etherorb) any mathematically perfect (or at least turing-complete) signal such as that within your brain somehow fundamentally alters reality in such a way that it cannot cease to perceive itsef - i.e. once the pattern is, it is for all timethe two are pretty similar in outcome but are different in their methods. Don't even ask me to explain the second one as it's a bad retelling of some philosophical numbers game that a sci-fi book I'd like to read was written about, but I can't recall it enough to find it.If our universe as we know it is some gigantic turing-complete hologram running on some enormously complex machine, then there's no reason why the energy signature which makes up 'you' can't be held and recreated or stabilized in some non-corporeal format which would be, by definition, outside of the current universe. But it's a pretty long shot.If you want real life after death, there's only two ways to actually bring it about1) don't die - this so far has been rather difficult to do, but in the future we may be able to stop and even reverse the aging process. not growing old isn't the same as immortality, but it's close enough if you're careful2) have a backupsome people would complain about #2 - when you're dead, they say, you died. A copy carries on, they say, but you-you died.The problem with that is it implies some sort of body-mind duality which is, quite frankly, impossible to maintain. I'm talking of course about a mind-upload. Backup your memories, your personality and store it safely. Bite the big one when you want, you can always download into a new clone or instantiate yourself into cyberspace and carry on.If you do not believe in some non-corporeal you-ness which cannot be duplicated (i.e. you're a rationalist who doesn't believe in the soul) then there is no reason to assume you cannot create a copy of "you". Things get complicated, but look at it like this:When you were born, you weren't who you were now. Infact, every molecule in your body gets replaced over some span of time, so if you believe that you can't be copied then you're already dead, you died years ago.If you complain that dying and recovering from a backup is "death" then what is memory loss? I argue that somebody dying and recovering from a backup and waking up in the hospital in a new body, having lost some days or weeks, is much the same as some person getting a huge bump on the head and losing their memory. To all observers that count (your friends, you yourself), "you" are still alive...Now we're not able to do anything about aging (much...) yet, and we certainly can't back up our brains, so it looks like when you die, that's it. poof.If it's any consolation, you didn't know it before you were born and you won't know about it after you're dead, so it's not really worth stressing about. Live

If you could clone yourself, and you asked both "Which one is the real Jon?" I think both would stick their hands up, no? Yes it would be murder! We may see things differently in the future if being dead becomes a minor inconvenience, but from where I sit it would be murder.If you could clone yourself without dying, that would mean there is now two of you (or more!) and each would have at least as much right to life as the other you. I'm not talking about cloning whilst you're still alive though, I'm talking about a backup which may not be right up until your last breath being cloned after "you" died. Now you're still thinking as if there is something irretrievable about "you" - it's why I bring up the idea of lost memory. is there a difference in the you-ness of a clone which is missing memories versus a you which has lost it's memory? And I mean to outside observers and to each individual "you" which could be asked this theoretical question?In either case, we've concluded that there is no specific non-corporeal thing definitively marking one less than the other, we've concluded that it's the energy signature making you "you" and now an outside observer is confronted with either a you that has lost it's memory of the past week, or a you which has lost it's memory of the past week because you died and didn't backup.Both of them don't have the body they were born with, both of them have lost the same amount of memory, both of them would claim to be the real Jon...Yes it's a thought experiment, and I'm not trying to convince you to see things my way