Why River Song's Ending Is Darker Than You Thought 

Forgot to clarify in the video but the Soma game footage comes from www.youtube.com/@superbestfriendsplay

“Moffat didn’t understand the implications when he wrote this”. He did, at least by the end of his tenure. He wrote a whole episode about this idea, twice upon a time, where he argues against your interpretation of consciousness and what makes you you. Yes river died, but the river copy is still river. It’s not a lie, it’s a philosophical interpretation. There may also be a testimony river out there, who is also sincerely river.

I think it’s criminal how you didn’t mention twice upon a time because it’s whole message is about memories and how exact copies with those memories act, feel, and live

You call River's happy ending the dumb technicality, but I see calling it fake as much more of a technicality. She died and then essentially got revived in a digital form, from her point of view she simply got put there. She is River Song, she harbours the same memories and experiences, thoughts and opinions, loves as her. That's all we really are as humans. It's just her. There's no lie at all.

This whole video feels like a "Well ackshually" Also Star Trek teleporters.

Well, you could argue that the Doctor died when William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, and that every regeneration, we are given a new Doctor. The device in the Confession Dial works very much the same way, since it uses the energy taken from the Doctor's body to trigger the creation of the next copy.

You're wrong because Donna Noble was also uploaded into the same network as River Song and then downloaded with no digital copy left behind. They also put the Tardis in a human body and then back again, the Who universe works different from ours and thats ok.

I actually did this as a part of my first year Philosophy degree. It’s even wider reaching than you’ve said. If we accept that the doctor is a copy in heaven sent (which I agree is correct) that means that the first teleported doctor is as well. Given the doctor calls this a “short range teleport” we can assume it’s similar to that used throughout the show like the sontaran teleport or the dalek one. Given this, we must also accept that every time a character teleports, they have also merely been copied. Therefore, very few people in the doctor who universe are their original selves.

I believe consciousness is transferred with this technology, which means that whilst the 1.0 body dies, the consciousness transfers to the 2.0 version, allowing them to still be themself. This prevents every teleporter (eg The Ark in Space to The Sontaran Experiment) from killing everyone. The teleportation paradox too is speculative as we don't really have a way to measure what is killing someone and if such thing as the same consciousness or a soul even would come back

No one talks about how weird it is that River settles down & has children. That’s really not like the River we got to learn in the Smith era.

As far as I'm aware, this whole topic is entirely speculative, as we don't fully understand consciousness. We don't know if consciousness is transferred, but within sci-fi, I think it's safe to presume it somehow is. We can't say objectively whether it would work this way or not without fully understanding consciousness, which would likely grant us some degree of control over it given sufficient technological development.

I can't really agree with ya here Wholmes, a person is not their body but their soul, experiences, and personality, and the episode implies that River's exact soul is uploaded, not a copy of it, no matter how that works in-universe. It doesn't matter that you can't copy carbon to digital in our universe because the episode SAYS they do. Just because we understand that we can't doesn't mean in the show it doesn't happen.

I'm going to be honest that I don't agree with you on the premise. If I met another version of me who was an exact duplicate up to a certain point in time and then presumably had different experiences, that person is still me; we are the same person just different bodies. River did survive but she also died; as her physical body died but a new digital body survived. This is even more a certainty given how the digital version literally has the same memories and the same personality as the physical version up to the moment she died and only then diverged. This is why if I met this hypothetical copy of me I wouldn't be questioning who the original is because it doesn't actually matter.

The mechanism of how "Heaven Sent" kept creating the same copy of The Doctor really gave me chills when I first watched it. And for much the reason you said. I haven't played Soma (and won't) but I watched a streamer play it. The twist at the end threw her for a loop, and all of us watching! It was a seriously dark moment. And the scene where we saw Simon on the Ark is a *post-credits* scene! This reminds me so much of the novel "Shifting Reality" by Patty Jansen. The piece of tech core to this novel is in fact being able to copy consciousnesses and re-upload them into human beings (either real or synthetic). Wealthy people use thus as a way of 'taking holidays' to another space station because these scans can be sent at the speed of light, but bodies cannot.

