ChunLing wrote:But if that isn't the same person, then can we make the argument that any of us is the same person as the one that existed at a previous point in time?
When I was a child, I had a similar thought along the lines of "Is the person who wakes up the same person who goes to sleep?" It gave me insomnia for 5 years before I finally came to terms with the fact that I'd probably never satisfactorily answer it and since there was nothing I could do about it, I might as well get some sleep.
The point of this story is: No, I don't think we can. But if you wanted a difference between a back-up and the original, I guess it would have to be the fact that somewhere the back-up's timeline is broken - there's a missing chunk between when the time the back-up was made and the time the original died.
You mean like going to sleep and waking up later? Which, as you pointed out, is perfectly normal and healthy and trying to avoid it is not so good?
The situation is made all the more interesting by the fact that, while asleep, we have experiences that nobody else (and usually not even us) recognizes as "real". We do not even claim to be responsible for our own behavior in dreams, it is a commonplace to do in a dream what we claim we would never do in reality.
If we can survive nightly sleep (and other, more fundamentally life-changing events) and confidently claim our self-hood, then why not some process of disintegration and rematerialization? Oh, wait, we weren't even talking about that, since (concerns about sterility and discomfort aside) no one in ES seems to have any deeply philosophical problems with the warp-platforms which are known to function on exactly this principle.
The basic problem is not a philosophical one of whether Ellis (or Lyn) would still be the same person if returned from dead by demi-divine powers. It is a purely practical one. Does Meji (who never really focused on medical type magic in the first place) do a better job putting together her magical talking cat-thing that has since been unconsciously transmuted into something else entirely?
