"Avengers: Endgame" and a different philosophy of death
When Hulk wore the Infinity Gauntlet and snapped his fingers, half of the universe's lifeforms that had been obliterated by Thanos in a crude act of population control, came back to life.
Families and friends were united with their loved ones who, of course, had no memory of the intervening five years before they had been turned into dust.
It was a moment that brought catharsis to us, cinemagoers, and inside Earth 616 (the official multiversal Earth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe), there were cheers all around.
Except... the whole "coming back to life" thing was a charade, at least from a philosophical angle.
You see, the ones that had returned were *not* the people who died, but simply their clones, re-created from their original's physical state (down to the quantum level), thus ensuring that their behaviour, memories and instincts matched the original's in every way.
If your constituent particles become dust, then even if the *same* dust particles were brought together to reconstruct you, it would only be a copy of you, not you.
Why is it not you? Simply because if a machine took your body's snapshot at the quantum level and replicated it into a clone (while you're alive), you wouldn't call that replica "you", would you?
Of course not. You'd regard the replica as a separate person. The same should hold true if the original "you" had died. The recreated version of you, would be a separate person.
Now that we've established that no one "came back to life" in Avengers: Endgame, we can go deeper and ask: are we the same person from one moment to the next?
The person inhabiting your body in the next second (the unit of time isn't important here), is essentially also a clone of you, with an additional memory of that one second. Does it mean that you die every moment and are replaced by a clone? Why not?
What's the essential difference between the person inhabiting your body after 1 second, and a full-blooded clone? After all, both bodies have the same physical properties down to the quantum level?
Consciousness isn't continuous, and this becomes even more prominent once you sleep. Is the person waking up you, or a new individual that just happens to share your body and brain? If a full clone wakes up, it won't feel any different than "you" do upon waking. If the clone is a different person upon waking, how are *you* not a different person?
If all this is true (and I cannot see how it's not), then what exactly is death? If we die every second and a clone inherits our memories and body, how is it different when we "really" die? Isn't the difference just that after "real" death, there's no clone that has a conscious experience of being alive.
What if we created such a clone after your death, with the exact neural structure of your brain before the final moment? Wouldn't you be considered alive then? In the case, would your killers be tried for manslaughter or just "bodyloss"?
(Kindly re-read if you need to, because this whole thing is quite counter-intuitive)
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