"If I can't be me, then I might as well kill myself"

Fuld Auditorium, January 9, 2024. Professor Harvey Flockenbird of Princeton gives a press conference in the wake of his startling paper---universally heralded by physicists---presenting the first full and complete Grand Unified Theory of physics.

"Professor Flockenbird! Professor Flockenbird!", cry the reporters, "just one question!" But the questions go on and on until finally a young reporterette asks, "Dr. Flockenbird, in layman's terms is I am given to understand that in your theory every femto-second each particle of matter is completely disintegrated? How then is it possible for us to go on thinking of matter as having duration and being substantial?"

"Well," says the professor, "the utter destruction of matter takes place on the order of zepto-seconds, a small fraction of a femto-second. Before a whole femtosecond is up, however, the *information* that constituted the matter---having been bounced around and re-digitized and analoged trillions of times---causes particle quadrupoles to organize and recreate the matter, whether it be quark, gluon, or electron."

"But then," she follows up, "doesn't that mean that each one of us, each human being, is instantaneously destroyed and re-created billions of times each second?"

"Oh yes," he replies, "after all, our bodies are made of ordinary matter!"


It was this statement, made on January 9 in Fuld Auditorium, that precipitated the wave of suicides across Europe and North America. "My life has been nothing but a tissue of lies," exclaimed Matthew Soleil, best-selling professor of philosophy just before he took his own life. "I'm not the person that I thought I was, and, worse than that, it's clear that I never was! Each second I become someone else, a complete stranger. Obviously, there is no point in going on. Because there is nobody "here" to go on for."

A counterclaim was made by Christopher Reich of the University of Glasgow. "What we have here is, sadly, just evolution in action, although this is the first time that fitness has descended from philosophy. All of these poor unfortunates simply fail to understand that the continuity of their lives is fulfilled entirely by the continuity of the *information*, and that the actual particular sub-atomic particles, which do flash out of existence all the time,
being replaced much later, are only temporary and unimportant carriers of the actual content."

Alas, people were to be completely stubborn on this point, as they always had been about teleportation scenarios, and the last un-uploaded people all killed themselves not many years later as they grew to an age where they could finally understand the TOE of the early 21st century.

I kind of giggled at this!

I rather like this vision of the future - it tickles me inside.

Who cares?