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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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It's funny that when it's transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the 'them' that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
Well...if that's true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G'night
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text
Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
Moar
Ok, here's a fun one:
When people have their corpus callosum split, the part that connects the two brain hemispheres, there's often different personality traits that will emerge for each hemisphere, such as one being religious and the other atheistic.
So the question is - where do the emergent personality traits come from?
When the brain is connected, do you effectively have psyches that are simply sitting there suppressed waiting to come out? Or is the you right now a mixture of personality aspects located in both sides?
What about extending this to the concept of the soul?
Is it still one soul in the body split into two, such that the one hemisphere could doom the other with its disbelief, or is there now two souls in one body - and if so where did the other one come from?
Are we actually individuals, or just a hodgepodge of different subconscious identities that's fooled themselves into thinking they are a single mind, just an accident away from being thrust into their own isolated lobes to define themselves anew separate from the others?
And if that split were to happen, which side would the 'you' experiencing this moment right now end up on?
I subscribe to the emergent properties theory, that our consciousness is an emergent property, same with our intelligence and the two different personality traits that appear on the brain being split into two hemispheres are on that path.
I do wonder though if being split introduces any differences from being born with a split, as in does being part of a whole create those traits or if those would've happened regardless of when the split happened and being whole works like you described with some personality traits suppressing the others.
Easy.. Everyone is a mix of personalities acquired from people you spend time with and interact. It's way more than just 2. Each side might hold a huge chunk of partial information.
When they split, it's maybe two combination of personalities fighting each other. And each subconscious would create a different individual
But the real you can only be the complete mind where all emerges come from. I'm no expert but sounds like the soul would be a confused one and not a broken one.
This thought has prevented my sleep for years now.
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
I mean... video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn't it?
How so?
Do you think I'm taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
No, I mean if you record daily videos of who you are in your day-to-day, like, talking about what happened and your thoughts and feelings, vlog-style, then you went to sleep and woke up with a completely different consciousness, wouldn't you know, by looking at the videos, that it was someone else seaking, not the conscious you are today.
Does that make sense. I'm having trouble explaining it well, I think.
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There's no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn't existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there's currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
Then does it even matter? What's the point of even considering the question if the end result has no detectable difference either way?
Exactly. Duplicating a person and destroying the original or truly transferring every atom from one location to another by teleportation results in the same level of continuity of consciousness as just going to sleep and waking up later.
So why does the cloning version seem so, so much worse?
Because of the difference is that there's a hard cut in continuity with the teleporter. The body is destroyed. In normal life, our body does get replaced, but the continuity remains equal through that time. With the teleporter, everything gets replaced at once, which is a hard continuity cut.
For this reason, sleep doesn't affect continuity, just its potency and what can be accessed during sleep. If we turn a microwave off by unplugging it, whatever continuity it has ceases, this is in no way equal to sleeping. The functions, information, and mind are still present and functional.
"Personality drift" while you sleep probably does happen, but in small degrees. You don't think exactly the same as you did 10 years ago. People have been knocked unconscious and woken up with different personalities, so it's not like people always wake up with conscious continuity.
Sleep and unconsciousness are more accessible means of exploring these thought experiments than fantasy teleportation devices, but many of the considerations apply. If you're a strong materialist, then the notion that "consciousness" is special is silly: any body that has your thoughts is "you" and multiple "yous" is fine, they should diverge as each copy has unique experiences.
On the other hand, many people are not materialists at all. Many believe either explicitly in a supernatural soul, or in a more ineffable "higher consciousness" that science has yet to reliably demonstrate. For these people, continuity of consciousness has severe implications.
If a person has a brain injury and wakes up as a totally different person, what happens to their soul? (I'm a materialist, so I dunno. Just pointing out that the question does have meaning to people.)
I guess my question is more directed at those people who are not materialists. To distill it into a philosophical question: why worry about something you cannot know?
Its a total hypothetical designed to make you look smart, and scare people. Whoever thought of it probably squeezes hamsters for fun.
The solution that clears up all of these issues and results in a fully consistent view of the self is the one people like the least. There is no "you" or "me", the self is an illusion the brain creates to make sense of things.
The Illusionist theory of Consciousness is pretty solidly refuted. The emergent theory of consciousness is vaguely similar, and argued by some to be stronger, others to be weaker, than illusionism. I think it's the most popular view among physicalist philosophers. For the arguments against emergentism, the most common seems to be the required presupposition of physicalism plus some handwaving to make it work. It's noted, however, there are a vast number of permutations of the emergentism argument or what emergent mental states actually mean, which each one of those permutations a bit different.
Upon analysis, neither has demonstrated being "a fully consistent view of the self" with any success. Ultimately, both are just unsubstantiated attempts to fill the gaps in our understanding.
That's about consciousness, which is a much larger claim than the self being an illusion. You can have consciousness without a self, that's what we call ego death. In theory, a conscious being could exist that's always in a state of ego death, and have no understanding of the self and be utterly confused by why people find anything unintuitive about the teleporter paradox.
I don't agree. Care you defend this claim? Your assertion that you can have consciousness without a self (ego death) seems more personal spiritualism than argument.
In theory like modal possibilities, or in theory like you genuinely believe such a person can exist? I'd love to hear why.
There's a great They Might Be Giants song about exactly this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSbEOZY7k20