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Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What wakes up is something slightly different due to biological processes. You are not tired, your moo

Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What wakes up is something slightly different due to biological processes. You are not tired, your mood is different, part of cells in your brain got replaced, memories become more stable and maybe linked to other similar memories, etc... This is way more pronounced for people waking up from a coma. Philosophers thought of this for a while, see https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-brain-of-theseus https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/66018/the-bra... So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up? Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different.

musicale 2y ago
Thanks for feeding my existential dread. For that matter, the you of this moment is constantly being annihilated and replaced by a slightly different clone, in an illusory life that resembles stop-frame animation. And don't ask me about the me from yesterday - the one who didn't bother to do any of the things I am stuck with doing today - or the me from tomorrow who will likely squander everything I've worked so hard for. Neither of them is to be trusted. On the other hand, I do seem to have a vast store of dream memories; wnen I think about them it seems like living some kind of second life, usually while fast asleep. Sleeping and waking selves are in agreement that being asleep is generally more pleasant than being awake, though being awake seems to have better continuity.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.
- smeej 2y ago
  There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.
    - smeej 2y ago
      The fact that "you are different" does not mean a "different you" now exists, though. Change of this specific kind is already intrinsically integrated into your existence and identity.
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        Every moment of consciousness is different. It is a different you in that sense. What is the strand that keeps it the same ‘you’?
        Charon77 2y ago
        Honestly I'd like to have my mind copied, but may only be 'simulated' once the current me is dead. From my perspective I'll be dead and there's no changing that, but from the clone's perspective, life just goes on.
        smeej 2y ago
        Physical continuity, in the sense that there is no break so significant that at any point one could say, "Before this, smeej0, and after this, smeej1." Unlike the ship of the famous thought experiment, there is and can be no reconstructing of the replaced parts such that smeej0 could ever be reconstituted, so the analogy breaks down in any attempt to apply it to humans. Change is ssential to human nature. A human exists--and the same human exists--fron fertilization to death. Fertilization is a change before which we can say "not smeej" and after which, "smeej." And death is also a change before which we can say "smeej" and after which, "not smeej." There will be vastly, vastly more cells at death than there were at fertilization (assuming smeej made it out of the womb and to an observable state), and the original fertilized cell will no longer exist, but there is no other point along the existence of smeej in which a change happens of such significance as to alter whether or not the same thing is present.
- ruszki 2y ago
  Not if “you” is created by emergence.
- maximus-decimus 2y ago
  switching a sesame seed on my burger bun is not the same thing as scanning it and uploading the file to the cloud.
- prometheus76 2y ago
  Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Which is the "real" Moonlight Sonata: Beethoven's original sheet music, the first performance, the photons carrying some radio broadcast, some physical vinyl or CD master copy, a lossless encoded digital copy? The thing about a copy, it reproduces that pattern. The question is, how good does a copy need to be to retain the important features? For now, I suspect that any attempt to actually scan a brain would be a cargo-cult copy of a mind… but I don't know that for sure, I'm just going with what I hear from the occasional neuroscientist who bothers to comment on misconceptions in this field.
nkrisc 2y ago
There’s a difference when there could conceivably be two of you. There will never be two of me in my bed when I wake up, so I’m the same. If my mind could be copied and embedded in a robot or whatever, then there are two of me, each now diverging. That other one is not me, as far as I, the other, am concerned.
- gowld 2y ago
  You'll need to be more clear in your last sentence. If you are cloned while you are sleeping, and both the original and the copy are moved into different rooms before you wake up, both of you think themself is you, and both of you think the other is not you. So, who is correct?
  - imron 2y ago
    > So, who is correct? The one that wasn’t the clone.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    It makes no difference. If it’s possible for the two versions to meet (they exist simultaneously) then what you’re describing is simple deceit. A world where two of me exist is fundamentally and irreconcilably different than a world where I simply go to bed and wake up each day. It makes no difference if I personally am aware.
    - exe34 2y ago
      it's almost as if your thought patterns and language are a product of your experience of being the only copy of you... if having copies of you walking around was a normal thing, our language and expectations would reflect that. right now if another copy of you comes by and claims your wife and your house, you'd be miffed. but the whole concept of one of you owning the house is just an artefact of how individuality and possessions happen to be right now. it doesn't have to be forever. there was a time you could steal a picture and have the only copy - now you can save a copy on your phone and you don't deprive another of theirs. some day people and stuff could behave the same.
GrantMoyer 2y ago
Reminds me of Filmcow: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur9jLK_6EcY?start=70&end=100 https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur9jLK_6EcY?start=70&end=100
