Upon reaching a certain milestone of computing and storage technology, an individual’s brain-state can be saved with perfect fidelity to an external medium. In practical terms, this means that one’s legacy lives on indefinitely provided that uploads are done either continuously or at regular intervals. This further means that the average person can go through revivification upon their body death, producing a brand-new identical meat-or-machine shell for them to abuse in fresh ways. However, this new individual has an unpalatable opportunity to grapple with the problem of Theseus’s ship in a very hands-on fashion; whether or not the returned person can under any circumstances possess the same soul, the same gestalt, as the original is an extremely open question. The two are provably dissimilar if a sufficient time elapses between the last full upload cycle and the person’s death, and their literal stream-of-consciousness is interrupted. Thus, “interruption” is the generally-accepted euphemism for an individual undergoing body death and then having a redundant copy of their consciousness thrown into a new housing. Over the long ages, the term has also come to apply to any expiration of an entity’s centralized person, regardless of whether or not they have the capacity to back themselves up, let alone reinstantiate their brain in different hardware.
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