Player choice and The End.

[KommissarK]

I'm also curious what would make people think they have to kill themselves once they have been scanned. Why can they not coexist? No convincing argument (certainly not one that would convince an otherwise intelligent person to kill themselves) is presented. Is two versions of yourself concurrently existing so wrong/hard to grasp?

I think the issue is one part a belief in a spiritual notion, as well as fueled a bit by selfishness.

I can think through the idea of having my mind scanned, and then running that scan through a sufficiently advanced computer system such that there is a running version of "me" on said system. It makes sense and is sound. But what I know, is that I, in my fleshy container will not "be" the me that is running in the simulation. I will not experience it. What the Continuity belief seemed to be about was that at the moment of scanning, the fleshy you and the digital you are the same, and thus, for an instance, have the same continuity of consciousness, likening this to say the premise that over the course of our life we shed the materials that make up our body. Through the course of our lives, we shed matter, yet we still remain ourselves and our experience is "continuous." So in the case of people killing themselves, its tapping into some metaphysical hope that maybe the stream of consciousness they are from their fleshy body can also live on into the simulation. Ultimately, its impossible to verify, which is partly what makes the idea so troubling.

I think really its just a matter of recognizing the desperation of the setting as well. Things appear to be really bad off already by that point in time. The world is basically over. WAU running amok. More than likely these people are not going to die of natural causes, and equally terrifying they might not die at all due to WAU doing crazy stuff. If there is even a glimmer of hope that they can avoid that sort of suffering and live on in a veritable paradise of the ARK, I think people are going to bite.

Realize that this is how Star Trek teleportation has basically worked (scan you, destroy you on one end, recreate you on the other end), and ST barely ever touched on the existential horror that might be brought about if people realized that one of the most common modes of transportation permanently halted "your" perceived stream of consciousness, destroying you, and simply starting a new one that the current "you" will not experience. Because you were destroyed.