When thinking about my resolutions for this year, I realized that saying that I am going to do something doesn't solve the problem, unless I have a serious reason to think I really will do it. This had a major impact on my willpower and the way I have been considering it for the past week. For instance, I write down my goals, the way to achieve them and how I will implement them in my life.

Besides that, I mostly didn't do anything important though. But I am confident this common sense knowledge will make my life better.

You manage to live long enough to witness progres in the field of cryonics. In your nineties, you are taken to the hospital, where you know you will die from some heart disease. Everyone arround you pays compliments on how serene you are for somebody about to die. But you trust cryonics better than some religious people have faith in heaven, so "dying" is not a big deal for you. Luckily, from your hospital bedroom, you even see the first revived man by the Cryonics Institute on TV.

When interviewed, he explain how painful were all those years, that he never experienced pain so intense in his life let alone for so much time. He even advocates for the destruction of the remaning patients' preserved bodies.

You die. Unable to explain to anybody that you changed your mind. You, who believed science could create something better than heaven, are now sure it can make things worse than hell for the dead.

I believe this thought experiment raises the following question : is one consciousness (sentience) unique ?

One answer could be that there can't be two identical consciousnesses, ie if you have two identical clones experimenting the exact same life, then they share only one sentience. If there were more than one, they would be different in some way. If consciousness is what is, in some way, computed by their brains, then this output can be produced in different brains, but it only exists once. It is quite similar to the "conceptual differenciation" proof for the unicity of god.

In this case, the one who wakes up after I went to sleep or taken the teleporter is still me, since the brain hasn't changed significatively. Weirder is the fact that your consciousness may not be dependent on time itself : if someone has built a brain in the 19th century that is identical to yours the moment you die, maybe you would just "wake up" there.

And falling asleep wouldn't be so frightening (SMBC is a great web-comic I recommend).