this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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I'd argue that an instance of life is it's continued existence. An interruption where it gets fully destroyed means that instance of a life has ended. Once reconstructed, a perfect, indistinguishable copy is created, but it is not the same life.
If you were to create the copy without destroying the original, would you now be in two places at the same time? Or are there two you's in two different points in space?
What about when you sleep, or get anesthesia? Continued existence of what exactly?
What if you kill and freeze a person, and revive them later?
What if you do the same but piece by piece and reassemble them?
Those questions are easily answered, though.
This question obviously revolves around the philosophical idea of the ship of Theseus.
In the scenarios you listed, it is definitively the same ship (albeit with different pieces/cells that have replaced parts over time), whereas in the original scenario it is akin to making an identical, second ship.
There is a clear distinction between those things. If there weren't, the ship of theseus couldn't exist as a thought exercise
What if they're in a coma for long enough that all of their cells are replaced? It's all dancing around the question: assuming there is no soul, what is the self?
It's all dancing around humans not wanting to admit they are just a bunch of stuff that could be hypothetically rearranged, destroyed, recreated, cloned, etc.
Any such device being wormhole based is far more realistic than considering the insane requirements of instantaneous subatomic recreation, transmission of that information and destruction of the original
I don't think any of those questions and in writing this comment I have decided that I solved the ship of theseus and decided that I deny the premise outright.
So anyway I'm gonna get some sleep and continue manic posting tomorrow.