Been reading a lot fics and stuff in the Star Rail genre lately, mostly centered around Dan Heng. Naturally, non-AU stories will have to deal with the special brand of reincarnation that the Vidyadhara possess, and whether/how much he is his previous incarnation or not.
Anyway, in the interests of keeping my lore straight, I went back into the game (or the wiki for the game) to get some first more first hand observations by the native Xianzhou citizens on their views of the soul and the self...
( Quest - A Teacher and a Friend: Continued )So here, a digital mind upload = soul.
The fact that it's a *copy* of consciousness doesn't even require uniqueness! At the time of copying and before the original person dies, is both the person and the copy the same soul?
Anyway, all this just means that according to Xianzhou law & governance, at least, what makes a person that particular person is just the data of one's mind.
What is the data of a mind upload? I would say memories plus the current state of thought/emotion.
But wouldn't that imply that this is in agreement with the Vidyadhara treatment of "rebirth" being a new person, because the memories are wiped even if the physical body is still the same. I mean, essentially the rebirth just does a format of the body's hard drive. Even if some bits and bytes might be left over and potentially recoverable, they are soon enough overwritten by entirely new data.
And if so, that just makes the fact that Dan Heng was still imprisoned for 1-2 centuries after rebirth due to his previous incarnation's crimes to be "unjust" even by Xianzhou's own legal/philosophical systems.
Of course, I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. No matter what the laws say, the Xianzhou is supposed to be a culturally chinese society. And chinese society does have a saying for "父债子偿".
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