I was entirely convinced by Tibby’s argument regarding personal identity when he said:
The bolded/underlined sentence really made my heart sink.
Will I essentially die? Even if there’s a 1% chance this argument is true then that’s still an incredibly daunting fact for someone who will be put into “hybernation mode” and then “re-booted”.
I am genuinely really quite frightened. Perhaps my fears will be attenuated upon seeing some compelling rebuttals to Tibby’s argument.
There are tons of people who have gone under, and they awaken seemingly intact to their own and their loved ones and friend’s satisfaction. It is POSSIBLE that they have all been replaced with slightly different imposters, perfect enough to fool everyone who knew them.
Essentially every day your personality is slightly changed, that just happens from living.
Imagine a Star Trek teleporter that sends a molecularly identical version of you somewhere else, but imagine that in addition to you being teleported, the you that stood into the teleporter still exists. There are now two "you"s – one in the original teleporter; the other at the destination. If you were to encounter the other you, you’d both consider yourselves not the same person.
This same interuption of psychological continuity may apply when undergoing general anaesthetic. I would be numerically and qualitatively identical upon waking up, but would I be a different person when it comes to my consciousness?
General anesthesia isn’t exactly the same as sleep, but it isn’t all that different either. If you’re worried about one, you should be worried about the other. Do you worry that every time you fall asleep, someone else wakes up?
My stance on personal identity is pretty close to Tibby’s, but I don’t worry about GA or sleep. There’s continuity in brain function, even if some higher level aspects are temporarily suppressed. Not true for a hypothetical transporter.
Who the hell is Tibby, and why do you give them any credence?
FWIW, your brain does not flatline under GA, so it does not die. And FWIW, I did happen to dream while under from propefol during an endoscopy a few weeks ago.
From that perspective, there’s a new “you” every second (or nano-second, or whatever the smallest division of time is.)
I can see the transporter argument, because it’s a whole new bunch of atoms making up “you,” but that doesn’t apply to sleep or anesthetic. It’s all (99.9%) the same cells as before I went to sleep and after I woke up. So it is, exactly, the same “me.”
Obviously, if someone suffers brain damage from whatever cause (disease, accident, etc), they may seem like a different person to everyone else, but that’s a different scenario.