Do you think we die when we sleep? As in our consciousness is erased and another one wakes up?

Maxed out brainlet detected I'm sorry for your low neuroplasticity

There is still brain activity even when you are in a dreamless sleep

>the new consciousness wakes up believe it has been alive for some time, but it just appeared a few moments ago.
I think that's true except you're not taking it far enough. The reason this issue of whether or not self is preserved as a continuous thing from birth to death gets raised in the first place is because there's never any continuity to begin with.
Brain activity is generated and memories provide some sense of there being such a thing as self that ties each moment together with all the other moments of activity that brain generates, but there isn't any literal self-continuing mechanism that makes one person different from some replicated version of that person. You always hear people trying to argue "but it would just be a copy," when the deeper issue is not that the replicated version doesn't have continuity with the original but rather that the original never had continuity across its different moments of thought production in the first place any more than a few pebbles lined up would become a single unified object just because they're positioned nearby one another.
Insofar as it exists at all, "self" is just a convenient way of grouping together everything an organism does over time as one imaginary combined thing that's easier to work in terms of.

The sleep part of this hypothetical is a red herring. The lack of any real mechanism for continuity of "self" is still there regardless of whether sleep happens or not. Thoughts happening in sequence while awake aren't literally attached to each other by anything that a replicated version of that thinking party would lack. They're just in sequence and that temporal nearness is something that gets used as a reason to group those thoughts together as part of the same "self."

Since when brain activity = consciousness?
Evidence?

Well why when you sleep then and just not every second? Like you blink and its a new one.

your mum certainly will, tonight

FYI
major function of sleep
to move the short term memories into the long term memories
so when you sleep you aren't becoming a new person
more so than your old self is synthesizing the new expierence it had for the day.
the wet concrete isn't replaced by a dry slab
it is cured into one.

Brain activity is a clear link, though. Certainly the idea of a consistent "mind" or "soul" is difficult to prove due to their inherent, abstract nature, but the brain constitutes an interlinked series of physiological changes that can be measured and tracked over time. "Consciousness", who you are as a person, is the brain. This is why people can radically change or even lose their own identity when they suffer brain damage or chemical imbalances.

does your consciousness have some sort of ID tag?

I wouldn't say consiousness is who you are as a person.
Consiousness and awareness are the same thing

like strip away all biological, and social layers to your self and what do you have?
in a not literal sense you have some ding-an-sich type thing that can only express its will, act, and have some sort of perception of the event.

I meant consciousness as the observing self-aware process that someone is.

Not to be a memefag but you definitely have to define consciousness to be able to ask this.

Consciousness happen only and only if there is metacognition.

what?

I'll explain, "cogito ergo sum", right? Actually, Descartes nailed it, because the feeling of one's existence is directly linked to one's perception of thinking. If you are able to think about how you think, then you are a conscious being.

That's a common notion in the context of cognition, but it's not really what consciousness means, ie. to be aware of something. A photocell has awareness. What you're describing would be more accurately called sapience (as opposed to sentient that is probably most animals).

No, memory is eroded by waves of electrical signals. This gets rid of mostly unused memories or unfocused memories. Like the 212th time you drove to work or the first baby toy you played with for the 4th time. It basically keeps you up-to-date with whatever is most important and/or most recent. Like yesterday's biology test cram or that time you did something stupid and broke your arm or when you spilled your spaghetti in front of her.

metacognition is just language

That depends. Are you a...
>philosophy major
Then yes or no depending onwhich belief you ascribe to. You cant be wrong in philosophy.
>man of science
Then the answer is either no, or it doesnt fucking matter.

If you woke up as a new “consiousness” (note the use of quotations) everyday but the transition between “consiousnesses” is such a seamless illusion that nobody can tell the difference, then how is that illusion any different from reality? The first mistake people make in this debate is quantifying consiousness. Consiousness is not a thing, its just a side effect of a sufficiently complex neural network. Consiousness cannot leave your brain, new ones cannot enter it, and reguardless of what brainlets think it cannot ever be downloaded to a computer reguardless of our level of technology. Your consiousness is just the result of your particular arrangement of neurons that makes you self aware. You dont have a new brain(save for maybe a few new connections in said brain) when you wake up, so why the fuck would you have a new consiousness?