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What consciousness? Yes, I am aware that "sleep" means that a person becomes unconscious (trivially demonstrated), but that is not the same thing as "consciousness shutting down". Supposing there is such a thing as consciousness, it doesn't seem to be anything that is suspended by the sleep process. And that's also a big "if", because consciousness is just woo-woo nonsense talked about but never defined by people who haven't quite gotten over the idea that humans don't have some immaterial soul.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Consciousness has, I'm told, 40 identifiable meanings. Makes it hard to get to grips with it. For example, I sometimes have direct awareness of the nature of my consciousness changing with tiredness. Sometimes that has been what I can only describe as if my homunculus has switched to autopilot and is now just watching a cinema of my senses. But that's probably a terrible description if you've never experienced that yourself.
- mrtranscendence 2y ago
  If I'm not conscious, it's rather difficult to explain what I'm experiencing right now.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    You're not really "experiencing" anything in the sense you mean. For a few thousand years, your species has communicated to others of its kind with a peculiar evolved language that causes a sort of narrative confusion.
akira2501 2y ago
> your consciousness shuts down. Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect. > So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up? Obviously not. Many of these processes also happen in reverse when you are awake. So when I go to sleep I'm tired and in a different mood. When did that "copy" get made exactly? > Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different. You can easily ask "how much of my conscious state is controlled by my body's chemical state?" If that's a non trivial amount then simply copying and hoisting my memories into a different body is clearly going to have a non trivial impact. To the extent that it's easy to say "that would not be /me/."
- chii 2y ago
  > Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect. but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. This discontinuity cannot be distinguished from the discontinuity arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". So how do you reconcile this discontinuity?
  - wqaatwt 2y ago
    > This discontinuity cannot be distinguished It can be, though. I don’t see how the discontinuity bit is the defining factor. Regardless equating humans with digital computers and using analogies like that doesn’t make a lot sense to begin with.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. Yet you dream and can remember your dreams. Your dreams can be influenced by things occurring around you in your sleep. Some people do this on purpose and find that they are more reliably able to do it with practice. So how are you defining "discontinuity?" I don't see one at all. > arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". You're rather certain of the semantics of something that does not exist and that you haven't described any sort of process for. What if you can initiate a copy while I'm awake? Am I required to be asleep or sedated into an artificial coma in order to make this copy? Why is that so? Are my short term memories excluded? Is my stomach equally full? Do I have the same wounds? Do I need to pee? > So how do you reconcile this discontinuity? How do you explain sleep walking? Or narcolepsy. In your model of discontinuities?
throw__away7391 2y ago
I do wonder sometimes if each period of being awake is the entire subjective experience of a sequence of independent conscious entities. Like I woke up today with the memory of yesterday, but possibly that version of me that had the subjective experience of being was an ephemeral phenomenon that ceased to exist when I fell asleep, just as I will tonight.
xpl 2y ago
> Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up I think it doesn't "shut down", maybe fades away to a different, low-power mode. When you go to sleep and then wake up, here is still a continuity, because of the same underlying structures and processes from which the consciousness emerges. So it is like a 4D thing. That continuity never really breaks (until death? which is like singularity) and I think this is what makes you "you". You can't copy/teleport it (kinda by definition), but you can extend/transform it. Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece. Alternatively, the brain could be extended with peripheral "devices" connected to it with bandwidth comparable to the interconnections within the brain itself, up to the point until the biological part becomes irrelevant. This is similar to how a portion of the living brain can be removed while still preserving consciousness — as neurosurgeons often demonstrate.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece. You just blew my mind (no pun intended). In this thread, we're basically alluding to the Hard Problem of Consciousness[0]. Consciousness is hard to define, and even harder to prove, and so conversations that talk about it become difficult. There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness. Assuming you could replace small parts at a time, what would happen? At what point does the "mind", "self", or "consciousness" get lost? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
  - Vampiero 2y ago
    > There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness If we don't even know what consciousness is, how do you measure the effect on consciousness of removing arbitrary amounts of brain matter?
    - 2y ago
tschwimmer 2y ago
I raised a similar objection to the GP comment many years ago, and someone made the same response to me. I wonder if I'm alone in that instead of making me feel more optimistic about mind transfer, it just made me slightly afraid to go to sleep.
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago
