Speedyblupi wrote:TL:DR:
"Jim" does not exist, so the question is meaningless. The concept of people existing as individuals doesn't make sense physically, even if it seems intuitive.
Jim might be even less existent than that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wusThis thought experiment reminds me of an excellent video that Kurzgesagt made that might complicate the debate even further. If life is fundamentally made up of things that aren't alive, where do we draw the line between what constitutes 'alive' and 'dead'. There are things like viruses that may neither be alive nor dead, or maybe they're both. Mitochondria use to be living bacteria that willingly let itself be consumed by early cells to enter a symbiotic relationship, but they're no longer 'alive' in the traditional sense. They're only as independent as one's liver or gallbladder. The video even mentions strains of viruses that can re-animate dead cells as a means of transferring it's DNA. Is the cell still the same cell since it never had any conscious to tell the difference? The closest thing to a sense of individuality a cell has is stimulation from it's environment. It doesn't think or feel, it simply acts on its immediate surroundings. If we're made up of these biological computers, how similar to them are we? Is everything that makes us human just a more complicated and evolved version of the simplest of instincts and stimulation? If so, is sentience and maybe life itself just a grande illusion?
Maybe Jim's not dead because he was never alive.
As for my take on Theseus, I think the best modern analogy is the teleporter from Star Trek. There was even an entire episode devoted to the fear of using it, but they never delve into the philosophical ramifications of it. I guess they just hand wave the question by claiming that the consciousness is transferred along with the rest of you, but that claim wouldn't hold up if the teleporters work like they say they work in the series. If you're torn apart atom by atom, then you should be completely obliterated by the process. We are constantly exchanging and discarding cells, but there's enough coverage by the other cells to prevent information from getting lost. Even so, our brain cells live, die and reproduce at a much slower pace, so we are in no threat of mentally dying until the cellular deterioration begins to accelerate. Even for people who were resuscitated after death, they were done so immediately because there's still some brain activity left for a few minutes. Most never recover after a lengthy period of time without becoming a vegetable. In the teleportation, there's no brain, no body, no cells, not even matter; it's all converted to transmittable energy and reconstituted on the other end. However, no one seems to care. If they did, half of every episode would be an existential crisis until the characters would acclimatize to the dread and feel numb to it all. Everyone acts as they acted before stepping into the teleporter, and we always view these characters as the same people we know and love even though they're just copies of copies of copies of copies of...
While Jim may be dead, as long as the transfer is functional enough, we will never know the difference and may not even care if the illusion that Jim Prime and Current Jim are one and the same is appealing to us.
If the concept of reforming is a lot more fantastical with the transferring of souls and such, I still don't think Jim is out of the woods yet. If souls were to exist, who's to say that our consciousness is tied to them. If they just leave us to die, they wouldn't act as a transfer, but as a backup instead. Even in a world where souls exist, it's still possible to dilute into nothing upon death. And then there's soul vore. If your soul is consumed, digested, absorbed, and maybe even shat out, yet you still reform, what happened to your soul? I know this scenario doesn't usually happen in vore, but it's an interesting, morbid, downright terrifying thought to ponder. Have you literally lost your soul? What happens if you lose your soul, what is within it that makes life different? Is such a thing even possible by the rules set up in this fantasy? If you gain a soul upon reforming, where did that soul come from? Do souls multiply like cells when they need to? Is Jim's predator now a fusion of itself and Jim? Did Jim gain something from his predator? Did they body-swap?
I think I'm just going to cut it of here before I start running into the streets demanding answers from the sky.
