Is Sarang a complete idiot?

[caffeine4671]

Or did he just not take Computer Science classes as a kid? Or anything remotely based on real science for that matter? If he did, he'd know that cut-and-paste and copy-and-paste both copy the original.

He and his followers should've changed their motto to "We put our faith in the reality of cut-n-pastey!", seeing as they tried doing that IRL.

There is an important difference between copy/paste and cut/paste: the first creates a copy of the file while keeping the original; the second moves the file from one location to the other, but you still have only one file.

In the ARK Project, cut/paste was not an option; it was only possible to create copies and place them in the ARK.

But if you delete the original document from your desktop, now you have only one file: the one on your pen drive, which is 100% identical to the original when you copied it, and you can continue making changes to it as you see fit.

This is basically what Sarang defended: remove the original (by comitting suicide) to guarantee that there would be a continuity in the entity's experience and thought. It would continue living on in the ARK.

I guess. It's absurdly idealistic and stupid though, for him to say "I will live on!11!! Long live the cut-and-paste!", no Sarang, your copy will live on, but you'll be a puddle of meat with cyanide in it; your particular instance of consciousness will die and your clone will have the illusion of having transcended via sharing the same mind and memories.

And that's not how cut and paste works. Cut and paste doesn't actually move anything. What it does, actually, is make a copy of the file in the RAM buffer,then deletes the original immediately afterwards. Following that, the data from the RAM buffer is 'sent' (written)into the new location. It's still a copy though.

That actually makes the whole thing a lot more macabre, now that I think about it. There's no true immortality and death is still final, just an illusion