  Same actually, if I follow the logic the conclusion is pretty grim. I've come up with silver lining to embrace the change. All life must change to survive and thrive. To wake up the same every time, to never change no matter what, to never learn - that is true horror to me.
- amenhotep 2y ago
  You're absolutely not. There's two big differences as I see it - firstly, it's not clearly impossible for the instance to survive sleep. The brain exists continuously throughout. There is constant electrical activity. We don't know for sure that our awareness is "transmitted through" to when we wake up, but we can imagine ways it's possible. In contrast, of course, transporters and mind uploads obviously kill us. Secondly, we can't do anything about sleep. No matter how worrying it is. There's just no choice other than to accept it. The first argument is nicer than the second, but, frankly, if I could avoid sleep I would and I really hope I never need general anesthesia.
scoofy 2y ago
Consciousness is probably an illusion anyway.
- epiccoleman 2y ago
  An illusion to whom?
  - scoofy 2y ago
    That language implies a self does not mean a self exists in reality.
drbojingle 2y ago
I think the difference here is that we share our bodies with the copy and share our memories. The difference between us at night and us in the morning is small. A copy in the cloud doesn't pass memories on to us when it sleeps and it's experience is very different. It's digital and could technically have a billion instances with no experience sync between them. Which one is 'you' then? The best way to go about this IMO, is nano bots first augmenting the brain, connecting to the cloud, then replacing the brain slowly and introducing syncing consciousness when online. Replace a little every night and then it would still be you IMO since you're replicating most closely what the brain already does.
coldtea 2y ago
>Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. Sure, but I'm ok with sidestepping that totally pedantic concern and still considering me the same person, like I do every single day. Mere point-in-time-copying to another substrate, though, not so much.
fipar 2y ago
I draw the line in the sand and say that is different because sleep has been working "forever", while the quote in the parent comment describes a process that, not only does not exist and therefore work now, if it ever gets to work, we won't know if it's the same as the daily process that happens when we sleep. Otherwise I actually agree with your point ("every night another little death", as the Sonic Youth song says): I'm different every morning. Usually, the differences are subtle. Over the time span of a lifetime though, I've been through enough changes that I often say ghosts of former selves share this body, and what "I" am now will probably be another ghost by the time the biological substrate dies and takes whatever "I" will be then, along with all the ghosts, with it (in my case we'll go up in smoke since I'll be cremated).
- xattt 2y ago
  The river I stand in is not the river I step in. (1) (1) https://brandondonnelly.com/this-river-i-step-in-is-not-the-river-i-stand-in https://brandondonnelly.com/this-river-i-step-in-is-not-the-...
MR4D 2y ago
Each morning I would not be a copy. This is provable - only one instance can wake up, whereas with the other method, it’s conceivable that two or more copies (instances?) could wake up.
DougN7 2y ago
I believe, if we could be copied to the cloud, that “me” is much more than neurons, and affected and defined quite a lot by the particular physical body we’re housed in. You can say losing an arm doesn’t change who you are, but it definitely does at some levels. Changes in health affect personality, mood, outlook, hope, enjoyment, etc, etc - that would all change when copied.
spicyusername 2y ago
A gap in awareness is definitely not the same as creating a new copy of your consciousness and annihilating the old one. Although, I'll grant that the subjective experience may be fairly similar. If you were to theoretically be copied, your copy would probably feel quite continuous with the original.
dartos 2y ago
No it doesn’t. You’re not unconscious while you’re sleeping.
lincon127 2y ago
I don't think it quite the arbitrary distinction you're making it out to be. If you were cloned every time you went to sleep, and those clones awoke with the same memories you had before going to bed. Would you consider all of those clones' consciousnesses to be part of your own? Surely not, because you're not experiencing them, you're only experiencing your own. This means that the "you", in this case, is the self reflective portion of the collection of interpretations of sensory stimulus and memories, whereas consciousness is that collection as a whole. That's why these clones can't possibly be "you", because if there's no sensory stimulus being experienced or interpreted by your brain, then there is no consciousness and there certainly is no "you". What this ends up meaning is that "you" are necessarily bound to the mechanical component that interprets stimuli. That component can be adjusted over time, but the process must be interpreted in such a way that it seems gradual enough that your brain can still recognize those intermediary interpretations as "you". So, when you state that robo brain is still "you", I have to disagree. While robo-brain can still believe it's "you", it can't possibly be "you", as "you" could potentially still exist in the original biomechanical device, which isn't interpreting the new body's stimuli, and thus not building a sensory profile based on the stimulus. Even if there was a transfer that resulted in the original device's (i.e. your body) death, the new body still couldn't be considered "you" as there isn't anything physically different about the two scenarios for the body. Of course, if you consider every clone to be an extension of your consciousness, then you could argue all this. But at that point I think we'd have vastly different interpretations on what consciousness and "you" are. You could also argue that there is something physically different about the two scenarios presented in the robo-brain example, but the only way I can imagine a sincere argument for that is if you told me it was due to the transference of some soul-like entity. But, of course, if you were to tell me that, I would simply disagree.

