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Romashka comments on Consciousness and Sleep - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: casebash 07 January 2016 12:04PM

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Comment author: gjm 07 January 2016 01:44:12PM 9 points [-]

You still have experiences while you are asleep

During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there's no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.

Anyway, for those who don't object to thought experiments: imagine that there's some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before? If you answer yes to this -- which I bet almost everyone does -- then the implications are the same as those you'd get from sleep involving a complete cessation of consciousness.

Comment author: kithpendragon 08 January 2016 10:16:48AM 0 points [-]

Are you the same person as before?

I expect I will do the same things for the same reasons as before. Or, to put it another way, I do not expect a brief interruption in my input/output patterns to significantly affect my input/output patterns in the future. Even less so than if they had not been interrupted and I had been allowed to have an experience of the same duration, now that I think about it.

I choose not to comment on the concept of "sameness" as it applies to "person", however, without some rigorous definitions. Ship of Theseus and all that.