in the vein of permutation city (greg egan) and old man’s war (john scalzi): if the transferral of consciousness between two systems *is* possible, without the creation of a copy (as most would hypothesize) - for example, if consciousness is simply the computations that are being carried out. the fact that they cease to be carried out on one hardware platform and begin to be carried out on another is irrelevant. the results of the computations are pure information and exist outside of physical reality. the fact that they are occurring on a system rooted in this universe/dimension/version-of-reality is just convenient and allows the consciousness in question to affect its surroundings. if the computations were to cease to be carried out alltogether, could they not continue to propagate simply through the fact that they could be given the infinite possible inputs? each possibility its own consciousness in itself. could this imply the existence of a kind of “heaven” or “afterlife”? your brain may stop performing the computations, but its current state can still be extrapolated given arbitrary inputs… your imagined eutopia or guilt driven self-punishment, or all of the above and everything in between at the same time…