Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you’re awesome aperson <3
How so?
Do you think I’m taking about something related to the entire physical body like Dark City?
No - I mean the continuity of consciousness inside your brain.
That potentially the part of you that IS you, your subjective experience of existing, might in fact die each night never to return and simply be replaced by a different new one spun up with access to the hippocampus and a sense of having lived a whole continuous life, none the wiser to the many past yous that came before and will never be again nor its own impending doom in just a few short hours.
No, I mean if you record daily videos of who you are in your day-to-day, like, talking about what happened and your thoughts and feelings, vlog-style, then you went to sleep and woke up with a completely different consciousness, wouldn’t you know, by looking at the videos, that it was someone else seaking, not the conscious you are today.
Does that make sense. I’m having trouble explaining it well, I think.
This is the concept of external validation of internal processes, which is part of the problem with the inherent solipsism of the question.
There’s no way to externally validate that the you inside is the same.
Just as if you were copied in the teleporter with one destroyed and the other created, your friends and family and videos of you would match the before teleporter and after teleporter versions, even though the old one was dead and the other hadn’t existed.
You just kind of have to just go on belief that the you inside is continuous. There is no way to measure it to validate, as there’s currently no agreed upon measurement of consciousness in neuroscience even.
Then does it even matter? What’s the point of even considering the question if the end result has no detectable difference either way?