musicale 2y ago

Thanks for feeding my existential dread. For that matter, the you of this moment is constantly being annihilated and replaced by a slightly different clone, in an illusory life that resembles stop-frame animation. And don't ask me about the me from yesterday - the one who didn't bother to do any of the things I am stuck with doing today - or the me from tomorrow who will likely squander everything I've worked so hard for. Neither of them is to be trusted. On the other hand, I do seem to have a vast store of dream memories; wnen I think about them it seems like living some kind of second life, usually while fast asleep. Sleeping and waking selves are in agreement that being asleep is generally more pleasant than being awake, though being awake seems to have better continuity.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Every nanosecond the set of atoms constituting you changes, each of those are a different you.

smeej 2y ago
There's a difference between "I have changed" and "I have been copied." This seems obvious enough to me that I don't question it, but is it not obvious to everyone?
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Copies are impossible because every moment is change with bounded but non-zero uncertainty.
  - smeej 2y ago
    The fact that "you are different" does not mean a "different you" now exists, though. Change of this specific kind is already intrinsically integrated into your existence and identity.
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      Every moment of consciousness is different. It is a different you in that sense. What is the strand that keeps it the same ‘you’?
      - Charon77 2y ago
        Honestly I'd like to have my mind copied, but may only be 'simulated' once the current me is dead. From my perspective I'll be dead and there's no changing that, but from the clone's perspective, life just goes on.
      - smeej 2y ago
        Physical continuity, in the sense that there is no break so significant that at any point one could say, "Before this, smeej0, and after this, smeej1." Unlike the ship of the famous thought experiment, there is and can be no reconstructing of the replaced parts such that smeej0 could ever be reconstituted, so the analogy breaks down in any attempt to apply it to humans. Change is ssential to human nature. A human exists--and the same human exists--fron fertilization to death. Fertilization is a change before which we can say "not smeej" and after which, "smeej." And death is also a change before which we can say "smeej" and after which, "not smeej." There will be vastly, vastly more cells at death than there were at fertilization (assuming smeej made it out of the womb and to an observable state), and the original fertilized cell will no longer exist, but there is no other point along the existence of smeej in which a change happens of such significance as to alter whether or not the same thing is present.
ruszki 2y ago
Not if “you” is created by emergence.
maximus-decimus 2y ago
switching a sesame seed on my burger bun is not the same thing as scanning it and uploading the file to the cloud.
prometheus76 2y ago
Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Which is the "real" Moonlight Sonata: Beethoven's original sheet music, the first performance, the photons carrying some radio broadcast, some physical vinyl or CD master copy, a lossless encoded digital copy? The thing about a copy, it reproduces that pattern. The question is, how good does a copy need to be to retain the important features? For now, I suspect that any attempt to actually scan a brain would be a cargo-cult copy of a mind… but I don't know that for sure, I'm just going with what I hear from the occasional neuroscientist who bothers to comment on misconceptions in this field.

