Okay. Fully back now, so second self-quote:
"See, I'm with you there right up to the "whole continuity thing" bit, 'cause I'm in total agreement on the importance and value of the consciousness, mind-state, non-supernatural soul, whatever you want to call it. What I don't get is where the continuity element comes into it.
For one thing, I am deeply skeptical that it - continuity of consciousness , in the awareness/self-awareness sense - exists in the first place: people enter non-dreamstate sleep, faint, become unconscious, suffer seizures, are electrocuted, lose chunks of time, wake up from comas or states near-indistinguishable from clinical death, etc., with brain activity all futzed up or effectively ceased, all the damn time, and don't seem to have existential issues - nor, albeit less relevantly, does anyone seem to think that someone different woke up. And while whiny ethics boards prevent us from doing this with humans, animals have been cryonically frozen and seemed to be the same animals when they were revived.
Preservation of pattern seems to matter, since severe brain damage can reshape or erase personality, but from such evidence as we have, you can reboot the hell out of consciousness and consciousness is robust enough to come back up just as it was.
But leaving that aside for a moment - we seem to be assuming that the consciousness can't be copied? Unless we get supernatural about it, it's got to be embodied in the brain, so if you copy the brain, you copy the consciousness. So...
If you imagine a one-step destructive copy process, a true move, you're just moving my consciousness from over here to over there . From my perspective, it's no different than going to sleep in the car and waking up somewhere else; I experience a brief discontinuity and then carry on right where I left off.
And a copy-and-delete is functionally equivalent to a move."
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