I mean like, just picture the doctor off screen explaining that they figured a work around for this paradox by adding "quantum flim-flam inhibitors" or some nonsense and suddenly problem solved. This is a sci-fi show with a time travelling bigger on the inside police box, surely it's within this show's suspension of disbelief that the technology exists to genuinely transfer someone and not just copy them, especially in an episode in the far future. The doctor definitely did die in heaven sent though, but the episode was so explicit about the teleporter being a cloning device that that might as well have been common knowledge

I think about it like regeneration. Sure they don’t look the same but underneath they just are. If you treat them any differently then it’s the same as suddenly starting to treat the original version differently, like how Amy treats the flesh version of the doctor which is why you should say yeah they’re dead but they’re also still alive.

By this rationale the doctor died in The Keys of Marinus when we first see him use a teleport

Personally, I'd argue that while River and the like, *are* copies, that the doctor in heaven sent, is the doctor due to timelords being more dimensionally transcendent. Based on certain reactions, it's even implied he ends up *remembering* all of his prior deaths upon reaching the wall which is why some cycles just end with him breakingdown and wait for the Veil to come. He's the same doctor because he's connected to every version of him up to that point, with the memories being the sign of when his actual self/consciousness is restored to the current body. He's a timetraveler so every version of him, would be him, and remain him as his consciousness itself isn't bound to the physical flesh. Theres also the matter of timelord science, for example I'd argue that, because the cloud that Missy uses to store human minds in Death in heaven is able to have things PHYSICALLY pass back into the land of the living. And that Missy herself can hop two and from using her weird wristband device, that there its more of a physical dimension that minds just before death get pulled into rather than simply uploaded.

It’s interesting that Moffatt later had the 12th doctor not acknowledge the copy of Bill in his last episode.

But people are their experiences, not their biological, atomic construction.

I can't believe this man could lie to us (i have no idea what he lied about)

Oh damn -- I always thought the "The one of you that goes into the transporter will die, and a copy picks up where you left off" was a very new and niche concept; had no idea that it originated decades ago. On that note, The Doctor has been transmatted/transported numerous times, such as The Sontoran Strategem, The Five Doctors and Resurrection of the Daleks, some of these involving instances where the Companions also teleported. It really does add a slightly unnerving element to each of these episodes when keeping this in mind.

That was sort of explained in series 6 in "Almost human", when the Doctor considered his own flesh-replica just as much The Doctor as himself. It was Amy who couldn't accept it at first. Also since every cell in our bodies gets renewed every 7 years or so, that means that you yourself are version 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever of yourself, while previous versions of you are dead and you just have their memories) P.s. Unlike humans with their fragile ego the Doctor can accept the idea of not being 'unique'.

If the copy of River in the library isn’t River, and if that’s the case, then the Doctor died when he was 2 when he used the T-mat to get from the moon to the earth. And any other time the Doctor was transmatted meaning there were at least two time the Doctor died before heaven sent. The moon base when he was 2, and the Big Brother house when he was 9

13:37 By that logic, the Doctor died all the way back in the William Hartnel Era (1st Doctor) when he first went through a "transmat" (teleporter). Also, considering the Doctor's familiarity with transmat technology before he stepped into it during that episode, it's likely he had gone through a transmat before, which means we have NEVER even seen the original Doctor 1.0 (Chibnell's 'Timeless Child' nonsense notwithstanding.)

I guarantee that Moffit was aware of the idea of the concept, given that it's been in the geek circles (of which I am a part) for decades when talking about Star Trek, made really relevant in TNG episode "Second Changes", and the concept even being called out in an episode of Enterprise. And guess what? Most people don't care because in the end, the copy is still a living, breathing, human being. Not to mention, Moffit himself directly referenced it when he had Matt Smith's Doctor call the digital River an echo. Also, the Doctor at the beginning of Hell Bent would certainly not be Doctor 1.0. While I could have sworn I remembered the Doctor being "beamed" at some point, even if he hasn't been so on camera, it's a guarantee it would have happened off camera at some point.