nkrisc 2y ago

There’s a difference when there could conceivably be two of you. There will never be two of me in my bed when I wake up, so I’m the same. If my mind could be copied and embedded in a robot or whatever, then there are two of me, each now diverging. That other one is not me, as far as I, the other, am concerned.

gowld 2y ago
You'll need to be more clear in your last sentence. If you are cloned while you are sleeping, and both the original and the copy are moved into different rooms before you wake up, both of you think themself is you, and both of you think the other is not you. So, who is correct?
- imron 2y ago
  > So, who is correct? The one that wasn’t the clone.
- nkrisc 2y ago
  It makes no difference. If it’s possible for the two versions to meet (they exist simultaneously) then what you’re describing is simple deceit. A world where two of me exist is fundamentally and irreconcilably different than a world where I simply go to bed and wake up each day. It makes no difference if I personally am aware.
  - exe34 2y ago
    it's almost as if your thought patterns and language are a product of your experience of being the only copy of you... if having copies of you walking around was a normal thing, our language and expectations would reflect that. right now if another copy of you comes by and claims your wife and your house, you'd be miffed. but the whole concept of one of you owning the house is just an artefact of how individuality and possessions happen to be right now. it doesn't have to be forever. there was a time you could steal a picture and have the only copy - now you can save a copy on your phone and you don't deprive another of theirs. some day people and stuff could behave the same.

GrantMoyer 2y ago

Reminds me of Filmcow: https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur9jLK_6EcY?start=70&end=100 https://www.youtube.com/embed/ur9jLK_6EcY?start=70&end=100

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. What consciousness? Yes, I am aware that "sleep" means that a person becomes unconscious (trivially demonstrated), but that is not the same thing as "consciousness shutting down". Supposing there is such a thing as consciousness, it doesn't seem to be anything that is suspended by the sleep process. And that's also a big "if", because consciousness is just woo-woo nonsense talked about but never defined by people who haven't quite gotten over the idea that humans don't have some immaterial soul.

ben_w 2y ago
Consciousness has, I'm told, 40 identifiable meanings. Makes it hard to get to grips with it. For example, I sometimes have direct awareness of the nature of my consciousness changing with tiredness. Sometimes that has been what I can only describe as if my homunculus has switched to autopilot and is now just watching a cinema of my senses. But that's probably a terrible description if you've never experienced that yourself.
mrtranscendence 2y ago
If I'm not conscious, it's rather difficult to explain what I'm experiencing right now.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  You're not really "experiencing" anything in the sense you mean. For a few thousand years, your species has communicated to others of its kind with a peculiar evolved language that causes a sort of narrative confusion.

akira2501 2y ago

> your consciousness shuts down. Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect. > So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up? Obviously not. Many of these processes also happen in reverse when you are awake. So when I go to sleep I'm tired and in a different mood. When did that "copy" get made exactly? > Or do you draw a line in the sand and say that is different. You can easily ask "how much of my conscious state is controlled by my body's chemical state?" If that's a non trivial amount then simply copying and hoisting my memories into a different body is clearly going to have a non trivial impact. To the extent that it's easy to say "that would not be /me/."

