Comment on Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Anduin1357@lemmy.world 1 year agoI would argue that two disconnected copies of the information that corresponds to a person does make 2 disjoint persons.
Like running a different seed on procedural generation, entropy will ensure that these two identical persons won’t be identical after whatever ticks in the biological clock.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I agree that the copies will diverge almost instantly; I’m just saying that small amounts of diverge aren’t a big deal. That’s what I’m trying to illustrate with my example of the person who loses an hour of memories. I think this is exactly equivalent to making a copy, having that copy exist for an hour, and then destroying it.
(I don’t feel like it’s exactly equivalent, but I think that’s an illusion caused by my moral intuitions developing in a wold where destroying a copy always means destroying the only copy.)
Anduin1357@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Though the simpler solution is that perhaps memory formation is paused over the period then the person ‘lost’ their memory to sleep.
Losing memories when you’re wide awake is like a file system deleting pointers to a file. The file is still there, just inaccessible.
Anyways I feel that the assertion that “Creating and destroying perfectly identical copies of the information that corresponds to a person neither creates nor destroys people” is extremely dangerous thinking that could lead to the premature end of consciousness for some very unfortunate individuals. After all, they’re perfectly identical and we have no documented instance of anyone sharing consciousness, so it may be that consciousness are unique and not commutative.