Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions. A “braindead” person usually still has a functioning part of the brain that regulates heartbeat. But the parts that are required for conciousness are gone.
The point behind the sleep analogy isn’t that everything shuts down as in death, but your conciousness shuts down. It’s more like a computer that has suspended it’s processes to disk (aka hibernated) but then went into low-power mode instead of powering off completely. You can wake it back up and it restart these processes. You could even buy a new computer identical to the old one, copy the hard drive over bit by bit and have the new computer launch all the old processes. Are they then the same processes or different ones? A calculation that was suspended will pick up where it left of after all.
Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions.
This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.
We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.
I guess I would say it is the same computer then. Same disk, same information, same hardware = functionally identical computer. If the body can be understood to that extent then that is my conclusion.
Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions. A “braindead” person usually still has a functioning part of the brain that regulates heartbeat. But the parts that are required for conciousness are gone.
The point behind the sleep analogy isn’t that everything shuts down as in death, but your conciousness shuts down. It’s more like a computer that has suspended it’s processes to disk (aka hibernated) but then went into low-power mode instead of powering off completely. You can wake it back up and it restart these processes. You could even buy a new computer identical to the old one, copy the hard drive over bit by bit and have the new computer launch all the old processes. Are they then the same processes or different ones? A calculation that was suspended will pick up where it left of after all.
This is an extremely debatable assertion that scientists and philosophers will still be debating long after you and I are dead, but empirically, the evidence is pointing towards, “No, your consciousness is just a byproduct of that lump of meat in your skull.” Phineas Gage, for example, discovered that a huge portion of what made him, him was actually his left-frontal lobe.
We could argue about conciousness, the soul, and the ship of theses for hours, and it would all still be opinion, but what is not opinion is this; your consciousness is being run on meat hardware, physical damage to or a chemical imbalance in that hardware will effect your consciousness, and it is constantly running processes, even when in sleep mode, until it is permanently shutdown. Based on that information, I would not let anyone disintegrate my brain, even if fhey reassembled it perfectly.
It doesn’t actually shut down though. Did the person behind this theory not have dreams?
You don’t dream the whole time you’re asleep. Not to mention non-sleep unconsciousness like anesthesia.
I guess I would say it is the same computer then. Same disk, same information, same hardware = functionally identical computer. If the body can be understood to that extent then that is my conclusion.
Hence me using an analogy where the computer also doesn’t actually shut down