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this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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Same as sleeping. You could have been replaced by a clone every night while sleeping and never know it.
That sounds like a form of last Thursdayism. The entire universe could've been created last Thursday with everything made to seem older, including everyone's memories. These philosophies are usually shot down by occam's razor.
Agree for Occam's if someone is actually suggesting they are replaced nightly or your last Thursdayism, but as for conceiving of parallels to a made up teleportation technology and its philosophical implications, is the break in consciousness/self awareness for sleep not a reasonable comparison?
Occam's razor is choosing the simplest answer. There is no simple answer when it comes to teleportation. I'm not sure there is a full break in consciousness when we sleep. Consciousness may not even be the right word...
In this case I'm not defining consciousness as simply being awake, but instead defining it as the perspective from which each individual perceives the universe.
then we get to really specifically define individual, perspective, and perception (can you perceive while unconscious? I guess?), all sorts of fun knots to tie oneself into. I always thought the difference in sense vs. perception was the thinking about it, but if it's processed at all by the "unconscious" I guess it's still perception? I mean, I'm gettting twisted up thinking if my individual consciousness has a perspective from which it perceives the world
Occam's razor is just one tool though, not an end all be all answer. Complicated things happen.
I'm not sure it's really the same thing, because it's already pretty clear that something happens to consciousness when one is asleep, since that period is experienced differently than when awake, positing something like that about the nature of what happens to it doesn't add a bunch of unnecessary complexity the way that assuming the universe just randomly assembled to look far older than it is does.
Cloning isn't necessary. Every night your stream of consciousness could actually and permanently end and a new one is created upon dreaming/waking but you would never know it. This could be how it really works though we can't know that. You could continuously lose and create new consciousnesses every firing of a neuron.
True. This could be the first and only day of your life so far!