Consciousness and Sleep

You still have experiences while you are asleep

During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there's no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.

Anyway, for those who don't object to thought experiments: imagine that there's some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before? If you answer yes to this -- which I bet almost everyone does -- then the implications are the same as those you'd get from sleep involving a complete cessation of consciousness.

You need to more formally define consciousness and "continuity of consciousness" in order for this to be a worthwhile topic.

Whether it's a period of deep/no-dream sleep, a freeze and thaw cycle, emulation, or a copy operation, you're trying to answer the question of "what relationship do these two distinct-but-very-similar configurations of data (brain or electronic model) have to each other". Your brain at 2016-01-07T18:54:26,922604088 is different from your brain at 2016-01-07T18:54:55,035292477, but in many ways, you want to treat them as "the same".

Define the critera for identity, and this question will dissolve.

"The question asked is whether this clone is the same person as you."

Depends on what you mean by "the same".

I say that these identity discussions always revolve around "the same" mistake - mistaking an issue about values for an issue about facts.

If you want to treat them the same, you will, and if you don't, you won't.

You are fully sentient (having experiences) during all phases of sleep. It is the brain processes related to MEMORY that shut down causing you not to remember it.

How do we know this? Myself and many people I've talked to have had the experience of almost falling asleep and then waking back up and realizing we were just thinking about a bunch on nonsense thoughts strung together in a stream of consciousness manner. For example:

"I am thinking about to go to the dog is up there is a good view of my office manager isnt really such a big potato chips are the lights on...."

It is clear that this kind of thought pattern reflects a lack of memory engagement. In the deepest sleep (or coma) this lack likely becomes so pronounced that not even single words or images are possible, but the sentient experience remains.

For another example, during dreams (REM) the memory processes turn partially back on, but not all the way, which is why dreams seem so illogical when you wake up and remember everything you couldn't in the dream.

Our sentience always experiences only the present moment, but the complex memory hardware of our advanced brains allows our sentience to re-experience the past as well, making coherent thinking possible. Without memory there is only pure experience of the now. This is the most elementary state of mind and the definition of sentience.

From the time your neurons first start firing in the womb until they stop at death, they propagate your sentience continuously like a wave moving over the ocean. Through waking, sleeping, and even the deepest of comas this wave continues unbroken.

But when a wave crashes on the beach it is gone and nothing can bring it back. You can create a new wave of course, but you cannot get the original back. Like waves, the IDENTITY of a particular instance of sentience ("you" or "me" for example) arises from continuity and nothing else. And yes, it certianly does not arise from memory.

Silly ideas about teleported copies and clones being "you" come from basing identity on memories not continuity. Thats why it is important to understand that when you sleep it isnt your sentient awareness that shuts down... just your memory of it!

Regular sleep may not suspend consciousness (although it can very well be argued in some phases of sleep it does), but anesthesia, deep hypothermia, coma, ... definitely do, and are very valid examples to bring forward in the "teleport" debate.

I've yet to see a definition of consciousness that doesn't have problems with all those states of "deep sleep" (which most people don't have any trouble with), while saying it's not "the same person" for the teleporter.

Your sensory system is still running

There are brain subsystems that are still running, but they are not necessarily ones "you" identify with. If you replaced the parts/networks of the brain that control your heart and lungs (through some molecular nanotechnology), would "you" still be you? My intuition says yes. The fact that "something is running" doesn't mean that something is you.

I know the computer metaphor doesn't work well for the brain, but imagine the system in the brain that wakes you up when you hear some sound could be sort of like when a sleeping computer that gets woken up by a signal in the computer network.

Also as others have mentioned, I'm pretty sure during anesthesia/coma there can be periods where you are completely lacking any experience.

I believe this thought experiment raises the following question : is one consciousness (sentience) unique ?

One answer could be that there can't be two identical consciousnesses, ie if you have two identical clones experimenting the exact same life, then they share only one sentience. If there were more than one, they would be different in some way. If consciousness is what is, in some way, computed by their brains, then this output can be produced in different brains, but it only exists once. It is quite similar to the "conceptual differenciation" proof for the unicity of god.

In this case, the one who wakes up after I went to sleep or taken the teleporter is still me, since the brain hasn't changed significatively. Weirder is the fact that your consciousness may not be dependent on time itself : if someone has built a brain in the 19th century that is identical to yours the moment you die, maybe you would just "wake up" there.

And falling asleep wouldn't be so frightening (SMBC is a great web-comic I recommend).

Sleep or the destructive teleporter (in your example) don't do away with a brain's memories. In my view, this is a key component to what makes up "identity" for people.

In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed.

In which case, "you" have a 50% chance of dying, because your self-continuity forks and one fork is then destroyed. The obvious answer to this dilemma isn't a metaphysical one. It's that this is a stupid way to design a teleporter.

If we instead imagine that you are destroyed and then duplicated perfectly in an alternate location, there is no longer an extra self-continuity branch that terminates. Correct order of operations in the engineering solution is all it takes to solve this problem.