this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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That continuity of function is arbitrary. In reality it provides people comfort in some idea of a soul but there's nothing suggesting it actually provides anything to the continuity of consciousness.
Between every loss in time, where you stop forming memories until you wake up again, you have nothing to affirm that your current consciousness is the same as your last waking period's. The only thing vaguely providing that illusion is your previously-formed memories, which would exist all the same on the digital mind, in theory.
I don't think you understand. Your consciousness is just one process amid a myriad of processes that your brain runs. It's that continuity that matters. You're correct that I don't know if my current consciousness is the same as prior consciousnesses, however what matters is that my brain has never shut off, giving me the feeling as though I am the same person; and it is because of that thread that I am the same person (though perhaps with a different consciousness).
Furthermore, you can't achieve immortality through digital consciousness if you just copy the whole thing and throw out the original. Again, it's the continuity. It honestly confuses me why people think that's a rational idea when the very obvious problem is, "what if something goes wrong and human me wakes up?"
That's why you have people, like me, who get frustrated when people start getting philosophical about this shit because they think you can "just make a perfect copy" of a person to achieve immortality.
Seriously?
No.
You just killed yourself and made a copy of yourself. You didn't achieve shit. Your new self might be happy, but your old self is dead. You're not suddenly going to wake up as a digital clone. You're not waking up at all, it's your clone that's waking up.
And hey, if that's good enough for you, then so be it. Just don't pretend you've achieved immortality; it was your digital clone that did. You're still going to die.
It also confuses me that so many people seem to believe that you're literally brain-dead while you sleep. If you were literally brain-dead then there'd be no way for you to wake up. Sleep seems to be when the brain processes memories too, so if your brain fully shut off, then it wouldn't be able to processes memories while you're asleep. Finally, afaik, once the brain shuts off, it can't turn back on; evolution didn't plan for a situation in which someone's been dead long enough for brain activity to cease before their heart starts pumping again. So why does everyone insist that you go brain-dead the moment your head touches the pillow?
This convo has gone on for centuries at this point. The Brain in the Jar, the teleportation conundrum, Thesius' ship, it's all already been covered over and over. people like you still keep crawling out of the woodwork thinking you know better than every philosopher that already waxed over this problem ad nauseum.
Your 'continuous self' is just as worthless as a concept. The idea that your 'sense of being the same person' is being held together by being apart of your plumbing just as much of an illusion. It's worthless.
To elaborate, you are not the brain. You are the observer, the thing which exists as a byproduct of the brain's processes, perhaps even a process yourself within. There's also plenty of times when you will lose time other than sleep, like concussions, getting blackout drunk, panic attacks, and after those times you have no memory of making decisions or acting in your own accord, but you were. You, the observer, were absent while the brain kept working. So where were you?
You act as though you're sure you are still the same observer as the one who went to bed. That is completely unsubstantiated. You may have just been born into your body when you awoke today, and will only have until your body falls back asleep again before you cease to exist, replaced by another process that thinks itself is you, another observer.
And if 'you' one day woke up in a digital world, like our own, it's you'd be none the wiser, because your self is simply a collection of processes and memories. It's arbitrary. It's all dust. There's not some special 'continuity' that keeps you alive somehow.