this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
96 points (86.9% liked)
science
14761 readers
716 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Are you the same person every morning when you wake up, or a new one with the same memories?
There's literally no way to know.
But how do you know this? That's the root of the question.
How would you distinguish "I woke up as the same consciousness" from "I woke up as a new consciousness with an identical memory", from the first person perspective?
One answer could be that having the exact same memories means you are the exact same consciousness. But this means that your moment-to-moment feeling of "self" is not actually intrinsic to your consciousness, since the memories alone are sufficient.
You seem to be missing the point of the philosophical question.
Just because you feel like you are the same conscious doesn't mean you are, which is what needs proving. We need to demonstrate that we have some way to know we are a different entity without just saying "I know I am". Is it enough to have the same set of memories? Surely not, as the Star Trek thought experiment implies.
For the record I do have an inner monologue. I just also think that the notion of consciousness and what it means to "be" the conscious process isn't as simple and clear-cut as you think it is.
I don't accept "I know I am" as any form of proof toward any introspective qualities, whether that is sentience or consciousness or even free will. I also don't accept "I just know it" as proof of any deity or higher power, or that there is an objective morality embedded in the universe, etc.
I'll stop responding here, because I think we are just not going to make any progress with each other. Your posit that you can just tell the difference and know it, is fundamentally incompatible with my stance that there must be some method or technique to distinguish what the difference is. I simply do not know that I am the same person today that I was yesterday - I feel that I have good reason to believe that I am, but I also accept that this might simply be an illusion because of the circumstance of having woken up with memories that lead me to that conclusion. I have no way to know that the consciousness that "ended" with sleep last night is really the same one that woke up this morning, outside of the apparent continuity of memory. I find it an interesting and thought-provoking question, but you may also simply decide that you know the answer by feeling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Critique
"Agree with me, or see a psychiatrist, or you're an actual NPC" is an exceedingly shitty debate tactic.
Enjoy.
As long as your brain mass has not deteriorated you should still have access to at least your long term memory. But in theory it could range from a terrible hangover to amnesia and brain damage, and in that case recovery may take longer and you may end up being a completely different person, as it can already happen with some accidents.
At that point you “die” every time you fall asleep.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
I wasn't making any arguments for or against. For the record, I don't agree with the comic. I simply found it relevant based on it touching similar topics to what you wrote, and thought I would share. But, that's my bad for posting a link with zero explanation.
The comic is fine. You’re assuming that all humans act rationally. This is clearly the story of a man who had an irrational fear that didn’t bother everyone else, and then learned to deal with it, in a way.
Essentially the protagonist isn’t you, but it certainly falls in the range of expected behavior for someone out there.
I hope having a transporter device is more like folding space than particle-scanning and reconstruction. The scanning and reconstruction would still be great for replacing or repairing lost or deteriorating structures. Regardless, I have a number of questions that come up as we learn more about how our brain might work.
If our brain is changed in (near) death how would we determine what was lost?
Could we even reconstruct consciousness (this could be also gradual, but what is the speed of consciousness)?
It seems more like we would have to gradually move our conscious processing from per-existing wetware to whatever replaces it (even more wetware). It should behave like our brain as much as possible, but I don't think we could avoid being different from what we were.
Our own brain changes over time, do we think the way we did when we were 5? How different will we think far later in life (assuming our brain is at least healthy)? I think we would have to accept changes in our fundamental being (which is already very challenging). The difference is that not only could we live for longer physically, but within the pure consciousness an entire lifetime could be lived in less than a second. We experience this temporarily in dreams, or while experiencing a life threatening event such as an automobile accident or the final moments of death itself. What if that was extended over physical months, years, decades? How would we deal with such a inheritance, who would teach us how to cope and find meaning?
Would we want to live life at the speed of the physical world after such an experience?