Star Trek Social Club

I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances - that “me” is gone and can’t do anything. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.