[cdirkx]

> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital.

It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.

[brazzy]

It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.

And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.

A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur:

The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur

Transmission protocol errors, eh.

[wongarsu]

Even aliens haven't solved the problem of exactly-once message delivery

[5040]

>It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.

Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:

Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).

[notpachet]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

[ChrisMarshallNY]

The NFT craze reminds me of Nasrudin's "Smoke Seller."[0]

[0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg

[ehnto]

SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt.

Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.

[smnscu]

Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.

[falcolas]

You may enjoy Returnal as well. In terms of an experience you can't replicate in other mediums.

[nikanj]

Are you familiar with the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult?