this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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Here’s what I don’t get.
Okay. All that is true. Yet they clearly still retain a certain sense of self. The same memories, experiences, personalities and such.
Remember reading about a guy who cloned several generations of cats, all the same stock. Each cat was clearly unique.
Maybe the distinction is that the experiences are basically the same going though it.
In any case. Why can’t they keep generic information on hand and and clone up a fresh body and plant the bits relevant to memory and experience and stuff?
The issue is with the conscience and the soul. Essentially the question is: "If your whole body is taken apart atom by atom, does the soul get taken along with it?"
In this case, the soul can just mean 'you'. The 'you' that is seeing through your eyes right now, and is giving you the current experience you are now experiencing. To give an easier example, let's say you are copied exactly four feet to your right. Your copy will look exactly like you, have all your memories, yadda yadda yadda. It seems pretty obvious that 'you' won't all of a sudden be seeing through your copy's eyes, no? If you get vaporised, then, your conscience is not going to just teleport into your clone, right? At least there's nothing to suggest that would happen.
Teleportation is just a fancy version of this in a different order. You are vaporised first, then your atoms are moved real fast to the new location, then your copy uses those atoms. There's zero reason to think that the 'you' which was vaporised is ever coming back. Once it's gone, it's gone, or at least that's the idea.
Whether you believe in the spiritual concept of a soul, or that your experience of the world is just a specific instance of electrical charges in some fancy meat, both seem to suggest that once the anima departs, it will never return. A new anima must instead be made.
Except, in your final statement that’s kinda false? The “Anima” is just the electrical signals of the meat suit. That’s it, that’s the “you”. There is 0 evidence that’s ever been produced of any kind that there is any existence of a soul or spirit beyond “trust me bro.”
In this case you have 2 exact copies of “you” and milliseconds later those two copies diverge as new neurons are formed. As soon as they start forming their own experience at that point each one is different, their own “me” (from their points of view). No need to make up some higher level of meaning such as a soul.
We are all just brains riding around in an electrical meat suit, listening to chemical signals from the bacteria in our guts and some how finding meaning and purpose in an uncaring universe. That’s a helluva a lot more amazing and meaningful then a cosmic space daddy giving us “us”
I've been trying to be faith-agnostic about it, as in the signals in your brain, some weird angel possession a meat mech, whatever. There is a clear phenomena where 'you' come into existance and get to look through your eyes. 'You' get to experience the world through these signals, and the full explanation of how that becomes a first person perspective observing the world is still not cleanly explained. That's the anima, the soul, 'you'.
Teleportation both, destroys your body completely and so when the copy gets made on the other side it's not going to be the same you even if you use all the same atoms, and only interacts with the physical world so no spiritual soul would be brought along with it.
Basically, you will go into the teleporter, they'll fire it up, and then you'll stop being able to see, think, feel, or do anything relating to existence because you stopped existing. A new anima will be created when the copy of your physiology is constructed on the other end. 'You' never come back.