And that picture does very little to answer the question, or did you miss the “Is broadly equivalent to” header?
Clone someone and the clone is no longer the same person. Why? Because psychological continuity is disrupted. Two courses of consciousness now exist with separate identities.
Anesthesia = disruption of psychological continuity. Same concept applies. It’s really not a difficult argument to understand.
People kept saying “you should be worried about sleeping too”. Sleeping is demonstrably different and I think it’s pretty obvious why.
It’s not difficult to understand, or to dismiss. Cloning is quite different than anesthesia. A much better analog is sleep or being knocked unconscious; neither of which is a problem for your “psychological continuity”.
We understand your argument, but we reject it because it doesn’t address the evidence nor does it add any useful information. The picture you posted doesn’t change the equation, it just repeats it.
If anything, it proves what people have been telling him all along – that being under anaesthesia is like, well, being asleep. So he basically gave us a cite that destroyed his entire argument.
Just ask anyone who has ever been under if they are a copy of their original self. If they don’t know any better what difference does it make?
I was just thinking today that another fundamental difference between sleep and anesthesia is that with sleep you do not lose the concept of time. After you wake up, you have some idea of how much time has lapsed. Whereas with anesthesia, from what I’ve heard of people, they have literally no concept of time. It’s as though no time had passed from when they were passed out to when they woke up. That to me is a worrying distinction to be made.
I quoted this from a month and a half ago because I really want to address it.
In the book The Physics of Star Trek, the one technology from the Star Trek
universe that was considered to be the most outlandish, never-gonna-happen
was teleportation. It will never occur, primarily because of bandwidth
issues, but also because it is flat-out impossible.
At some level, I think you know this. At some level you know that everything
people in this thread have been telling you is both accurate and true. So my question
is “What are you getting out of this?” Does it make you feel special? Does it make
you feel unique? You go in these never-ending fantasies about how precious your
“continuity of consciousness” is and how fearful you are of losing it. So cut the crap
and spill the beans - ‘cause you know what? Someday you are going to lose
your continuity of consciousness. To quote Clint Eastwood : "We all got it comin’, kid."
You seriously, seriously need to relax. When are you having this surgery?
Since we’re playing with analogies - and that link makes an interesting one - that unconsciousness is like turning down a dimmer, not flipping a switch, let me ask:
With actual light switches and dimmers, consider the following scenarios:
[ul]
[li]I turn off a light switch - the bulb goes dark. I turn it back on again, the bulb illuminates.[/li]
[li]I turn down a dimmer - the bulb dims. I continue to turn until the bulb is dark, then turn it back up and the bulb illuminates and brightens.[/li][/ul]
In either of those scenarios, is the light being emitted by the bulb ‘the same’ before and after the interruption?
The correct answer is: no it’s not the same light, because it’s not the same light from moment to moment even if the bulb is left illuminated without interruption. It has properties that appear consistent and continuous, but in reality, the bulb is producing a continuous stream of new light all the time.
There can be no relationship or link between the light that is being emitted now and that of the past, because the past is gone.
So… My argument is that our brains produce a continuous stream of fresh consciousness that looks like it is consistent and continuous, but doesn’t need to be.
Damn, Mangetout - you just recently went over 50,000 posts! Congrats!
I genuinely and absolutely sincerely believe what I’m saying. I think people here just intuitively believe what I’m saying is incorrect without really thinking too much about it. If this was true, it would be a terrifying fact for everyone to realise.
3 weeks.
I understand what you’re saying and I believe you’re right, but it’s at least a lot more consoling when there’s continuity. It gives me a satisfactory illusion that I am the same person. Completely cutting me out for a period of time is a lot more unsettling and, as far as I’m concerned, is death.
Ok, I’ll play.
IT IS NOT TRUE. People undergo GA all the time and come out of it perfectly
fine. You know this. Otherwise, you are the one human on a planet of over
7,000,000,000 people who has realized the single, fundamental, horrific fact of
our existence. Look at all those zeroes, use your brain for something besides belief
and tell me which possibility is more likely? This is not The Matrix and you
are not Neo - which was another fiction.
Oh, and thanks for calling me and everyone here dumbfucks.
You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. I don’t know how to explain it any other way than I have before.
I’ll try one more time. Imagine there was some sophisticated cloning machine (I know it’s impossible but it’s a hypothetical situation that helps explain my point) which would clone you perfectly so that there were two of you. The second you would be certain he’s the original. It would be mindblowing to him to think that he was actually just spawned into existence. He would be just as sure of being the same person as anyone coming out of general anesthesia would be sure they’re the same person who went under just a couple of hours before.
My fundamental point is that conscious continuity is key to maintaining the idea of being the same person. Going under general anesthesia is the same sort of disruption of continuity as being cloned.
I don’t think it is. I’m not going to try to convince you of that, however.
Better people here than I have broken their picks on you. As I see it,
you have 2 paths ahead of you. Undergo the surgery in 3 weeks, come out
of the GA and pinch yourself, prod yourself - do whatever you have to to
prove to yourself that you are you. I promise you that you will be you. If
not, you can look me up and kick my ass.
The other possibility is to get some therapeutic help. I don’t like telling people
they’re out of touch with reality, but on this issue, I think you might be. I do believe that you believe this and are genuinely fearful of it. I don’t think there is
anything anyone on this message board can do for you. You have my empathy
and my concern. Please be well and take care.
Assuming what I’m saying is true, “I” would just as easily come back and type to you that I’m still the same person. It wouldn’t mean I am.
Wow, that took a while for you to come up with.
Yeah, I can’t do much to help you determine if you are you afterwards.
I’m afraid that’s gonna be pretty much on you.
But in that case, I really don’t see your problem. I mean, how would you
be able to tell that you weren’t you? This is not me trying to trick you, it’s
a real, legitimate question. You say “It wouldn’t mean that I am (the same
person)”. Who is this person that is determining whether or not you are you?
One last point I want to make and then, insomniac though I am, I need to
try to grab some sleep. The brain is never not active. Asleep, under anesthesia,
no matter what, the brainwaves keep rolling on out on EEGs. This is of no small
comfort to me in matters such as this, truly. I hope you can find a means to
have it be of some comfort to you.
I’ll be glad to talk some more later, if you want. In the meantime, avail yourself
of some of the other great people here. They’ll be glad to interact with you. Just
bear in mind that life is hard and stressful, and it can leave people easily frustrated.
Something I like about you is that you are slow to anger. I’ve thrown a couple of
hardballs at you and you never rose nor reacted to them. You kept right on track
with your thing. To me, this is the mark of a strong and purposeful mind. Please
take care of it. There are relatively few of them around.
Even if it is, our conclusion from this thought experiment should be that consciousness already obviously isn’t what it seems to be.
You’re already dying at every moment and being replaced by a copy.
This thread reminds me of debates between atheists and monotheists. There is not hard evidence that God exists other than millennia of faith among groups of people and their shared experience. LifeSucks believes this phenomena of her self being replaced if she were to undergo anesthesia, even though there is no evidence to support it. It’s a bit unique in that I don’t think there is shared experience for this belief among other people…so she’s a bit of a pioneer.
It’s not. I have logically deduced this. I would love, LOVE more than anything to not believe this, but I do.
I already responded to this: