Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Even if you die in your sleep, its different then sleep because something in your body goes terribly wrong, and your body makes you aware of that through pain. And even if you are asleep as you die your heart stops (Painful) and your brain carries on until it runs out of oxygenated blood and then it starves (painful). So even if you are dreaming, theres got to be a sensation there.
|
Then make the death instantaneous, with zero time for the impulses of the event to reach the portions of the brain that register such things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
If you died, and they activated a clone of you with up to date memories, you wouldn't know or carry on because you as an individual are dead. A clone no matter how exact is still a different person.
|
But how would you know? There's no forward continuity with consciousness; if I go to sleep and something wakes up that's identical to me, even though it has different molecules, there's zero difference, because even you can't tell.
Our minds like to construct this convenient fiction of forward continuity, but it really doesn't matter. All the molecules in your body get changed over over time, so "you" doesn't depend on the molecules. So "you" must depend on the patterns those molecules and the impulses in your brain and all that. (Assuming there's no spirit)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
except that you would be dead. your friends and everyone else wouldn't know it, but just because you have a clone with all your memories doesn't mean the consciousness transfers over
|
Consciousness doesn't go forward though, it's only in the moment, based on our memories and current experiences. I'm assuming that whatever electrical pattern that existed in the brain at the moment of substitution would be transferred over (though because you are asleep and unconscious, it doesn't really matter)
What if I magically replaced all the molecules in your body right now with different ones of the same kind, all at once so that their positions stayed the same and the pattern of impulses and stuff in your nerves all stayed the same? You didn't die, yet you are completely different.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
he would have been dead from his perspective after the first one, so what would be the point?
|
But the perspective of the first one is gone, so it doesn't matter.
Like I said this could happen each night when you go to sleep.. the going to sleep you of course doesn't know, and the waking up you doesn't know.. It's just because we have this sense of forward continuity that we feel uncomfortable with it.
Kind of like science fiction books and teleportation.
Would you feel uncomfortable if the teleportation device disassembled you and reassembled you at your destination?
Would it differ if it used "your" molecules vs a different set of molecules?