This has always been my thinking. You could argue that our existence is only fleeting, we have the memories of our lives from moments before the present but we are *not* the same entity. Only an entity that has a memory of before.

This debate is one of my favorite things to think about, because I am firmly of the camp that "yes, that person is you." The things that make up something are irrelevant. It's the memories that are important. The Ship of Theseus may have been repaired to the point where every part of it is a new part, but it's still the Ship of Theseus. The memories the crew had of sailing on it, the battles it's seen and places it's visited, that's the important part, that's what makes it the ship, not some dinky ass wood. If a clone of me has all my memories, remembers trivial things like where i grew up or what my childhood friend was named, then they're me. It doesn't matter whether or not they were born from a womb or created by a cloning pod, they are me.

What happens here and in Soma is almost exactly like what happens with Testimony in Twice Upon a Time. Maybe you should make a follow up video that talks about what was said and done in Twice Upon a Time.

I guess, the same could be true for when the 9th doctor said “everybody lives” in the Doctor Dances.

Gotta love that philosophy argument. If it is the sum of your experience that makes you or the physical form? So the question is if you remember everything up to the point that the other ends then does it matter?

A concept the Prestige did the best. " it took courage. Never knowing if I would be the man in the box or on the stage"

There have been several works of science fiction and delve into this theory of clones being copies or a continuation, including a pretty thought provoking Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. What we can either also conclude that you’re just a copy of yourself, as in every seven years, your body has completely replaced all of your cells. When you replace all parts of a ship, one piece at a time, it’s still the same ship, if you consider how living beings replace all of our cells. When you get your organs replaced due to organ failure, or whatever, your new organ is still your new organ, if it hasn’t rejected you, and one by one, you replace parts of your body. Until you only have your brain left, the only part of you that’s you, because of your memories and consciousness. Once we learn to transfer our consciousness and memories, then you’ll be a copy of you, but you’ll also be yourself version 2.0 in laymen’s term, but technically, you’ve been replacing yourself at a molecular level since your conception.

I never realized how big a theme this is throughout the whole show. Personally, I am of the opinion that identity and consciousness is all about memory, and therefore if someone's consciousness is transferred or uploaded then it is still the exact same person, and this is true within the Doctor Who universe. There's the episode Twice Upon a Time, where the whole point is that even though Bill physically died, the glass copy of her is still entirely her because she has the same memories. Also, there's the episodes with the gangers (The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People) where the validity of the identity of the flash avatars is debated, but ultimately we come to the conclusion that these avatars literally are the people that they're copies of and have just as much of a right to exist. That little boy's dad is replaced by the flesh avatar, but it's still his dad. Something that I think is really interesting is the situation with the metacrisis doctor. It's established that he has the exact same memories as the doctor and is the doctor in every way except physical. I've heard a lot of debate surrounding Rose ending up with him and not the "real" doctor. The doctor's conciousness got split in two. There's a version of the doctor who ended up with Rose and a version who didn't. The version of the doctor who ended up with Rose is the same doctor who travelled with her, loved her, lost her, missed her, and found her again. Same goes for the other doctor, but now he loses her again. From this point onwards, however, they become different people, or at least different versions of the same original person. One of them is a time lord who regenerates and will live on for thousands of years, travelling through time and space, and the other is a human who will settle down and grow old with Rose. Both of these lives happen to the doctor, but only one version gets to experience each of them. This is potentially comparable to the likes of a Mickey/Ricky situation, where they're the same person but from a parallel universe so really not the same person at all. I don't really remember where I was going with this lmao and I don't know if any of it makes any sense but I just think it's an interesting thing to think about.

"Poor River Song. Sacrificing herself to plug in a cord." "River Song lives on in the memory of the Library." "WELL THAT'S ALL RIGHT, THEN!"

Basically it's just a long winded way of asking if there is a soul

I forgot Moffat did Press Gang. Press Gang was brilliant; it was Moonlighting meets Grange Hill.

