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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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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.