D E A T H. No Self, Informational Continuity, and the Structure of What Follows

This work develops a naturalistic framework for thinking about death that avoids both religious afterlife narratives and dogmatic secular "nothingness." Starting from the view that there is no metaphysical self, it argues that the feeling of being a continuous "I" arises from informational overlap between conscious moments, and that streams of consciousness can be interrupted without anyone dying. On this view, death becomes a successor problem: after the final conscious state of a biological life, does any state in reality count as a legitimate continuation of it? From two variables, the underlying metaphysical law and the length of the successor chain, the work derives five structurally distinct post-death outcomes: absolute void; rebirth via zero-overlap re-indexing; a finite chain of continuations ending in void; a finite chain ending in rebirth; and infinite continuation. It argues these five are exhaustive and that none can currently be ruled in or out. Along the way it uses thought experiments on teleportation, duplication, gated memories, and sleep, and introduces the "Superposition of Substrates," the idea that a conscious state is effectively located in every physical or simulated substrate compatible with it. The work concludes with a position of structured, honest agnosticism about death. The framework also has direct implications for questions of AI consciousness, including copying, forking, and pausing of artificial minds. First draft (v1). Written with AI assistance.