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
Regular sleep may not suspend consciousness (although it can very well be argued in some phases of sleep it does), but anesthesia, deep hypothermia, coma, ... definitely do, and are very valid examples to bring forward in the "teleport" debate.
I've yet to see a definition of consciousness that doesn't have problems with all those states of "deep sleep" (which most people don't have any trouble with), while saying it's not "the same person" for the teleporter.
"Anesthesia, deep hypothermia, coma, ... definitely do" - don't people have dreams or at least some thoughts occur during these?