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Why sleeping is essentially dying

JonesBones said:
The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science,
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Phr3121 said:
...and you have that decision/option? How about old age? Do you factor in things like an unpredicted car accident?
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You guys are losing me.
 
Tycho Brah said:
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the method of copying consciousness in an effort to avoid dying, such as in cloning or mind/consciousness uploading.

Here I want to demonstrate why I don't think either can succeed in dodging death, along with an odd consequence of that line of thought.


Scenario 1: You sign up to climb a perilous mountain. The cultivators of the trail have developed a fail-safe method to ensure that no harm befalls you as you climb: they used advanced technology to make a perfect clone of you before you ascend. That way, should something happen to you, all they have to do is wake the clone up and you can continue with your life unperturbed and uninjured.

Conclusion: A lot of people who haven't put a great deal of thought into this will respond that though they still have some hesitation about the climb, the backup clone does provide reassurance that they can continue living even if they die doing the trek.


Scenario 2: You take part in the climb described above, and there's a horrible accident that results in you falling from a cliff. Fortunately some branches and fresh snow break your fall, and you survive without serious injury. You make your way back to camp, and find that since you were presumed dead, your clone has been awakened to continue your life. Now you are both alive simultaneously.

Conclusion: Despite the common intuition about Scenario 1, it can't be the case that a clone would mean the continuation of your own life/consciousness if it can be alive at the same time as you. You alone are home to your own continuous psychology. And in fact this phenomenon is called psychological continuity.


Psychological continuity is a key concept for mind uploading. If you can successfully copy or upload someone's mind, you still don't get the result you want if you aren't actually maintaining the continuity of their consciousness. Similar to considerations about the teleportation machines from Star Trek, what may actually be happening is that you're killing one consciousness and generating a brand new one. Of course from the perspective of the new mind, and everyone else around it, the same life has continued. It's only the first person-perspective that's been wiped out - but the whole point of the exercise to begin with was to keep that going, not to merely replace it.

This brings us to the final point about sleep. Somehow, probably through some kind of identification with the body or brain, consciousness experiences continuity despite shutting off during sleep. This seems to indicate that there must be some mechanism that enables continuity in the brain. However there's also another possibility, which is that waking consciousness automatically assumes continuity even when it should be in question.

When you wake up and someone has drawn a giant penis on your face in permanent marker, you don't assume that you're a flawed penis-face copy of the old you that's just recently been generated, you assume that you're the same thing you fell asleep as but someone has tampered with you in the night. But what if you woke up missing limbs, or as another sex, or in a different body altogether? What reason do you have to believe you're still you, and not something new?

The arguments that apply to the Star Trek transporter or the mountain clone seem also to apply to sleep. You die when you fall asleep. The person who wakes up again is just very stubbornly convinced that this isn't the case.

Rest in peace Sherdoggers.

~FIN


TL;DR: you're an impostor who refuses to acknowledge the death of the person you think you woke up as. Should you now be afraid to sleep?
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Sleep is not death and has shit to do with it. Our atoms are shifting second to second every day of our lives. Therefore we are a "different person" from second to second throughout our entire lives. Our consciousness is what remains. Who knows what will be possible in the future as far as keeping our consciousness around after our body truly fails? I don't think I am interested in that future, as I do not want to live forever.
 
fonzob1 said:
Sleep is not death and has shit to do with it. Our atoms are shifting second to second every day of our lives. Therefore we are a "different person" from second to second throughout our entire lives. Our consciousness is what remains. Who knows what will be possible in the future as far as keeping our consciousness around after our body truly fails? I don't think I am interested in that future, as I do not want to live forever.
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That's just an assertion though. The argument in the OP says otherwise.

The moment to moment change is different because continuity is preserved. Identifying how and why that happens could be the start of an actual argument against mine.
 
Tycho Brah said:
That's just an assertion though. The argument in the OP says otherwise.

The moment to moment change is different because continuity is preserved. Identifying how and why that happens could be the start of an actual argument against mine.
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Sleep does not change your consciousness/memories. Those remain regardless of sleep or atoms scrambling in your body.
 
Cool, I get a new computer every time I select "restart" !
 
I tried reading the OP but then it started putting me to sleep.
 
Dilan Cummingsworth said:
I had a friend who became addicted to meth and started shooting it up. When he first became addicted his parents and family intervened by taking him to a rehab clinic where he was able to give it up and become a devout christian who lived his day to day life on the teachings of the bible. I don't how or what happened but somehow he changed and went straight back to shooting it up. He would hear voices and think he was in a war zone so one night he ended up in some car park, broke the window of a car and slept in the back until the cops arrested him the next day.

Ever since then he's never been the same because he used to tell me that when he was taken to the mental health ward they had a secret underground area where they performed satanic practices and did experiments on him. After that he's never mentioned it and has never been the same person I used to know before the addiction. I believe the "original" is either dead or being kept for experimentation and the "person" they released is a clone of him.

From what I've read clones cannot completely function 100% like a real person and they require some sort of stimulant to keep their brains functional on a basic level. This is where I believe the meth comes into play because cloned brains can't produce endorphins on their own and need it in unnaturally high levels to sustain itself. I've been around him a couple times when he shoots the meth and everything revolves around getting the meth and shooting it into his vein. Once it's done he goes from hearing voices and people screaming to then talking in tongues and screaming out of his window at the sky. Then he does it all over again and it seems like nothing can change this behavior. Because of all this I believe the friend I once knew is no longer alive and has been replaced by a synthetic duplicate with implanted memories
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Are you sure it wasnt you bunting Meth?
 
HHJ said:
I think of dying alot when i am trying to sleep. It helps me get to unconciousness. Never been good at getting to sleep.I just try to think of a peaceful death and eventually i knock out.
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When I was having serious problems with hypertension it felt like once I fell asleep I was never going to wake up again.
 
Loiosh said:
When I was having serious problems with hypertension it felt like once I fell asleep I was never going to wake up again.
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yikes
 
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