It’s terrifying at first, but if you reflect over it further it becomes natural. Sure, we can’t guarantee that we are the same continuous individual, but “not sleeping” would only see us have a more profound and permanent discontinuity. It’s not a possibility for us. Still, we do carry something of the people we used to be regardless. Consciousness vanishes and recreates itself, as do most of our cells. We are evolving entities, as is everyone around us.
This existential fear is rooted on a desire for permanence that we never had to begin with. There was never a fixed self that we could possibly know.
duckington@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean to be honest I wouldn’t say that we “die” at all when you sleep… your mind is extremely active while sleeping, it’s just disconnected from motor control.
Enkers@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s way more than just that, though. You’re also disconnected from your sensory inputs, and furthermore, your conscious experience is interrupted. It’s not like you’re just in a sensory deprivation tank, because there you’d still experience conscious thought, and the passage of time. It just seems to turn off for a while.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 1 year ago
Plus there are periods of deep sleep when your brain does shut down quite thoroughly. People just don't remember those, obviously, so they put a lot more weight on the dreaming bits that slip through sometimes.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year ago
I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it's difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn't require brain activity either. There's a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of "death" is oversimplifying things.
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
We have a good definition of “death”, it’s the irreversible stop of some activity. For a brain, that’s neuronal depolarization; for a body organ or cell, it’s destruction past its ability to regenerate.
The self, is a snapshot of a brain state at a certain moment, which is technically irreversibly disappearing 30 times a second, but we like to think of it as just “changing” and forming a causal sequence we call “consciousness”.
pjhenry1216@kbin.social 1 year ago
This threshold has changed over time. So I don't think it's a good definition of it hasn't always been the same point.
And the rest of your comment is just philosophy. You're neither wrong nor right. Definition of self is not a concept there's really any consensus over.
nevemsenki@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not even that sometimes. I’m told I can do some pretty mean kicks while I sleep.