>>118468
This too is good. Really good actually.
>>118325
>could you elaborate on the
Most people I talk to on the nature of self tend to "subscribe" to a philosophy by which they identify themselves as the sum total of their memories and experiences. They don't recognize any inherent nature or 'core self' [spoiler]which I find to be a very Buddhist way of approaching the question when you get down to it['/spoiler], and see things like having aspects of their personalities or memories altered as a form of death, a change of the 'internal narrator' who they identify as themself.
In my mind this is attaching one's perception of self erroneously to an mere construct composed of impermanent aspects. We forget, to varying degrees of completion, memories all the time. Under this logic, my self should be a constantly shifting construct only loosely related to prior versions from ten, twenty years ago. Similarly, something like total amnesia would essentially be death under this schema, but to me that makes little sense. I forget quite substantial things all the time, and I cannot recall most of my life (as most people cannot outside summaries and generalizations constructed in the subconscious), but I am no less me.
As an example, if I forgot everything I knew in five minutes, there would be some who would say that I have died. If I then, five minutes after that, regained all my memories, they would say that I have been revived, and the 'me' who existed for that five minutes had effectively died, or else changed so much that they might as well have. In my conception of self, "I" never died, I simply went from one state of awareness, to another, and back again. I was aware and conscious for all of it, at no point did "I" cease to be present, even as what I might perceive of as "I" changed.
In my mind, as long as you are still aware in the present, you still exist. Now, what that "I" is beyond 'the thing that is aware of its own existence' is harder to say, and I can't say I've settled on an answer, but if we're to presume the existence of the soul, which for things like Jumpchain is fairly safe, then I would posit that the soul is what is experiencing the state of awareness.
In this sense, I would compare the soul's awareness as similar to water, in that it is molded by its vessel. In one vessel, due to the nature of that vessel, it might exist under the influence of some aspect that is not inherent to its nature, but once it has released from that aspect, it no longer need bear that influence. In that sense, memory itself could be considered an aspect, though I tend to prefer to understand memory of the vessel and memory of the soul differently. That being, the memory of the soul is the sum total of its experiences in all its vessels, whereas the memories of a vessel are those memories made from the experiences that soul/awareness has had in that vessel. And when the awareness of a soul is in a vessel, it has only access to the memories of the vessel, absent sufficient spiritual self-awareness to be aware of memories from past vessels.
All of which is to say, is that I see the modification of the brain, of the computer, or of the code, as an alteration of the vessel, rather than the fundamental, 'true' self, which continues to exist in an, admittedly very basic and undefined/unrefined, state.
This gets weird when you get to Nasu, but given how Void Shiki implies in her conversation with Mikiya that one's origin is the actual core of the self (notably, the one part of the soul that isn't broken down into its base components in the process of reincarnation), one could argue that the soul is itself merely another layer of vessel standing between the actual self and the material vessel.
...anyway, sorry for the length of that ramble, kinda got away from me there. Probably pretty dumb and nonsensical.