god i hope so

>the brain constitutes an interlinked series of physiological changes that can be measured and tracked over time
If you define "self" as information in the brain then you run into the problem of whether taking one person's memories and transmitting them to another person makes the second person become the first person.
Also, everything has causal relationships with everything else in the universe if you trace events back far enough, so just because some brain activity in one moment can cause part of the brain activity in another moment doesn't necessarily mean those two instances of activity constitute a "self."
Lastly you have that artificial person copying thought experiment where everyone always likes to point out the copy wouldn't really be "you" because creating a new version of someone doesn't cause the original person to mentally teleport into the new body. I think this is true except that most people stop there and just decide this must be a problem specific to copies when really it's just a consequence of there never being any self continuity generating mechanism in the first place. Nothing you could copy from the original brain would ever include a means for transferring the self because there was never any continuous self to transfer. Just as the original brain activity wouldn't teleport into the copied brain activity, the original brain activity from moment t-1 never teleports into the same original brain's activity at moment t either. Each just happens in their own moment and the idea of self between them is inferred as an explanatory narrative after the fact.

That's false. Completely false and bollocks.

Why would you even think that?

language in a very loose sense

Perhaps in the sense that many people associate words in their head (experience of phonological loop) as consciousness in itself?

But that's only a part of consciousness and not a necessary one. Some people think mainly in images, some think in diagrams. Words are not necessary.

Maybe you could be thinking of the capability for abstraction associated with language. Certainly abstraction helps you be effective, but I don't think it's necessary.

language does not necessarily mean auditory

It doesn't get erased - it changes it's frequency and observes another stream from parallel reality. That's why sometimes in dreams you don't remember your waking life - the memories aren't there. That's also why sometimes in dreams you have vivid memories of parallel life which you are observing now. Depends how big the frequency shift is. If it's small one then you would remember you waking life.

You = observer of the stream of consciousness
Soul = consciousness + subconsciousness
Higher self = observer of both streams across the Absolute

Yes there are two observers within you. Subconsciousness has it's own stream, just like consciousness.

Now, this is obviously my opinion, as that is how the reality is revealing itself to me. YMMV

Memories are product of your brain and data stored within it. Consciousness does not carry memory.

Assuming atheism is wrong and we don't become non-existent after death, that there is a continuation of one's consciousness... You would not be "you" in any sense of the word. Therefore would not carry any memories of the former self.

If OP's ridiculous theory is true, the biological "you" would store the memories and any conscious entity that enter 'your' body would have access to those memories.

I suppose OP's isn't completely implausible but it's still ridiculous.

Having been dead once, I can assure you that waking up is not the same as coming back to life.

When you did there's nothing. That's it, you're done. Unless some doc fixes the machine that is your body. The sense of self is then rebuilt from whatever memories remain. I have no idea if I'm the same person I was before I died, but I can assure I am the same person I was when I went to sleep last night.

>When you did there's nothing. That's it, you're done. Unless some doc fixes the machine that is your body. The sense of self is then rebuilt from whatever memories remain. I have no idea if I'm the same person I was before I died, but I can assure I am the same person I was when I went to sleep last night.

This implies that what we consider "ourself" is the product of the memories we experience.

When you say you are the same person as you were before you slept last night, are you also saying every memory you have has remained the same, and you have not gained any new ones?

From what I understand the brain is massaged by waves. These waves allow neurons that are used infrequently to disconnect from the network of neurons with large volumes of traffic.

In essence you have a very different synaptic structure when you begin to sleep as compared to when you wake up even if the latter is a resemblance the former.

That's because you sleep too long or too hard. The proper level of afternoon nap is once you forget where you are, you're done. You drift off and snap out of it and remember "Oh yeah I'm at work" and then it's time to put your feet back on the ground and walk a bit. Any more and you are decharging, not recharging, as well as affecting your bedtime.

Sure except that the process of accumulating memory doesn't stop when you're asleep. So the body has no need to regenerate a sense of self.

Think of it like rebooting a computer. The memory is still there, memory is main thing that determines personality, there are other quirks of course. But look at amnesia vicitms, some have total personality changes, even hating people they used to like.

I find it hard to think of past versions of myself as the same person. My personality has changed over time, even the version of me 5 years ago seems alien. I like to believe consciousness isn't a continuous state but rather a consequence of a complex system, as the system changes, the consciousness changes as well, they are not really separate, I think it's just a label that we put on complex processing and memory aggregates.

I went through a fucked up breakdown over this concept. I literally believed that when I slept I was going to die. Just know that sleep isn't the cesation of brain activity, and consciousness and memory isn't fully understood. Or you could go through the agony of believing you can never sleep for the rest of your life, never being able to prove that it won't happen as it has happened countless times before.

This. Everyone get out.
/thread