>>12032731The idea that consciousness is a permanent-thing linked across time is the red herring.
Your consciousness at one moment in time is not the same at a second moment in time. There is no continuation of a single you. This is the assumption that a lot of philosophical ideas rest on, for example, "if you were deconstructed to the atom level, and the reassembled from those same atoms elsewhere, are you the same you? Now if you are disassembled down to the atom level, and instead of transporting atoms, you just rebuilt you out of another set of atoms since they are indistinguishable from each other, are you still you? Now instead of disassembling you to the atom level, you just rebuilt yourself with a set of different atoms; now there are two of you. Which is the real you?"
All of this presumes that there is some permanent consciousness that exists from time frame to time frame, from birth right up until the though experiment. But there isn't. Each moment in time is a different you. A different consciousness. You just have (poorly made and incorrect) memories that make you think you exist as one coherent being, but that's also not true. We reject how terrible our memory actually is.
People were asked in the week following 9/11 what they were doing that day, and wrote down a detailed statement. 2 years later, these people were brought back and asked the same question. More than 50% of them had a completely different memory of what happened that day, even going so far as to completely reject their original written statement, saying it didn't happen. 2 years after a major event. Some said they were flying that day and got stuck at the airport, when they weren't going to
fly for over a month after.
If our memory is really so terrible, and it is, then it is an illusion, making us think that we are one continuous being.
Instead, every single moment a new consciousness exists, and has access to a stack of cards explaining what happened before.
