Is Sarang a complete idiot?

[Ashtoreth]

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.

From what I understand, Sarang didn't want two copies to exist at the same time because that would create a discontinuity in the being's existence: one would continue living in PATHOS-II and the other in the ARK. They would go through different situations, have different experiences, basically with time they would become two different entities.

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.

If you copy a document from your desktop and paste it into a pen drive, you can make different changes to each document, to the point where they'll become so distinct from each other that no one will be able to tell that the second was a copy of the first. They become two.

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.

Personally, I find it scary to imagine two copies of myself living at the same time in different locations. In the context of the situation they were in, I think Sarang's theory made sense. There wasn't much left to live for in PATHOS-II anyway.