humans don't seem to have continuity of consciousness, in that we sleep

Yes, humans do sleep. Let's suppose that the consciousness "pauses" or "vanishes" during sleep. Is it how would you define a discontinuity in consciousness? An interval of time delta_t without consciousness separating two conscious processes?

Bergson defines in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness duration as inseparable from consciousness. What would it mean to change consciousness instantaneously with teleportation? Would we need a minimum delta_t for it to make sense (maybe we could infer it from physical constraints given by general relativity?).

Also, it seems plausible that you could fake the subjective continuity of consciousness in a sim.

The question is always how do you fake it. Assuming physicalism, there would be some kind of threshold of cerebral activity which would lead to consciousness. At what point in faking "the subjective continuity of consciousness" do we reach this threshold?

I think my intuition behind the fact that (minimum cerebral activity + continuity of memories) is what lead to the human-like "consciousness" is the first season of WestWorld, where Maeve, a host, becomes progressively self-aware by trying to connect her memories during the entire season (same with Dolores).

Thank you for reading me.

1- In this post I don't really mention "non-me-simulations". I try to compare the probability of only one full-time conscious being (me-simulation) to what Bostrom calls ancestor-simulations, as those full-scale simulations where one could replay "the entire mental history of humankind".

For any simulation consisting of N individuals (e.g. N = 7 billion), there could in principle exist simulations where 0, 1, 2, ... or N of those individuals are conscious.

When the number k of individuals being conscious satisfies k << N then I call the simulation selective.

I think your comment points out to the following apparent conjunction fallacy: I am trying to estimate the probability of the event "simulation of only one conscious individual" instead of "simulation of a limited number of individuals k << N" of greater probability (first problem)

The point I was trying to make is the following: 1) ancestor-simulations (i.e. full-scale and computationally-intensive simulations to understand ancestor's history) would be motivated by more and more evidence of a Great Filter behind the posthuman civilization. 2) the need for me-simulation (which would be the most probable type of selective simulation because it only needs one player (e.g. a guy in his spaceship)) do not appear to rely on the existence of a Great Filter behind the posthuman civilization. They could be like cost-efficient single consciousness play for fun, or prisoners are condemned to.

I guess the second problem with my argument for the probablity of me-simulations is that I don't give any probability of being in a me-simulation, whereas in the original simulation argument, the strength of Bostrom's argument is that whenever an ancestor-simulation is generated, 100 billion conscious lives are created, which greatly improves the probability of being in such a simulation. Here, I could only estimate the cost-effectiveness of me-simulation in comparison with ancestor simulation.

2- I think you are assuming I believe in Utilitarianism. Yes, I agree that if I am Utilitarian I may want to act altruistically, even with some very small non-zero probability of being in a non-me-simulation or in reality.

I already answered to this question Yesterday in the effective egoist post (cf. comment to Ikaxas) and I am realizing that my answer was wrong because I didn't assume that other people could be full-time-conscious.

My argument (supposing I am Utilitarian, for the sake of argument), essentially, was that if I had 10$ in my pocket and wanted to buy me an icecream (utility of 10 for me let's say) I would need to provide an utility of 10*1000 to someone being full-time conscious to consider giving him the icecream (his utility would rise to 10 000 for instance). In the absence of some utility monster, I believe this case to be extremely unlikely and would end up eating icecreams all by myself.

[copy paste from Yesterday's answer to Ikaxas] In practice, I don't share deeply the Utilitarian view. To describe it shortly I believe I am a Solipsist who values the perception of complexity. So I value my own survival because I may not have any proof of any kind of the complexity of the Universe if I stop to exist, but also the survival of Humanity (because I believe humans are amazingly complex creatures), but I don't value positive subjective perceptions of other conscious human beings. I value my own positive subjective perceptions because it maximizes my utility function of maximizing my perception of complexity.

Anyway, I don't want to enter the debate of highly-controversial Effective Egoism inside what I wanted to be a more scientific probability-estimation post about a particular kind of simulation.

Thank you for your comment. I hope I answered you well. Feel free to ask any other clarification or point out to other fallacies in my reasoning.