I’ve always thought about this. My gramps in 2005 mentioned how computers will upload our consciousness. But I thought…isn’t that just a copy. Unless it’s the actual material and person then it can only ever be a copy.

I try not to take this show too literally, but it works metaphorically, too. In Silence in the Library, we’re seeing the Doctor’s unwillingness to truly accept loss. In Heaven Sent, the show is saying you’re not the same person after intense grief.

teleportation would make you scream - it would be so painful! And wouldn't you need resuscitation at the other end?

RTD also played with this concept in Years and Years. A character's consciousness/memories were uploaded into a (water?) computer. But he kept it open-ended and didn't really confirm whether it worked.

River dies but a digital copy with her memories is uploaded to the Library. Oh well that’s alright then.

This is true which also means that Donna and the others are not the originals either as they were converted into digital forms within that matrix and then converted back same as any other transporter. Same is true of Martha in the series 4 finale. Now as for The Vortex Manipulator or the crossing between worlds device, That all depends on if they work like a transporter does or if they just shunt the body into a different world or time rather than breaking it down.

It's why physicists refer to consciousness as "the hard question." The brain is simply hardware and we have no idea how consciousness really works. This was the dark ending of The Prestige. DARPA is investigating memory implantation and removal to control soldiers and covert operators and to heal PtSD (though I doubt simply removing a memory can remove the damage as we've seen trauma carried genetically).

McCoy doesn’t like teleportation either . “Spraying my atoms all over the universe “ 😊

I believe the statues show that organic material can be converted. If the faces are stored why not the whole body. Maybe that's why it was so full of HD space. Just saving a model of a face compared to a full model gets taxing on space and complexity..

the fact that so much work went into those folder names we saw for about 3 seconds,,,

I'd say the episodes with the gangas depicted the nightmarish scenario of copies finding out that they are copies pretty well

1984??? Dude, the teletransportation paradox was introduced LONG before that. It's the entire basis for the problem in Star Trek's _The Enemy Within_ episode by Richard Matheson, and the classic 1976 Star Trek fan story "Ni'var," by Claire Gabriel, in which new transporter protocols are experimented with precisely to deal with this concern.

in my mind you are your memories, and if i lost all my memories that would mean i who i am now would be dead. and so if all my memories are transferred to somewhere else then that's me

I always hated Moffat's "everyone lives" mentality, because it never felt like he was doing it for the audience's benefit but rather because he was too in love with his own characters, creating these convoluted and unsatisfying scenarios where a nice and proper death scene would have served better.

was so hoping the reference of SOMA would pop up when i heard the start of theory XD

In reality I agree that teleport/transmat would be eradication/replication, but in sci-fi you just gotta kinda go with it. The episode Heaven Sent, as amazing as it is, really steps abit to close to the edge on that point haha EDIT: I wrote this before he mentioned Heaven Sent.

Star Trek: "Hold my pint"

"Well, THAT'S ALRIGHT THEN!!!!!"

Every molecule in our bodies is replaced roughly every seven years, and our memories are basically just our neurons playing telephone, so does it really make a difference?

That means Capaldi's Doctor was the last one, and everything after is not Doctor Who. I like that.

But the thing is: In Heaven Sent, he *does* remember all the cycles. He specifically says as much when he has his breakdown. The Face the Raven teleporter actually transmits the original Doctor to the confession dial, and because the time resets in the teleporter room, the 'copy' is the original Doctor, but he remembers all the aborted 'timelines' because he's a Time Lord, or because his experiences in the dial sync up with him.

Considering that time travel itself, at least depicted in the way the show projects, is even more of an impossibility than this elaborate video expanding on the "Beam me up, Scotty" trope, I would say this was a very entertaining 20 minutes of sci-fi wibbly wobbly mishmash.

By this logic the Doctor has "died" every time he's teleported in any episode. This is more a philosophical debate than a straight "lie". What is consciousness? Do memories make the man? I don't think we can definitely say that River "died" when she was uploaded because the same memories live on in a new form. Are the memories "River" or the body?

