this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
653 points (98.8% liked)
memes
18551 readers
3454 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads/AI Slop
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live. We also consider AI slop to be spam in this community and is subject to removal.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But that means the original, "real" you died and the person that comes out the other side is essentially a clone with a copy of your memories.
Hell yeah
Is that distinguishable from the "real" you, though? Because from a material point of view, that's real life too.
Your cells are dying and renovating, the atoms that make up your body come and go, your consciousness is a sliver of a moment of a flow of electricity that is gone before you can even intercept a moment.
If you could track every little bit of matter that makes you, you wouldn't be able to keep an unique well defined "you" at any point in time. A convoluted system maintains your memories and self thorough that experience.
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?
The true answer to this is that we simply don't know. Consciousness is perhaps the greatest mystery in our universe
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?
Your brain doesn't stop working when you sleep or are under. Your physiology keeps going.
Killing and freezing a person kills them. You can't revive someone after doing that.
We're unable to do piece-by-piece replacements of the brain(stem) so not much to argue about there. But if we could, it's probably still you since you're the continuation of your biological processes, which doesn't get interrupted, just modified.
There's plenty of examples of people who have drowned under the ice, been dead for many (most I can remember is around 30) minutes, and have been revived. We're talking about people that have had no heartbeat and no brain activity for a prolonged amount of time. I would definitely argue that they're the same "life" when they wake up.
With such "revivals" they weren't fully dead yet. They would be, if nobody intervened.
Human bodies are irrecoverable once life fully ceases. Before that happens revival is still possible. Afterwards, it isn't.
There also have not been any revivals after brain activity stops. Once neurons stop firing (which happens on cell death), no revival is possible anymore. At that point, death is permanent.
Under anaesthesia like propofol your brain literally pauses, when you wake up you are typically confused because it's like you were literally paused and resumed
Hamsters and other small animals can be and are regularly frozen and unfrozen
That's literally not how it works.
Propofol slows down your brain and changes several "rhythms", but your brain activity does not cease at any point. To your conscious self it may appear as if you've "paused", but this is absolutely not the case.
Hamsters and small animals can be partially frozen and unfrozen. Once fully frozen (or close to it) they can no longer be revived. Once brain cells die, they cannot be revived.
Of course total brain activity cannot completely pause, but that's the effect on your consciousness
You got a link to read about these hamsters? My understanding is we had progressed well past this point
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article-abstract/145/920/427/30027/Studies-on-golden-hamsters-during-cooling-to-and
... 1956
Well yeah, we haven't really been in the business of freezing hamsters regularly since they end up braindead pretty quickly.
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.