The coin toss revisited

[Mudbill]

I thought Mark was an idiot when I played it. If there were to be some sort of continuation of conscience by ending your life as you get scanned, it made FAR too little sense that such a continuation would have a grace period of "shortly after the scan."

If there were to be any sort of connection in this "switch" theory of his, I would assume that it wouldn't let you paste in the new entity, let it live for "a short time" and THEN paste in the old conscience to override it. If so, what conscience does it have in that grace period? What becomes of it afterwards? There are no connections between these entities after they have been created.

Later I've found a little more justification for his train of thought with the whole atoms thing, but nothing of that still gives any reasonable suggestions that it would ever work like he wanted it to. He must've been very delusional.

An interesting thing to think about is that Mark killed himself right after the scan. The scan of Mark within the Ark never killed himself, and never knew what became of his original self. If he were to communicate out to the others, he'd claim that he never needed to kill himself after all. Since you can't ask the perspective of his human self, that's the only perspective of Mark that matters. We know that Mark had this planned a while before his scan, so the Mark inside would've considered it and be prepared to do it, but since he appeared in the Ark after the scan, he'd agree that it was unnecessary.