Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson <3
Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson <3
It’s funny that when it’s transporter people freak out at this idea, but technically every single person goes to sleep not knowing if the ‘them’ that wakes up was the same as the one that went to sleep.
We could effectively have individual consciousnesses dying each night and new ones picking back up the next morning.
Something to think about as you lie drifting off to sleep tonight.
Well…if that’s true then I have died over 14,000 times so I must be used to it.
G’night
Great, I needed more existential dread. Thanks!
I gotchu fam. Anytime - happy to help.
Moar
Ok, here’s a fun one:
When people have their corpus callosum split, the part that connects the two brain hemispheres, there’s often different personality traits that will emerge for each hemisphere, such as one being religious and the other atheistic.
So the question is - where do the emergent personality traits come from?
When the brain is connected, do you effectively have psyches that are simply sitting there suppressed waiting to come out? Or is the you right now a mixture of personality aspects located in both sides?
What about extending this to the concept of the soul?
Is it still one soul in the body split into two, such that the one hemisphere could doom the other with its disbelief, or is there now two souls in one body - and if so where did the other one come from?
Are we actually individuals, or just a hodgepodge of different subconscious identities that’s fooled themselves into thinking they are a single mind, just an accident away from being thrust into their own isolated lobes to define themselves anew separate from the others?
And if that split were to happen, which side would the ‘you’ experiencing this moment right now end up on?
I subscribe to the emergent properties theory, that our consciousness is an emergent property, same with our intelligence and the two different personality traits that appear on the brain being split into two hemispheres are on that path.
I do wonder though if being split introduces any differences from being born with a split, as in does being part of a whole create those traits or if those would’ve happened regardless of when the split happened and being whole works like you described with some personality traits suppressing the others.
I mean… video recording kind of shoots that theory in the foot, doesn’t it?
How so?
Do you think I’m taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
No, I mean if you record daily videos of who you are in your day-to-day, like, talking about what happened and your thoughts and feelings, vlog-style, then you went to sleep and woke up with a completely different consciousness, wouldn’t you know, by looking at the videos, that it was someone else seaking, not the conscious you are today.
Does that make sense. I’m having trouble explaining it well, I think.
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
I wake up in the body of someone else with the same residue of Cheetos in my mouth as the other person ate before bed? Seems like a lot of effort
The original comic page mentions the sleep thing in the alt text