We don't know what happens to the mind after death. I believe in mathematical realism, and Ibelieve simulations do not necessary depend on specific implementation to exist. I believe they exist independently as abstract potential patterns( in some real number, maybe a transcendental like pi exist numerical sequences representing all the temporal states of a simulation, and these have existed outside of time eternally).
If you burn all the books of isaac asimov and all the copies of them, the actual patterns haven't been destroyed even if no local physical implementation of them exist. As has been often said even random monkeys typing with enough time will produce these works again along with all possible books past present and future.
Now I believe the brain is hardware that is simulating sensory perception and an accompanying observer. I believe this simulation or sequence of patterns is eternal and has always existed outside of time, it exists independent of the brain's existence. If the multiverse is true it is likely that infinite copies exist and are taking the exact same sequence of actions at the same time.
Now I do not believe this means that one is intrinsically immortal. There are sequence of things that have defined beginning middle and end even if they are timeless, eternal in nature.
What I do think is that death remains an open question, we just don't know what happens to the continuity of consciousness, does it just end there or does it continue somehow? For example take a particular simulation of an ai with perfect checkers play against another ai with perfect checkers play, the game iirc will end in a draw. Now if you destroy the computers on which this simulation is being run, you don't actually destroy that particular perfect play game it exists outside of time along with all imperfect plays in a combinatorial space.(the related data for perfect play is about 200GB iirc).
If I take a book of hamlet and burn it midway through, the ideas the play is not actually destroyed only my access to it. If I was a character in the play i would be none the wiser, the ideas , thoughts, words are immune to corruption. In the brain the conscious observer is the main protagonist of the simulation, a simulation that is independent of substrate, as patterns while implemented in matter are independent of the matter in which they've been implemented. In theory it is perfectly plausible that the mind keeps on going somehow(for example, maybe the multiuniverse is true and the exact mind simulation is being run in parallel an infinite number of times, when the hardware is destroyed in one of these worlds, the individual simply continues in the rest of the copies as the actual interaction is exact it is conceivable the individual exists simultaneously at the same time across all copies.).
But again I restate we don't know what happens, we're only consciously aware of what our memory allows us to be aware of. Yet we know from experiments, drugs, accidents, etc that in some cases one can have no recollection of times when one was conscious. Do we solely exist in one body at a time? Even if so given that our brain has zero memory access to anything that could occur outside the brain's sensory input and its internal processes, we just can't know if our memory can be considered to provide the limits of what we're actually conscious of. If time travel is possible, we could be in two bodies at a time, past and future or more if repeated travelling occurs, and yet despite our conscious existence being in multiple places at the same time we wouldn't be aware of it, while hypothetical this hints that it is conceivable. We could conceive of a ship of theseus thought experiment, were a man and his wife's brain and body are slowly replaced with each others. Eventually the man becomes the wife and the wife becomes the man, did the man stop being the man at any point? how about the wife? or was the man both man and wife always but not consciously aware of this because of memory separation?I'm reminded of this story
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