When Moffat wrote Silence In The Library, I'm not sure he ever intended to bring River back again. She was seen more as a one-off character. Therefore whether she was truly alive or not had less consequence and demanded less scrutiny.

The last thing I expected when clicking on this video is to hear Pat ranting about how teleports aren't real lmao

Star Trek actually tackled this very issue in a few episodes, most notably the Original Series episode "The Enemy Within", and The Next Generation episode "Second Chances", with the characters of "good" (lacking in willpower and command strength)/"evil" (violent and self-indulgent) Kirk, and William/Thomas Riker, respectively.

Well,using your logic, we saw the Doctor die as Tom Baker before Genesis of the Daleks, because he,Harry and Sarah Jane ended up on Scaro when the time lords diverted his transmat beam.

I always thought this about the 12th Doctor. The original died in the scanner, but there were multiple duplicate copies.

Came across this same theory as a Star Trek fan. Technically, no character in Star Trek is the original person who was born of their mothers and retains the same consciousness. You can count the number of times each character is transported throughout each series, and that is not even close to the number of copies of them that have been made, as they all had years of service in Starfleet (or whatever organization they were part of) long before we come across them as characters in their storylines. Interestingly, Will Riker unwittingly comments on this issue in the second season TNG episode "Up the Long Ladder": "One William Riker is... unique, perhaps even special, but a hundred of him, a thousand of him... diminishes me in ways I can't even imagine."

Will always wonder what Moffat's real story was... The God Complex: "Do you know, there's a planet whose name literally translates as Volatile Circus?" Volatile Circus = RAM Disk.

Very thought provoking post ❤ but copies of people isn't new. I don't know if you remember the 4th doctor's episode logopolis, when he regenerated, Tom Baker's doctor merge with the Watcher which is a copy of one of the doctor's future Incarnation. Which is pretty much explained in the episode Giggle where the 14th doctor David Tennant regenerate and bi-generate into the 15th doctor Ncuti Gatwa. Hence there are two doctors. Pretty much explains about the Curator and the Valeyard.

as Moffatt himself already mentioned, the doctor has been a clone since the first doctor, there was an episode where the first doctor dies and a copy of him, Ian, Barbara and Susan go on.

Arguably not darker than I thought, because that's exactly how I would assume 'transference' of experience to be. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm likely to wonder if there is some sort of way to actually transfer consciousness given the available technology, since the Doctor is so convinced he's saving River rather than just creating an eternal digital memory of someone he wishes didn't die. Unless the Doctor is just some sort of vain egomaniac who needs to present the idea of having saved someone's life (which, admittedly, might not be entirely inaccurate). But then, also, light entertainment sci-fi can often be kind of hand wavy about what all this sort of stuff means - if it's all vague and unexplained I have to assume that it does exactly how the writer believes it works, because that's the story they're telling.

The Teletransportation Paradox is a prime example of sweating the small stuff. There's no true meaning in contemplating it unless the transported "2.0" version of you loses rights for teleporting, digitizing, etc. If no loss of person, mind or rights occurs for the transportation/copying, then those of us that do not suffer from "Transporter Phobia" as shown in Star Trek with Leonard McCoy and Reginald Barkley, shouldn't sweat it.

It parallels the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) stating that Bill in "Twice upon a time" isn't really "Bill". Coincidentally, I was watching the same episode earlier today. Looking forward to the review.

Thing is during our life our cells are repeatedly replaced. We're all a biological ship of Theseus. So even without brain scans and transporters and so on we're still just ongoing copies.

The whole nature of regeneration that has been shared so far means the second doctor was doctor 2.0 since the body is broken down and reformed into a new body but with the same memories (brain scan) the 3rd is 3.0 and so on. Which gets even worse abd more confusing if you throw in the timeless child.

Immediately watching this was thinking of Soma.

based on this theory, how is it possible to identify which is the original & which is the copy, if the copy is identical to original?

