Star Trek

[Slamz]

I am my contiguous brain pattern, not just a snapshot of a brain pattern at any given moment.

If I make an exact copy of Slamz and then shoot one of you, the fact that the one remaining has the same brain pattern as the dead one doesn't change the fact that I killed one of you. To the living one and everyone else it doesn't make a difference, but to the one I killed it certainly does.

Yes but in that case, the very second you make the copy, you now have two divergent brain patterns, so two separate human beings, no longer identical duplicates.

But if you destroy one and then recreate it, you haven't killed anyone. It's as if nothing happened.

Basically, if there is no soul, then human brains are basically just biological computers, and you wouldn't be dead if they made a perfect reconstruction of you because there is nothing to be dead. It would be like halting your current machine, copying the contents to a new, identical machine and then smashing the old one to bits. Nothing "died" and no data was lost -- just some useless hardware got wrecked.


If you believe in souls, then stuff like teleporters and stasis would get more dicey.