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0 pointsYeGoblynQueenne9y ago0 comments

Sleep doesn't involve destruction of your body, however. The kind of teleportation discussed here, does. And while you can't be sure, upon waking, whether you're the same person who fell asleep, if your body is destroyed you can be absolutely certain you won't be the person that wakes up on the other side.

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mikeash9y ago· 2 in thread

I strongly disagree with the magnitude of certainty and uncertainty you assign to these various things. We really have no idea how this stuff actually works. For all we know, your consciousness was in my body until a second ago.

All we actually have to work with here is memory. Based on this, we have the illusion of continuity of consciousness. But we have no real clue if that actually happens or if it's just something we've made up.

YeGoblynQueenneOP9y ago

>> We really have no idea how this stuff actually works. For all we know, your consciousness was in my body until a second ago.

Sorry but that doesn't make sense. By the same token you can start believing in supernatural creators- because, after all "we don't know how [physics] really works".

And yes, we do know some things. For instance, if something goes wrong with your brain, your conscious mind is also messed up. That's pretty solid knowledge there.

Besides you'll need to jump through some serious hoops before you can explain how my consciousness could be in your body without me knowing anything about it. Not that I'd put that beyond her, the little hussy!

mikeash9y ago

Before we talk about potentially jumping bodies, let's examine a simpler question: how do you know that your consciousness is continuous at all? How do you know that the consciousness reading this comment is the same one that wrote the one I'm replying to?

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