The same philosophical question actually occurred to me as well. But frankly from a pragmatic view it's a moot point. I mean everyone is going to die at some point right? Well then at the end it's quite literally do or die. I'm sure the vast majority will pick "do", self preservation and self interest is at the top of human motivations after all. So after it's done, you're resleeved, why worry about the choice? No use worrying about it because it's already been done right? What are you going to do? Kill yourself? Not likely given the drastic in your eyes measure you just took to live further. What's more likely is denial and ignoring that the choice was actually made and just going on with your life.

Ok now take the premise one step further. You're going to resleeve at the end of your life right? Who's to say you won't die next week? And you will die at time X right? So what's the point in not resleeving next week or at any time in the near future? You get to keep your "soul", if it even exists, longer? Now, later, the "milk" as it where will be spilt at some point. No use crying over it.

Rationalization is a wonderful thing.

Also, a thought. The system defines your soul to be "Ego". When you make an exact duplicate of it, how does that Ego differ from the original one? Being exact duplicate, in no way whatsoever. Therefore 1 becomes 1+1, or 2 times 1, one being one as we know it. Therefore, how do you know which 1 is you? I mean that surely you know that you are 1, but so does the other 1. And, by the way, he's thinking exactly same things as you are now, since neither of you have yet had any different surroundings or situations. You both have the same thoughts as you step out from the box. You are being told that You are the clone. No! it wasn't supposed to go like this. You must've been mixed or something, yeah. That must be it. You look exactly same like the other. Why should you believe what someone else says? He's tricked you. That's a lie! ...Isn't it? Okay then. How about neither of you is the one that was cloned. Maybe he was wiped out entirely when he uploaded himself into the machine and gave birth to the 2 new creatures that look just like him? Who are you then?

TheRawrnstuff wrote:

Also, a thought. The system defines your soul to be "Ego". When you make an exact duplicate of it, how does that Ego differ from the original one? Being exact duplicate, in no way whatsoever. Therefore 1 becomes 1+1, or 2 times 1, one being one as we know it. Therefore, how do you know which 1 is you? I mean that surely you know that you are 1, but so does the other 1. And, by the way, he's thinking exactly same things as you are now, since neither of you have yet had any different surroundings or situations. You both have the same thoughts as you step out from the box. You are being told that You are the clone. No! it wasn't supposed to go like this. You must've been mixed or something, yeah. That must be it. You look exactly same like the other. Why should you believe what someone else says? He's tricked you. That's a lie! ...Isn't it? Okay then. How about neither of you is the one that was cloned. Maybe he was wiped out entirely when he uploaded himself into the machine and gave birth to the 2 new creatures that look just like him? Who are you then?

And here I suspect you've stumbled across the real reason why alpha forking isn't very common in the EP setting. There really isn't any good way to tell unless you personally created the fork and you both remember the process (which means that your fork remembers coming into existence when you made him, while simultaneously remembering everything else in your life right up to the very moment he was forked off), and even then time, distance and new morphs are going to blur those memories a lot. So it's going to cause all sorts of practical issues related to shared identity if fork and original start conflicting with each other before enough time has passed for the personas to diverge. Now what might be one interesting possibility would be someone who creates a large number of alpha forks of themself as a sort of experiment, and then deliberately disperses them. Have them all awaken in different places, in different bodies, and with different lives, with one little bit of extra functionality built in: every time one of the forks gets backed up, a copy gets sent to wherever the original keeps his own backup and reintegrated.

Aleksander, the same question has caused me to lose sleep over the past several nights since I received my copy. I am still reading all of the material, but I do have an opinion at this point, that may change as I read more. I feel that this thread has come off topic from the original question because of an assumption of the "point of view" in relationship to how a "sleeve" or "clone" is viewed. From an outside point of view, you live on as if nothing happened. Your family and friends are glad to have you back, and your enemies are already conspiring against you again. From an internal perspective, you are dead. A copy is now living with your memories. Please allow me an explanation: We will define the "original" you as YOU_ALPHA. We will define your "resleeve" as YOU_BETA. YOU_ALPHA grew up, got a job, got married, decided ego insurance was a necessity and backed up your ego. Then one day YOU_ALPHA is in a terrible accident and killed. YOU_ALPHA's consciousness ends here. Your lights are out forever. There is no "magic spark" that flies back to inhabit the body of YOU_BETA that is now being downloaded into a new sleeve. YOU_BETA wakes up with all of YOU_ALPHA's memories, beliving himself/herself to be YOU_ALPHA, and is likely informed of what happened. YOU_BETA thinks, "wow, that's a relief. I'm glad I got insurance" but is actually a new consciousness stream with all of the memories of the old. It doesn't remember the accident because it didn't happen to "him" (YOU_BETA). There were several other questions and "what-ifs" that came up in the thread, but I think they only confuse the real issue and the real question. Regardless of how many clones, alpha forks, and resleeves there are, regardless of how confusing it might be to determine which one is the "original" the fact is that one of them is the original, and at the point at which that one dies, the original "you" is dead and the original you stops experiencing existence. Alpha forks is a great way to see this in action. Each one "believes" it is the original, but they don't all experience the world through each other's eyes, do they? Each one lives and dies, and can be copied again. Each consciousness is it's own entity, even if they start out their lives as a perfect copy of the memories and personality of the originator. Is this important from the perspective of a role-playing game? No. Is this important from the pespective of "what would I do in that scenario?" Yes. The last thing to consider is the setting. I think that the book said that there were about eight billion humans on earth at the time of the fall, and that 90% of humanity was terminated. Of the survivors, almost 90% "survived" as infomorphs and backup copies that were transmitted off-world. So that would mean that there were only about 80 million "real human" survivors. In the face of species extinction, I think that most people would have to force themselves to deal with it as a survival mechanism. Given the prospect of total extinction, I would prefer my information "lives on" in the event of my death, even if it is in the form of clones and data backups.