chii 2y ago
> Consciousness not a single isolated process and describing a lull in activity as "shutting down" is incorrect. but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. This discontinuity cannot be distinguished from the discontinuity arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". So how do you reconcile this discontinuity?
- wqaatwt 2y ago
  > This discontinuity cannot be distinguished It can be, though. I don’t see how the discontinuity bit is the defining factor. Regardless equating humans with digital computers and using analogies like that doesn’t make a lot sense to begin with.
- akira2501 2y ago
  > but there is indeed a discontinuity in your consciousness when you sleep. Yet you dream and can remember your dreams. Your dreams can be influenced by things occurring around you in your sleep. Some people do this on purpose and find that they are more reliably able to do it with practice. So how are you defining "discontinuity?" I don't see one at all. > arising from a copy of your brain on first "restart". You're rather certain of the semantics of something that does not exist and that you haven't described any sort of process for. What if you can initiate a copy while I'm awake? Am I required to be asleep or sedated into an artificial coma in order to make this copy? Why is that so? Are my short term memories excluded? Is my stomach equally full? Do I have the same wounds? Do I need to pee? > So how do you reconcile this discontinuity? How do you explain sleep walking? Or narcolepsy. In your model of discontinuities?

throw__away7391 2y ago

I do wonder sometimes if each period of being awake is the entire subjective experience of a sequence of independent conscious entities. Like I woke up today with the memory of yesterday, but possibly that version of me that had the subjective experience of being was an ephemeral phenomenon that ceased to exist when I fell asleep, just as I will tonight.

xpl 2y ago

> Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. So, each morning is a copy of you wakes up I think it doesn't "shut down", maybe fades away to a different, low-power mode. When you go to sleep and then wake up, here is still a continuity, because of the same underlying structures and processes from which the consciousness emerges. So it is like a 4D thing. That continuity never really breaks (until death? which is like singularity) and I think this is what makes you "you". You can't copy/teleport it (kinda by definition), but you can extend/transform it. Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece. Alternatively, the brain could be extended with peripheral "devices" connected to it with bandwidth comparable to the interconnections within the brain itself, up to the point until the biological part becomes irrelevant. This is similar to how a portion of the living brain can be removed while still preserving consciousness — as neurosurgeons often demonstrate.

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
> Perhaps a "Ship of Theseus"-style approach would work — gradually replacing neurons one by one, or brain sections piece by piece. You just blew my mind (no pun intended). In this thread, we're basically alluding to the Hard Problem of Consciousness[0]. Consciousness is hard to define, and even harder to prove, and so conversations that talk about it become difficult. There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness. Assuming you could replace small parts at a time, what would happen? At what point does the "mind", "self", or "consciousness" get lost? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- Vampiero 2y ago
  > There's certainly a certain subset of the brain you can take out and still have no effect on consciousness If we don't even know what consciousness is, how do you measure the effect on consciousness of removing arbitrary amounts of brain matter?
  - 2y ago

tschwimmer 2y ago

I raised a similar objection to the GP comment many years ago, and someone made the same response to me. I wonder if I'm alone in that instead of making me feel more optimistic about mind transfer, it just made me slightly afraid to go to sleep.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago
Same actually, if I follow the logic the conclusion is pretty grim. I've come up with silver lining to embrace the change. All life must change to survive and thrive. To wake up the same every time, to never change no matter what, to never learn - that is true horror to me.
amenhotep 2y ago
You're absolutely not. There's two big differences as I see it - firstly, it's not clearly impossible for the instance to survive sleep. The brain exists continuously throughout. There is constant electrical activity. We don't know for sure that our awareness is "transmitted through" to when we wake up, but we can imagine ways it's possible. In contrast, of course, transporters and mind uploads obviously kill us. Secondly, we can't do anything about sleep. No matter how worrying it is. There's just no choice other than to accept it. The first argument is nicer than the second, but, frankly, if I could avoid sleep I would and I really hope I never need general anesthesia.

scoofy 2y ago

Consciousness is probably an illusion anyway.

epiccoleman 2y ago
An illusion to whom?
- scoofy 2y ago
  That language implies a self does not mean a self exists in reality.

