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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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"Death" is the absence of a future self that is continuous with your present self. I don't know exactly what constitutes "continuous" but it clearly is not the identity of individual particles. It may require continuity of causal derivation, for example.
Why?
Upload yourself to a computer. You've got a copy on the computer, you've got a physical body. Kill the physical body a few milliseconds after upload.
Repeat, except now kill the physical body a few milliseconds before the upload.
Do you mean to define the former situation as involving a "Death" because a few milliseconds worth of computations were lost, but the latter situation as simple a transfer?
I don't think the word "death" really applies anymore when we are talking at the level of physical systems, any more than "table" or "chair" would. Those constructs don't cross over well into (real or imaginary) physics.
(Even the billiard ball model of "classical" chemistry is enough to eliminate "individual particles" as the source of personal identity; you aren't made of the same atoms you were a year ago, because of eating, respiration, and other biological processes.)
There could be special "mind particles" in you brain and I can't believe I just said that.
(::shrug:: Well, that does seem logically possible, but it doesn't seem to be the way our biology works.)
Curses. My poor biology knowledge has betrayed me once again.