I think this view starts with a faulty concept of consciousness which then necessarily leads to one disregarding continuity of self as being importance.
Namely you assume that things like personality and memory are a part of consciousness, and that therefore those things would have any ability to predict your future anticipated experience. This is problematic, particularly once you’ve deconstructed the idea that you have a unified self: Since it presumes some coherent unified self which is defined by whatever bundle of cognitive faculties, personality and memory you care about.
In contrast what I think is the far more coherent view is that consciousness is just the particular processes running in your mind which are currently generating your experience. If you mess with the brain in order to change one’s memories or personality then you should still anticipate to have future experiences in that body, because the processes which were already generating your consciousness never stopped.
The mistake is in assuming that the type of identity which describes what other people care about when interacting with you is synonymous with the type of identity which predicts your future experiences. It’s important to note that “you” here has 2 very distinct definitions: One for predicting subjective experience and one for predicting behavior.
I also don’t think there’s good reason to expect consciousness to cease during sleep and that this is a result of assuming that because you don’t remember something you didn’t experience it.
When sleeping you experience dreams in both REM and some non-REM sleep (the latter are less vivid) but you don’t remember most of them, so clearly you experience a good deal more than you remember. Similarly even if you take a brief nap and don’t get the chance to slip into REM most people don’t describe feeling as though they suddenly lost time and you have a vague awareness of your surroundings during sleep. Some people have mentioned how people will wake up when they hear their baby crying, but won’t get woken up by other similarly loud noises. Plus there’s experiments showing classical conditioning during non-REM sleep and even some conflicting research on it from people under anesthesia.
I think this view starts with a faulty concept of consciousness which then necessarily leads to one disregarding continuity of self as being importance.
Namely you assume that things like personality and memory are a part of consciousness, and that therefore those things would have any ability to predict your future anticipated experience. This is problematic, particularly once you’ve deconstructed the idea that you have a unified self: Since it presumes some coherent unified self which is defined by whatever bundle of cognitive faculties, personality and memory you care about.
In contrast what I think is the far more coherent view is that consciousness is just the particular processes running in your mind which are currently generating your experience. If you mess with the brain in order to change one’s memories or personality then you should still anticipate to have future experiences in that body, because the processes which were already generating your consciousness never stopped.
The mistake is in assuming that the type of identity which describes what other people care about when interacting with you is synonymous with the type of identity which predicts your future experiences. It’s important to note that “you” here has 2 very distinct definitions: One for predicting subjective experience and one for predicting behavior.
I also don’t think there’s good reason to expect consciousness to cease during sleep and that this is a result of assuming that because you don’t remember something you didn’t experience it.
When sleeping you experience dreams in both REM and some non-REM sleep (the latter are less vivid) but you don’t remember most of them, so clearly you experience a good deal more than you remember.
Similarly even if you take a brief nap and don’t get the chance to slip into REM most people don’t describe feeling as though they suddenly lost time and you have a vague awareness of your surroundings during sleep. Some people have mentioned how people will wake up when they hear their baby crying, but won’t get woken up by other similarly loud noises.
Plus there’s experiments showing classical conditioning during non-REM sleep and even some conflicting research on it from people under anesthesia.