drbojingle 2y ago

I think the difference here is that we share our bodies with the copy and share our memories. The difference between us at night and us in the morning is small. A copy in the cloud doesn't pass memories on to us when it sleeps and it's experience is very different. It's digital and could technically have a billion instances with no experience sync between them. Which one is 'you' then? The best way to go about this IMO, is nano bots first augmenting the brain, connecting to the cloud, then replacing the brain slowly and introducing syncing consciousness when online. Replace a little every night and then it would still be you IMO since you're replicating most closely what the brain already does.

coldtea 2y ago

>Every time you go to sleep your consciousness shuts down. Sure, but I'm ok with sidestepping that totally pedantic concern and still considering me the same person, like I do every single day. Mere point-in-time-copying to another substrate, though, not so much.

fipar 2y ago

I draw the line in the sand and say that is different because sleep has been working "forever", while the quote in the parent comment describes a process that, not only does not exist and therefore work now, if it ever gets to work, we won't know if it's the same as the daily process that happens when we sleep. Otherwise I actually agree with your point ("every night another little death", as the Sonic Youth song says): I'm different every morning. Usually, the differences are subtle. Over the time span of a lifetime though, I've been through enough changes that I often say ghosts of former selves share this body, and what "I" am now will probably be another ghost by the time the biological substrate dies and takes whatever "I" will be then, along with all the ghosts, with it (in my case we'll go up in smoke since I'll be cremated).

xattt 2y ago
The river I stand in is not the river I step in. (1) (1) https://brandondonnelly.com/this-river-i-step-in-is-not-the-river-i-stand-in https://brandondonnelly.com/this-river-i-step-in-is-not-the-...

MR4D 2y ago

Each morning I would not be a copy. This is provable - only one instance can wake up, whereas with the other method, it’s conceivable that two or more copies (instances?) could wake up.

DougN7 2y ago

I believe, if we could be copied to the cloud, that “me” is much more than neurons, and affected and defined quite a lot by the particular physical body we’re housed in. You can say losing an arm doesn’t change who you are, but it definitely does at some levels. Changes in health affect personality, mood, outlook, hope, enjoyment, etc, etc - that would all change when copied.

spicyusername 2y ago

A gap in awareness is definitely not the same as creating a new copy of your consciousness and annihilating the old one. Although, I'll grant that the subjective experience may be fairly similar. If you were to theoretically be copied, your copy would probably feel quite continuous with the original.

dartos 2y ago

No it doesn’t. You’re not unconscious while you’re sleeping.

lincon127 2y ago

I don't think it quite the arbitrary distinction you're making it out to be. If you were cloned every time you went to sleep, and those clones awoke with the same memories you had before going to bed. Would you consider all of those clones' consciousnesses to be part of your own? Surely not, because you're not experiencing them, you're only experiencing your own. This means that the "you", in this case, is the self reflective portion of the collection of interpretations of sensory stimulus and memories, whereas consciousness is that collection as a whole. That's why these clones can't possibly be "you", because if there's no sensory stimulus being experienced or interpreted by your brain, then there is no consciousness and there certainly is no "you". What this ends up meaning is that "you" are necessarily bound to the mechanical component that interprets stimuli. That component can be adjusted over time, but the process must be interpreted in such a way that it seems gradual enough that your brain can still recognize those intermediary interpretations as "you". So, when you state that robo brain is still "you", I have to disagree. While robo-brain can still believe it's "you", it can't possibly be "you", as "you" could potentially still exist in the original biomechanical device, which isn't interpreting the new body's stimuli, and thus not building a sensory profile based on the stimulus. Even if there was a transfer that resulted in the original device's (i.e. your body) death, the new body still couldn't be considered "you" as there isn't anything physically different about the two scenarios for the body. Of course, if you consider every clone to be an extension of your consciousness, then you could argue all this. But at that point I think we'd have vastly different interpretations on what consciousness and "you" are. You could also argue that there is something physically different about the two scenarios presented in the robo-brain example, but the only way I can imagine a sincere argument for that is if you told me it was due to the transference of some soul-like entity. But, of course, if you were to tell me that, I would simply disagree.