>>13048439Are you a fucking idiot? It's not even unintuitive. I thought everyone realises this when they're like 14 the same way everyone asks "why am I me?" when they're like 4. Let's start off real easy with the classic teleportation thought experiment. If you were to go into a teleporter that breaks you down into atoms, sends them over to your destination, then re-constructs you on the other side, our intuition tells us that the consciousness of the person who arrived is not the same instance as that of the person who departed. The arriver can't tell the difference, but the departer is definitely "dead".
Now let's consider what happens when you go under anaesthetic. You remember nothing between the time you go under and the time you wake up. The intuitive "causal link" has now been broken in a different way. How can you tell that the instance of your consciousness before and after waking is the same one?
let's consider what would happen if you were to take a "forgetting pill" on sunday that makes it such that when you wake up the following saturday, you won't have any memories of what happened from monday to friday. Is the person who wakes up on saturday the same one as who went to bed on friday? Or is he the same one as who went to bed on sunday? Well, he shares the memories of the one who went to bed on sunday, but not the one who went to bed on friday. Yet the one who went to bed on friday also shares the memories as the one who went to bed on sunday....
Let me end with this: What if we were to 'die' from day to day? I.e. Every day we are in fact a brand new consciousness that has inherited the memories of the person from the day before. We make a modification to these memories, then we cease to exist when we go to sleep, and pass them on to the new person the next morning. There is no way for us as the one who woke up this morning to tell whether we are indeed the same instance as the one who went to bed last night; it's just that we share memories.
