>>11422544>The fact that you feel like you are the same person you were in the pastThat's the thing though, I don't. I rarely even feel as if I were the same person I was last year. I certainly don't feel like the same person I was years and years ago. My personal definition of "consciousness", which I think is a muddy and unscientific concept, is the second to second experiences that seem continuous from our perspective. If such a continuous stream of sensory input, neural activity etc were to be completely broken for even a short length of time, like say with a teleporter getting ripped to atoms and rebuilt, I would say that the first stream of consciousness was broken and therefore ended, which to me is death whether I get reconstructed or not. There is also the problem that a teleport may not be able to reconstruct someone perfectly to an atomic level, and even a fraction percent of error that may not be harmful in any way to the clone would still stop "you" from being "you". There is also a version of the teleport thought experiment where the cloned version of you appears before you are disintegrated, which to many reveals the folly of the whole thing. Just because you have been cloned doesn't mean you would consent to being destroyed, but for some reason as long as you are destroyed beforehand it is ok?
The one stipulation I would have is that arguably the stream of consciousness is broken many times in our lives anyway. Sleep for example creates such a different state of being in the mind it is like a full stop at the end of each day, and the subconscious reorganises itself to make you a little bit of a different person who has processed the previous day's experiences. And of course, being under anaesthesia completely stops all conscious and unconscious brain activity except the very basic shit like keeping the heart pumping, and time is essentially erased for that person for however long they are under. But for me this is not comparable to teleporting
