[monocasa]

I'd say they die.

There's not really a better analog in biology. Even in the case of sexual reproduction, the new life carries tons of epigenetic state across the creation boundary, and is more akin to fork(2) than exec(2).

A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.

[samatman]

What you're illustrating here is that "awake", "asleep", "death", and "life", are pretty terrible metaphors for states our computers exist in.

Saying my laptop is "asleep" when it's suspended is verbally cromulent, no one would be confused by what I meant. But the metaphor breaks down badly on any attempt to extend it.

Even if I brick it, I have the option to purchase fresh equipment and restore from the most recent backup. If my timing is good, there may be no difference from my perspective.

This isn't possible with living things, and it might not even be possible, the fond dreams of mind-upload enthusiasts notwithstanding.

[sergeykish]

It is a clone. The original one is dead. Works for teleportation too.

[inopinatus]

and time travel. O'Brien must suffer.

[core-questions]

Perhaps we should say 'reborn' instead of rebooted, 'reincarnated' instead of 'reinstalled'.

[gruez]

>A ceasing of operations and erasure of all current state seems more like death to me.

but some state is preserved in non-volatile memory.

[sergeykish]

Amnesia of everything but carefully written. Rebirth.

[monocasa]

And when you die, your DNA can still be sequenced.

[gruez]

DNA is generally non-mutable, so that's more akin to the (read-only) /system partition on androids. There's still the /data partition which is mutable and gets saved even after you power down.

[monocasa]

In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all, so it seems a bit of a non sequitur to use it in an analogy with computing systems.

The closest I can come up with using that framework is plasmids. But if you squirreled away the plasmids of a plasma before ceasing all of it's operations, then injected those plasmids into a new copy of the bacterium, you'd still say that the original bacterium died.

[gruez]

>In that conceptual framework it seems life doesn't have non volatile storage at all

how so?

[monocasa]

Do you have a counter example?