_Rogue Moon_ from 1960 also explored the concept of an identical copy who thought of itself as the original or at least unique. In that case the copies were sent to the moon while the originals stayed on Earth. For a short period of time they have simultaneous identical thoughts, faster than light, before diverging. They are aware that they're duplicates though. And the Star Trek TOS/TNG novel _Federation_ at least discussed it. There Zephram Cochraine is brought to the 24th century and thinks that transporters destroy the original and make a copy who only thinks it's the original. He is assured by some other character that no, the exact same atoms which make up you are the ones being beamed from place to place, so it really is you and not just a copy. There was also an episode of TNG where some eccentric mad scientist decided to "live forever" by transferring his mind into Data in the moments before his death. I noticed right away that it would be a copy of the scientist; the scientist himself still died. Nobody in the episode seemed to feel that way about it though least of all the scientist-in-Data himself.

The Doctor goes into his mind-palace/TARDIS when he enters Room12. He goes into a rant about "NOW I REMEMBER!" Every time. He knows he's done this for billions of years, because ny the end, he knows that those skulls in the sea are HIS.

When it comes to files, as long as the bits are the same, it doesn't matter how many times it's been copied. It's still the same file because the bits are the same. When you start modifying the copies, then you have new files. Uploading people's minds is like when you put your computer into hibernate and save the contents of memory to disk so you can pick up where you left off next time. If you took a copy of the hibernate file (hiberfil.sys on Windows, the swap file/partition on Linux) while the computer was off, started it and immediately hibernated it again, and compared the files, you'd find they were different because it's had time to process new data. It doesn't matter how many copies of someone's mind you make if they are never run. Once you start running them, they'll diverge into new individuals.

I’m not necessarily convinced by your argument regarding Heaven Sent. In Hell Bent the Doctor seems to “remember” all the time in the confession dial, when Clara asks him about it. And honestly that seems to make sense that because he’s in his own confession dial it’s more of an experience he lives out rather than him literally dying, but it’s certainly a bit hazy given how he gets in and out of it. Suffice it to say I don’t believe it’s made clear enough how confessions dials work - whether they’re just a bit like a TARDIS, bigger on the inside, or if there’s a lot more going on and a strong mental component - could anyone else have gone inside the Doctor’s confession dial for example? I’m inclined to say no, but it’s never stated either way.

Those 2007 clips at the beginning, right in the nostalgia feels HW!

Hmm, I guess I always took River Song in the library as dead. Like, it never even occured to me that someone thought she WASN'T dead. She absolutely died. The Doctor did the only thing he possibly could, and kept a memory of her alive. Its not like he will ever see her again, so its not that big of a deal to the story, he just wanted to make sure in some way that she could not be forgotten by time.

Transcendence with Johnny Depp is a great example of this. His character is dying from cancer so they upload his brain and there's a real debate in the movie about if the copy is really him or is it just AI with memories. It's sad to think this paradox is pretty hard to work around. I always wanted to be uploaded to live forever but knowing it's not me that would survive really sucks lol. But I guess the next question would be if I would want the copy to live forever like I wanted to.

If you apply the theory to the Time Lord's Matrix then even The Master and Rassilion we see in New Who are not the originals we see in classic who, being revived for the Time War

Because the communicator works through a psychic link it preserves the conscious of the user for a short amount of time allowing the doctor to transfer the conscious to the computer so river should live on.

I feel like this is an example of one technicality in which Moffat being "wrong" isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's better for someone, like you, to mention it than necessarily for Moffat to being wrong. After all, this is a sci-fi series in which some concepts are not true (maybe for now) and paradoxes happen. The fact that they're not true doesn't ruin the show. And this "lie" of River not being alive after being uploaded isn't bad. It's a good ending to a story. That's what it is, a story. If this was overlooked, I'm fine with it. I guess the big majority of the fans are also fine with it. Therefore, I don't find this a bad thing. I'd rather keep the version in which River was saved by 10th that never knew her than the version in which River is not alive because who's alive is a copy of her...

In Heaven Sent, there were billions of copies all created from the same "print buffer". The question is not if any or all of them are just as real but rather, when the Doctor was on Trap Street before he was teleported, what was HIS fate? Will he find himself in Gallifrey or will he die at the hands of the Grimm Reaper?

