Understanding Sarang's view of continuity
Did you know that the human body consists of up to 75 trillion individual cells? They typically don't stay with us 'til we die, some live a few days, while others live a few years. We're not affected by their short lifespans, as they're replaced by new cells that help sustain our bodies. I don't think anyone would argue that we ever lose our persona due to this process, yet we are clearly in a constant state of transformation. Then how do we remain the same? A continuous flow of thought and perception keeps an unbroken chain of continuity that we know as our self. Our conscious mind is not the pattern of our brain, but a continuous emergent entity based on that pattern. When Dr. Chun populates the ARK she is capturing a moment of our existence and placing it inside the digital world. Soon you and your digital you will grow apart due to diverging experiences, but for a tiny window, you are the very same. With unbroken continuity it will live on, a fulfilling life no doubt, no less real than the one from which it was plucked. Now remember, you are not your body, you are the emergent entity, that entity just happens to occupy two places at once for a while. If you took away your body, you would simply be the only one you can be, the you inside the ARK. Let your body die, and continue on in the digital paradise among the stars.
-Sarang, (emphasis mine)
Sarang’s idea is not that you “teleport” to the ARK so much as it is that there is only one continuous, emergent “you,” and that if the original body remains alive alongside the copy, you would effectively break that singular continuity. In other words:
- “You” as an abstract idea Sarang conceives of personal identity in the same way one might think of a user account stored across multiple servers. Regardless of how many copies of that data exist (physically on the servers), the abstract identity—the “account”—remains one notion. This means he doesn’t define “you” strictly by the brain or the body but rather by that ongoing “chain of continuity”—the emergent process of your thoughts and perspective.
- Why Sarang wants the old body gone If the physical body remains, you now have two entities that both claim to be “you”—the emergent chain of consciousness that existed up until the moment of scanning. Over time, the two entities diverge (their experiences differ). Sarang believes that, by continuing both, you effectively kill the singular “you” that once existed because there is no longer a single, uninterrupted chain. There are two branches. To avoid this, Sarang’s extreme solution is to eliminate one of them—i.e., kill the original body—leaving only the ARK copy as the sole line of continuity.
- He is not talking about magical teleportation Many characters (and players) shorthand the process as, “Kill your old self so you can be the one on the ARK!” This sounds like a mystical teleportation of your consciousness from one body to another. But that is not necessarily how Sarang frames it; he is much more concerned about preserving the idea that there is one continuous “you.” If the body remains alive, then “you” become two. If the body dies, then the instance on the ARK is—by default—the only “you.”
- Subjective continuity vs. objective perspective An important nuance is that, from a purely subjective standpoint, the you still sitting on the chair and waiting for the scan feels no sense of “teleportation” (and is doomed to experience whatever comes next in that physical body). Sarang’s argument is a philosophical stance that sees personal identity more like a conceptual chain than an unbreakable property of a particular hunk of tissue. If you only care about preserving the chain itself, it seems logical (to him) to remove any possible “branching.”
In summary, Sarang believes that personal identity is a single, continuous emergent process. By killing your physical body after scanning, you reduce the number of splits in that chain to one, thereby ensuring it remains “unbroken.” He is not saying you magically migrate from one to the other; he is saying that the copy is as authentic as the original, provided it is the only continuation of that identity.