Dramatized clickbait headline.
What the article actually says is more like “we might be able to revive you if not too many if your cells have died, even if your heart and brain seem to have stopped.”
AKA they are working on a next tier of CPR.
I wonder how this would play with the whole “Ship of Theseus” philosophical theory of identity, where even though we’re constantly changing out our parts (cells), our sense of continuous self persists. If you suddenly have a hard break in continuity of matter or thought (like with a Star Trek-esque matter transporter or brain death), do you experience life whenever you’re revived or is your consciousness ended and another starts?
Are you the same person every morning when you wake up, or a new one with the same memories?
There’s literally no way to know.There’s no way to prove it to others, just like there’s no way to prove your own sentience. But it’s pretty easy to tell from experience. I am consciously experiencing this moment right now. When I fall asleep, the conscious being that I am right now is not going to just never wake up.
But if you can’t prove your own sentience to yourself, maybe that’s worth digging into.
When I fall asleep, the conscious being that I am right now is not going to just never wake up.
But how do you know this? That’s the root of the question.
How would you distinguish “I woke up as the same consciousness” from “I woke up as a new consciousness with an identical memory”, from the first person perspective?
One answer could be that having the exact same memories means you are the exact same consciousness. But this means that your moment-to-moment feeling of “self” is not actually intrinsic to your consciousness, since the memories alone are sufficient.
Hey, it’s me from the next day. Can confirm, my previous consciousness terminated the moment I fell asleep and I’m a totally different person now.
But seriously, I started wondering why so many people have trouble proving this to themselves and so many others don’t. Maybe it’s something similar to how about half of people don’t have an inner monologue. I personally do and I’m curious to know if the people who aren’t sure they’re the same person every time they wake up are the same people who don’t have an inner monologue.
You seem to be missing the point of the philosophical question.
Just because you feel like you are the same conscious doesn’t mean you are, which is what needs proving. We need to demonstrate that we have some way to know we are a different entity without just saying “I know I am”. Is it enough to have the same set of memories? Surely not, as the Star Trek thought experiment implies.
For the record I do have an inner monologue. I just also think that the notion of consciousness and what it means to “be” the conscious process isn’t as simple and clear-cut as you think it is.
Like I originally said, if it were possible to prove to someone else you’d be able to put it into words. It’s just like being aware of your own sentience without being able to demonstrate it to others. What I am experiencing now is not just a memory waiting to happen. I can tell the difference between memory and experience and I can chain experiences without resorting to memory. Maybe not everyone can do that. The inner monologue thing was just an idea but probably not related.
But I can’t put to words what that chaining of active experience is like in a way that’s ever going to convince you I’m a thinking being with an awareness of self that dates to before 0800 this morning. The real question for me isn’t “how do I know I’m the same person?” but “why is it difficult for some people to know the same thing about themselves?”
ETA: Do you also have the same questions about whether you are a sentient being or do you accept “I know I am” as the answer because the only proof is through personal experience?
As long as your brain mass has not deteriorated you should still have access to at least your long term memory. But in theory it could range from a terrible hangover to amnesia and brain damage, and in that case recovery may take longer and you may end up being a completely different person, as it can already happen with some accidents.
At that point you “die” every time you fall asleep.
This comic is terrible and the sort of thing that gets refuted in Philosophy 1000. It’s not even a good version of the same bad argument that I’ve heard dozens of times. The fact that it compares copying and destroying a person to falling asleep is absolutely absurd. Your brain doesn’t stop functioning when you sleep, and your molecules don’t instantly replace themselves each night.
The point of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment is that if you replace the parts of a ship one by one over time, never replacing more than what you keep at any one time, you can easily understand how it continues to be the same ship even if at the end of its existence it contains none of the original parts. Each part has shared experience with the others. There is continuity of the whole even if any individual part has been lost and replaced. If you replace the entire thing all at once, it is absolutely a new ship because not a single piece shared any experience with a part of the original, or a part that can be traced back to a shared existence with the original.
That continuity of experience is what matters, and in sentient creatures that extends to continuity of thought (conscious or unconscious). A person has a sense of self that doesn’t end just because you lost consciousness. If you create a copy of a person and destroy the original, that sentience doesn’t jump into the new body. Yes, it thinks and acts exactly as the original person did, but the original person is still dead. This only wouldn’t matter to someone who lacks sentience. But then again I have always been a bit solipsistic.
I wasn’t making any arguments for or against. For the record, I don’t agree with the comic. I simply found it relevant based on it touching similar topics to what you wrote, and thought I would share. But, that’s my bad for posting a link with zero explanation.
The comic is fine. You’re assuming that all humans act rationally. This is clearly the story of a man who had an irrational fear that didn’t bother everyone else, and then learned to deal with it, in a way.
Essentially the protagonist isn’t you, but it certainly falls in the range of expected behavior for someone out there.
I hope having a transporter device is more like folding space than particle-scanning and reconstruction. The scanning and reconstruction would still be great for replacing or repairing lost or deteriorating structures. Regardless, I have a number of questions that come up as we learn more about how our brain might work.
If our brain is changed in (near) death how would we determine what was lost?
Could we even reconstruct consciousness (this could be also gradual, but what is the speed of consciousness)?
It seems more like we would have to gradually move our conscious processing from per-existing wetware to whatever replaces it (even more wetware). It should behave like our brain as much as possible, but I don’t think we could avoid being different from what we were.
Our own brain changes over time, do we think the way we did when we were 5? How different will we think far later in life (assuming our brain is at least healthy)? I think we would have to accept changes in our fundamental being (which is already very challenging). The difference is that not only could we live for longer physically, but within the pure consciousness an entire lifetime could be lived in less than a second. We experience this temporarily in dreams, or while experiencing a life threatening event such as an automobile accident or the final moments of death itself. What if that was extended over physical months, years, decades? How would we deal with such a inheritance, who would teach us how to cope and find meaning?
Would we want to live life at the speed of the physical world after such an experience?
I mean it depends. If you get liquified by the implosion of a submersible three quarters of the way to the Titanic, there’s not much of a process.
A very momentary process.
Many who have watched someone die will likely know this
It’s not like the light leaves their eyes and that’s it
My cousin’s breathing stopped, but his heart kept stopping and starting again. He was clearly gone, but certain parts didn’t stop working for several minutes
Yeah nothing about this seems like it shouldn’t be obvious, it takes some time for everything to fail, just like being ‘alive’ and having a single organ fail, you can be in various states of ‘alive’.
My death is when I permanently stop experiencing life.
Not sure what that means for an ‘Upload’ scenario… I guess he’s just a swamp man of me and he’s alive but I’m not anymore… but I’m not signing up for the digital afterlife anyway.
There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.
At what point do I go through their clothes and look for loose change?
The article by the Guardian that is linked is very interesting! I can really recommend reading it to people interested in this stuff.
Thanks for recommending the guardian link. Crazy stories in there and an interesting conclusion on what we’re learning about death.
Makes me wonder about organ donations and if the timing for those may change based on newer findings…
Yes, that is an interesting question as well. I am wondering what the people with near death experiences could still experience from their bodies, because that would make a big difference as well.
What a low effort article.
WTB device to make it a point.
As someone else in here mentioned, a trip to titanic in a private submarine controlled by a rechargeable Xbox controller and a narcissist captain would be a good bet
I need something much cheaper.
These feet are nasty
And this is why I carry an organ donor card prohibiting taking my organs.
Death is a poorly-understood process and I don’t want doctors under extreme time pressure to decide when to end it.
