@Background Pony #875A  
Sounds a bit like Harry Potter.

@Vree
 
Swampman sounds closer to Too Many Pinkie Pies.

@Vree  
I should have read it more thoroughly. My bad.

Eh… she probably just understood that the Elements of Harmony were doing something, and that they wouldn’t hurt her.

Yes. She goes along with whatever happens, willingly.

^Actually swampman is a thought experiment about whether something that is identical to something else, but misses a link in casuality to the other thing, is the same or different from the previous thing. It is similar to p-zombies which also deal with some problems with how we define identity.
 
Not much relation to the episode I’m afraid, unless you want to dvelve into philosophizing about whether, if Twilight died, then sentences like “she recognizes her friends and her friends recognized her” can be called truthful (they are not her friends but other-Twilight’s, ergo what they do does not match how we define “recognize” - her memories are fake because they refer to another (albeit identical) person, and they can not recognize her because she is not “herself”, only a different person who is the same in every regard as her previous self.
 
Also, never say “theory” when you mean “thought experiment”. :D

@Background Pony  
Sounds like the Swampman theory:  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman

Oh.
 
What if Twilight thought she was dying here, and this was her facial reaction?

Funny…she doesn’t look Jewish.

@Background Pony  
I heard headcanon similar to that. Basically, the Friendship Cannon killed her, but with her destruction, it allowed Celestia to talk to her and let her be reborn as an Alicorn. In the end, she’d still be the same pony as before.
 
Which would also mean that Twilight is Pony Christ.

Something I’m wondering – and this is probably too dark to ever really be detailed in the context of the show – but is it implausible to think that Twilight actually /did/ die in that scene, in the sense of having her physical body annihilated, only to be reborn, literally, some time later?
 
And a bigger thing: Even if that wasn’t really Twi dying – let’s say she just teleported away – she was still reborn as something new and more powerful.
 
Which parallel’s Celestia’s pet phoenix a lot and makes me wonder if that WASN’T some kind of (internal?) foreshadowing.

She had just learned how happy she had made Celestia and making Celestia happy seemed to be her #1 priority at all times. Of course she was happy! She had no idea yet of what Celly was going to do to her.

She probably didn’t know Alicornication was going to happen, but she could probably sense she was going to be all right.