My name is Bob, not Jack.
Current thinking is that GA does not cause a “shut down hard” situation in the brain. For instance, the auditory cortex continues to respond to discrete sounds during anesthesia.
Well, you *used to be *Bob… 
I haven’t seen it yet. You brain is not a computer, it does not run software, and cannot be be "rebooted’. So your fears are ungrounded.
Why isn’t this belief subject to the “sound reasoning” standard?
I know of someone who used to have the same worries about general anaesthesia. But when he needed back surgery there was nothing he could do, so he let them put him under. That’s when I replaced him.
I’m in a lot less pain from my back than he was, and he didn’t suffer going under, so from a utilitarian perspective it was the right thing to do. And I still have [del]all[/del] [del]most[/del] some of his memories. (Hey, I’m getting old! What do you want?) I have nothing to feel guilty about.
I like you! (A long walk in the rain can be a truly beautiful experience.)
I really like you!
It’s bullshit ‘philosophy’. I’ve been under general 3 times in the past two years. You wake up still the same person to any extent you are able to tell. I still have the same ‘earliest’ memories from my childhood from about 45 years ago. I also studied philosophy in a couple of courses in college. Even Descartes couldn’t convince anyone besides himself of his own existence. If you can’t convince yourself that you exist, just give it up, skip the surgery, and accept your meaningless death. You will have already determined your existence to be meaningless. No point in continuing. Or wasting your remaining time on contemplating it.
You don’t get my original post, so all that ranting was completely in vain.
If you believe that you’d end up as two different people with differing consciences after being molecularly cloned, then you’d also have to believe that psychological continuity is required for one person to remain the same.
Sure, “you” will wake up feeling like the same person with all the same memories, but you (your state of being, “YOU”, right now) will no longer be the consciousness that wakes up, but rather a “remarkably accurate impostor” who thinks he’s you. For all intents and purposes to the outside world, it will be you, much like the molecular clone would be you, but the conscious state that existed before going under is now dead and replaced by another.
You’re right, I don’t get it. The brain doesn’t ‘shut down’ under GA, it merely doesn’t function normally. It doesn’t function normally when people get drunk and pass out, either, but they’re the same person once they sleep it off, and the brain resumes normal function, aren’t they?
If your memories are the same and your personality is the same, then how is it not you? What are we other than memory and personality?
Whoa, man, that’s like, really deep.
LifeSucks, what are you hoping to get out of this thread? Are you looking to be persuaded that your fears are misguided, or are you trying to persuade us that your fears are rational? Because it sure seems like you’re putting your energy into the latter.
Your beliefs about general anesthesia are, frankly, nonsense, but If you want to be afraid then no one here is going to be able to talk you out of it.
Yep, if you wanna be afraid of general anesthesia, dwell a moment on the idea of a neuromuscular blocking agent causing paralysis while failure of effect of the anesthetic causes you to be fully conscious. Ouch.
The Scientific Method has a term that deals with hypotheses of this nature: “nonsense.” It isn’t necessarily an insulting term, although it inescapably connotes criticism.
Is there life on a planet circling Xi Eridani? Not only do we not know, we don’t even have a procedure that could let us know. The question is not approachable at this time. The question is “nonsense” in this non-judgemental sense.
The same is true of your conjecture. It cannot be tested. There is no existing method, nor any method projected from known technology, that could answer it.
When a photon passes through a sheet of glass, it is absorbed and re-emitted many times. Is it the “same” photon? Or is what you see outside your window only a “copy” of the real light reflected from your hottie neighbor sunbathing on the lawn, every rippling muscle gleaming…
Ah… Anyway, the point is: not only do we not know, we cannot know.
So…don’t worry about it. Pick your fights. Concentrate on something that will be of real benefit to your quality of life.
(Me, I’m getting out the old binoculars…)
I’m yes, yes it does.
And why is that? Simply because you read someone musing on the internet (and this wasn’t a discussion and anasthesia, it was about being cryogenically frozen. There’s a big difference)
I think he’s suggesting that it will to the rest of the universe appear as “him” but that the “him” before the GA is the unbroken stream of consciousness from infancy. That rebooting it, would end the first stream, and create a new stream.
Like if I duplicated you and kicked the original into a chipper shredder. The copy thinks it is you, but the first you got mulched. To the mulched guy it doesn’t matter if you make a perfect copy.
That said, I don’t buy it personally, since I attach personhood to the brain’s atoms.
This.
To the non-mulched guy, it doesn’t matter that you mulched the original. And it matters to the original only in the sense that it has to experience being mulched. Maybe you should put it under GA first.
I think the real problem is that our whole idea of “continuity of self,” or perhaps even “self” itself, is complete and utter dog’s bollocks. It’s a fantasy we’ve grown very accustomed to, but it falls apart like a papier-mâché hot tub when we begin subjecting it to the faintest interrogations. We have to invent peculiar contortions of logic and crank the cognitive dissonance up to eleven just to continue convincing ourselves that there’s this special “us” that can be conjured from the complex mess of emergent behaviors that more or less occupies the space between our shoes and our hats, to keep believing that this same “us” can be carried continuously, through a permanent state of mutation while somehow unchanging in a quality that nobody can ever quite define.
Well, I say sod it.
If you put me in a replicator, there won’t be two of me for the same reason that there was never really one of “me” in the first place. We say there was a person, by convention, and that person tends to agree that it holds certain entitlements based on its apparent history. Now that there are two people with the same history, but still only one set of entitlements, we must admit that our convention has reached a limitation on its usefulness, and either devise a new one, or find a convenient way to dispose of the spare that doesn’t offend our sensibilities too much. Note that for this to happen we may need to get new sensibilities. (Q: Which one is the spare? A: Doesn’t matter, unless the other end of the replicator is somewhere nice.)
Either way, we cannot claim that this scenario is any different from any other interruption in continuous consciousness for the purpose of preserving a sense of self, unless we put ourselves in the absurd position of imagining some sort of ghost tied to our particular atoms, and that this ghost is smart enough to stick around as those atoms are gradually given the Theseus treatment, but not smart enough to jump ship when they’re being replaced en masse. (Pun definitely intended.)
The very thought pains the imagination of this chaotic collection of impulses and clothing.
So, in short, LifeSucks, you can stop worrying. You needn’t fear ceasing to exist as a single entity when you go under, because you don’t exist that way now, and never have. You think you do, and you can go on thinking that way: does it matter if you once disbelieved, but now believe? People change their minds all the time, and that, I think, ought to be enough.
Question surely is: if the person who wakes up has the same memories, likes and dislikes at the person who was under GA, does it matter? A difference which is no difference IS no difference.