Except, in Heaven Sent, upon reaching the wall between the Confession Dial pocket universe and Gallifrey, The Doctor directly states that he remembers all the time he spent in the Confession Dial. Or, at least, it seems so to me.

@13:00 i believe when each time the Doctor trapped between the Wall and the Creature, the Time Lord tech would force him to Sync up with backs from every pre-existing copies from that point, meaning whilest each new copy would deviate 0,00~001 from the orginal Doctor taken from the Trapstreet, after facing the Wall each sequentualy copies that are left trapped or dying would gradually becomes burden with a slightly different life inside the Castle, leaving behind notes for himself to solve the riddle Perhaps its not even required for the Doctor himself to restart Teleporter itself, being remotely powered & operated from a distance is within Timelord capacity, especially within their own devices. Maybe its done to ensure as a deliberarly to himself, at first perhaps unnoticed, afterwhich a 'canvas' for a special note

What even is a body without the mind? Our consciousness its nothing but all our memories and lifetime experiences together, so, if when transferred, our memories are still there, the "new version" its still you, but with a plus in your mind that its knowing that youve been teleported. At the end, it doesnt matter if its made a copy or not, if one of you died and another one exactly identical was born, nothing changed. A great exemple of this logic is the last special when the 14th does bigeneration and both of them its the doctor, the new body and the one who remain the same body, because no matter what happened, the mind is what defines us, not the physical part that walks around with it. Also, a tiny point: River isnt just a human beign, she is part timelord since she was "made" in the tardis exposed to the time vortex. This is what make me believe she was able to "travel" to the real world to speak with clara in Trenzalore, cause she isnt just a normal human who was uploaded like a file.

I think Red Dwarf addressed thsi way back in 1988 Lister : And look, look, you're not dead, are ya? I mean, you're "dead", but you're not dead-dead because you're still here, aren't ya? Rimmer : Lister, I'm not really here. I'm not really me. Don't you see? I'm a computer simulation of me. [points to his remains - a pile of white powder on the floor] Rimmer : That's me there, that pile of albino mouse droppings. And again in The Promised Land when Cat is creeped out by low power mode putting Rimmer in mono and draining all colour from his projected image. Who would have guessed that the comedy would address such implications before the drama series

Live to you seems to mean have a physical human like body (because River isn’t totally human) whereas I see it as the mind/memories surviving. As long as I have my memories and experiences then I am me, copy or not. Oh, one of is a copy, fine now we are me.

So... what does this mean for Stephen Moffat's "Final Doctor", ("Doctor #45) Doctor Moon? Thank you so very much for the video.

If River was hooked in and her stream of conciousness was transferred through the line and her subconsciousness was never interupted then she'd be the same as that is a transference not that different from writing memory to the brain.

Now about the Doctor being in the confession dial for billions of years...

Another examination of these themes is in Altered Carbon. Your consciousness is stored on a "stack" which can be uploaded to another body either locally or transmitted via FTL communication tech to another world and uploaded to a body there.

Continuity of Consciousness for the original person is the key.

I feel like unless we're given an exact explanation on how a teleportation device or mind upload works, we can assume continuity. SOMA had a neat existential concept that was a decent reflection of how things would work out given an extrapolation of our technology. But Doctor Who is basically science fantasy, it doesn't really have to follow those rules. We could say that the neural relay things connected to the subject's brain, essentially dividing their mind between the two, so when the physical brain dies, their mind carries on in the limited computational capacity of the relay. Or some quantum soul mumbo jumbo. I think the Heaven Sent thing may have been retconned by some time lord fuckery, but the copies being copies is kinda part of the theme.

That felt like a long way for a shortcut.... still enjoyed it

Your cells die out and are made anew so much so that every 7 years not a single cell from the last cycle exists, but you still maintain your own identity and consciousness. You could make the arguement seen in this video, but it can be endlessly countered until it devolves into a pointless arguement.