LiterallyASoyboy said:
Suppose I know that I'll be doing something I enjoy tomorrow, like watching anime for example. I can foresee myself having the experience, and presumably it will happen, but I just won't be there to know it. A nearly indistinguishable but still fundamentally different version of myself will be there instead, and I'll be gone forever.
By that logic, a new "observer" would have been created over a thousand times in one lifetime. And whatever occupies your cranium (you in this case) will cease to be within a day. This makes zero sense.
Whatever resides in your gray matter sitting in your skull, "consciousness" or whatever you'd like to call it, would not cease to exist from minute changes in the brain. Your entire brain is replaced in 7 years, but it's obvious that you're still here. And even if your new observers were replaced so often, assuming they have free will they would probably experience the death process, and that death process would influence the brain and whomever occupies the brain next would "remember" dying over and over again.
Obviously you keep waking up to the same person. If you ceased to exist, you would "know" because you simply wouldn't wake up one day and you would be chilling out in the oblivion or whatever you would like to call nonexistence.
You would essentially just be creating another person, experiences are as important as genetics in determining who "you" are, or rather how you respond to stimuli. I would scrap almost everything, which at the end of the day is more or less the same thing as suicide.
Not at all. Your personality and how you respond to stimuli changes through your life. If drastically altering it is "suicide", then living out a natural life would be a slow drawn out suicide being done multiple times.
If you mean that your killing your old personality and what makes you human, sure. But if you mean that you're killing what you call as an observer, you are gravely wrong. If we assume that your core existence is just very simple parts of the brain, then this would not make you suddenly dissappear because the higher-ups are always changing and rewiring depending on how it's being stimulated. But if we assume that your observer is external and can survive without a brain, then it should be obvious why altering the brain isn't akin to death or ceasing to exist.
If memory is an integral part in constructing what we know as the self, then my memories tomorrow being different to those which I possess right now would suggest that I will soon cease to exist.
Except it isn't, unless you happen to be a machine or computer. Are you a machine?
I assume that you have a very materialistic view of consciousness, if I'm not mistaken. And if this happens to be the case, then the role of their being a observer, or "you" has no role in the nature of consciousness. Having a so called inner "you", whom is probably just sitting inside your cranium, implies that there's something or somebody calmly sitting inside your brain control room tweedling away at the control panel. And whenever that guy's position gets filled or replaced, he gets fired and replaced by ”you" (or you get fired and replaced, referring to your concern of ceasing to exist tomorrow). You see, to put simply, saying that there is an inner "you" experiencing everything implies that you are that thing and you have free will.
If you seriously believe that whatever you are is merely just the wiring of your brain, then a "soul" or "you" do not exist and do not fit in this paradigm of consciousness, there is no purpose for having these things. In fact, consciousness as we know it would also be meaningless, because nobody would be there to experience it. We are just computers following a program, no soul or "you" needed.
Sure, computers have their memories wiped, they may have a part fail or they may even die and get scrapped. But what happens to their owners? They continue on and get a new computer if they choose to.
My point is that this question doesn't even really make sense, as it's based upon a miscalculation of who exactly you happen to be. The present is all that exists, and all that will ever exist, at least as far as you're concerned.
You do not exist.
If you think that your brain is just a data storage unit with I/O devices slapped onto it, then you can only conclude that you either
- will always exist until the process of life ceases, since your brain causes consciousness and consciousness will cease following the ceasing of neurological processes
- you don't exist and may be as good as dead, because there is no proof that a soul exists and the brain doesn't need something external to control it to run its program
You cannot just be your memories but at the same time have free will and experience consciousness, that makes no sense.
One is because that I wouldn't really be the one living it, for reasons I already touched on, and the other is because I wouldn't want to do that to someone else to satisfy my own vanity.
But haven't you said that you have no guarantee that you'll be here tomorrow? Why be so vain and make someone else, so to speak, suffer through your situation just to satisfy your vanity? Why not just kill yourself and not let anyone else suffer by being you for a cosmic femtosecond?
This system makes no sense. If you believe that you are nothing more than a machine that responds to stimuli, then you shouldn't believe in a "consciousness" or "you". If you are just memories, then "you" shouldn't even last a second because your brain is constantly changing. This system is simply absurd.
You honestly have nothing to worry about. Obviously, you're still waking up everyday and experiencing life, aren't you? If you were to be gone tomorrow, you would simply dissappear and you won't know or care, but that isn't the case because you continue to experience uninterrupted consciousness.
If it's true that you are just memories, then it doesn't even matter because you, as you know it, don't even exist and nobody is there to suffer by existing as you.
