cool fact: when a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, its atoms get totally scrambled within the cocoon... yet the butterfly remembers lessons from its caterpillar phase
AND, now that I think about it - I don't agree with the depictions above of life and death (but maybe we're talking about different things). As I see reality, the pretzel/lizard matter doesn't get erased. You're constantly consuming atoms that become newly "yours" and shedding ones that become part of other beings. You're not a thing; you're a process. So what makes you stop being you (= die) is less a change in matter, and more an interruption to the vital processes (= solids, liquids, gasses flowing in, out, around). At that point, your cells all get simultaneously released to join the bodies of (or "processes that we perceive as distinct bodies of") bacteria, fungi, insects, worms.
yeah! the "lizard" persists even though all of its cells are constantly changing. So we can say there is no lizard, but the matter is "currently lizarding". And the longevity of that process is determined by whether it aligns or conflicts with all the other processes that exist in reality around it
And here is where I get excited because metaphysics intersects with theology, when we think about: the lizard is NOT an eternal process, it can die/stop. Are there things that are eternal processes? The answer is yes: "change" is an eternal process. You can't kill change. Death is an eternal process, can't kill the possibility of ceasing. I think theology is the study of eternal processes, and "computational theology" is the modern equivalent (it is what is all the rage now, including by the person who discovered that earlier link you posted, about the caterpiller's memories persisting even as the entire organism dissolves. That was from Michael Levin's work. He doesn't describe his work as theology because that's a kind of stigmatized thing in science, but I think that is what it is)
cool fact: when a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, its atoms get totally scrambled within the cocoon... yet the butterfly remembers lessons from its caterpillar phase
https://www.iflscience.com/do-butterflies-remember-being-caterpillars-72943#
AND, now that I think about it - I don't agree with the depictions above of life and death (but maybe we're talking about different things). As I see reality, the pretzel/lizard matter doesn't get erased. You're constantly consuming atoms that become newly "yours" and shedding ones that become part of other beings. You're not a thing; you're a process. So what makes you stop being you (= die) is less a change in matter, and more an interruption to the vital processes (= solids, liquids, gasses flowing in, out, around). At that point, your cells all get simultaneously released to join the bodies of (or "processes that we perceive as distinct bodies of") bacteria, fungi, insects, worms.
yeah! the "lizard" persists even though all of its cells are constantly changing. So we can say there is no lizard, but the matter is "currently lizarding". And the longevity of that process is determined by whether it aligns or conflicts with all the other processes that exist in reality around it
And here is where I get excited because metaphysics intersects with theology, when we think about: the lizard is NOT an eternal process, it can die/stop. Are there things that are eternal processes? The answer is yes: "change" is an eternal process. You can't kill change. Death is an eternal process, can't kill the possibility of ceasing. I think theology is the study of eternal processes, and "computational theology" is the modern equivalent (it is what is all the rage now, including by the person who discovered that earlier link you posted, about the caterpiller's memories persisting even as the entire organism dissolves. That was from Michael Levin's work. He doesn't describe his work as theology because that's a kind of stigmatized thing in science, but I think that is what it is)