Consciousness and Sleep

casebash

This will be a short article. I've been seeing a lot of dubious reasoning about consciousness and sleep. One famous problem is the problem of personal identity with a destructive teleporter. In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed. The question asked is whether this clone is the same person as you.

One really bad argument that I've seen around this is the notion that the fact that we sleep every night means that we experience this teleporter every day.

The reason why this is a very bad argument is that it equivocates with two different meanings of consciousness:

Consciousness as opposed to being asleep or unconscious, where certain brain functions are inactive
Consciousness as opposed to being non-sentient, like a rock or bacteria, where you lack the ability to have experiences

You can still have experiences while you are asleep, these are internal experiences and they are called dreams. Your sensory system is still running, but in a kind of reduced power mode. If someone shouts or prods you or it gets too hot, then you wake up. You aren't like a rock.

Perhaps some people would like to talk about what kind of waves we do or do not see while you are asleep. What I would like to point out is that we still have very little understanding of the brain. Just because we don't see one particular wave or another doesn't mean much given our incredibly limited understanding of what consciousness is. Perhaps in the future, we will have this knowledge, but anything at the moment is merely speculation.

I'm not arguing either way on personal identity. I haven't done enough reading yet to comment. But this is one particularly bad argument that needs to be done away with.

One really bad argument that I've seen around this is the notion that the fact that we sleep every night means that we experience this teleporter every day.

The reason why this is a very bad argument is that it equivocates with two different meanings of consciousness:

Consciousness as opposed to being asleep or unconscious, where certain brain functions are inactive
Consciousness as opposed to being non-sentient, like a rock or bacteria, where you lack the ability to have experiences

I'm not arguing either way on personal identity. I haven't done enough reading yet to comment. But this is one particularly bad argument that needs to be done away with.

Yes, I agree (except that I'm not sure whether most people outside LW would really answer no; for sure a lot would, but I don't have a strong intuition about whether it would be a majority). My point is just that even if sleep never turns off experiences altogether, the intuition people appeal to when saying "experience stops every night when you sleep" isn't actually dependent on that.

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Consciousness and Sleep

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Consciousness and Sleep

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