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How can we be sure that when we go to sleep that our own consciousness doesnt just end and isnt replaced by an entirely new consciousness with all of our same memories when we wake up? For all we know, I only started existing 8 hours ago when I woke up, and when I go to sleep I will be replaced by a new me. Im honestly extremely terrified of going to sleep now, please help.

How do you know the memories are even the same? They get rewritten a bit each time they are accessed, and your dreams are rearranging the stored information and experiences. If you observe your consciousness close enough through meditation practice you will see that it flickers at some fast frequency. Between any of those flickers you could also be replaced with a new consciousness.

Because of veridical cases of reincarnation and OBE during NDE? When every mental habit your personality is composed of and every atom your body's composed of is erased by time... Your consciousness will still be running around as a part of some different being that doesn't care about your existence. Some people believe this makes them immortal and find great comfort in the idea.

>>94828 I would say that during sleep, consciousness is not interrupted, but rather changes. >>94830 Veridical cases? Can you post some examples?

>>94832 Pam Reynolds' case seems to be in the wiki with enough detail. Ian Stevenson is the most well-known reincarnation researcher who published a lot of material and is also there. Asking some AI for more works well enough.

your whole body is being replaced cell by cell, as you probably know. who's to say that that doesn't happen to your consciousness too? what you currently refer to as "I" and what you referred to as "I" years ago is a completely different person, you just happen to have evolved from them

>>94828 why does it bother you? no seriously. asked the question to yourself and be honest, does it matter if you are "new" person everytime you wake yourself up? i think from there you could start off so you can eliminate or decrease the feeling of paranoia, visit a therapist if you could >>94846 i think your mixing up ego and consciousness

>>94828 fuarrrking get rekt. Over and over. Enjoy your ruined memory

>>94846 I do experience my days as a set of bodily changes so slow it is hard to notice the significant accumulated difference as well.

>>94847 >i think your mixing up ego and consciousness am i though? the point is panta rhei, really there's no constant anywhere in a person. how can you say for sure, for example, that the consciousness you have now, however you define the word, is the one you had at, idk, four years old?

>>94854 >how can you say for sure, for example, that the consciousness you have now, however you define the word, is the one you had at, idk, four years old? of course there is no way to know and am with you on that but what i was trying to say (and should've clarified) is the fact you used the word "I" to which there might be confusion am not well versed on the philosophy of consciousness but the way i see it is the ego is merely a consequence of consciousness. due to the limiting nature of the way we perceive, we are essentially forced to be conscious in one perspective, which is through ourselves. as a result the limitation of consciousness basically formed our ego i could be talking out of my ass considering i haven't thought about it before but hey there is a beginning to everything

When you are dreaming, it's not like you fully lose consciousness. That is, you're still able to perceive things your brain generates in your dreams. Likewise, I think that even during deeper phases of sleep, there is still some degree of minute awareness that is preserved, but it is just so minimal that you don't remember it. As a result, I think there is still some degree of continuity of consciousness throughout days. In other words, I think you will still remain "you" after wake up.

>>94863 true it's not like your brain flatlines (as in brain's EEG) - there are funny delta waves when you sleep, sure, but there IS some brain activity. And don't get me started about REM sleep.

>>94828 Do you know about the stages of consciousness in medical practice? Sleep, coma, vegetative state and brain death. Our brain enters sleep and coma stages to allow itself to get rid of toxins and accelerate body regeneration, and in extreme cases for desperate self preservation (doctors can take advantage of this and induce artificial comatose states to help you endure extremely life-threatening conditions like brain swelling or internal bleeding), which means that the sections of brain in charge of rational and voluntary action have reduced or minimal levels of activity...but even then they're not completely turned off. Again, it's a minimal, basal but still active state of consciousness, and in that you still have some capability to reflect self-identity because you still can react to external stimuli which refers to your self (your name, the voice of loved ones, cyrcadian rhythm and bodily reactions to ambiental changes, etc). I personally had an experience in a birthday party where i got very drunk and memory from a certain point of the night got partial and incomplete. At some point, the day after one friend showed me a video of us walking on the street and talking bullshit on the street and...it felt so alien, like i literally cannot even say that i "maybe did that but cant remember it properly" because IT FEELS LIKE ANOTHER PERSON TOOK MY BODY. That kind of took me into an obsessional rabbithole (i'm OCD) investigating about consciousness, self-identity, diseases like Dissociative Identity Disorder and so on and so forth. Think of you, living right now, acting, moving, talking...You feel like you're there, you're alive, right? I sometimes wonder if this feeling of identity is actually retrospective and we're only remembering what got to get burned in the memories of our mind...or rather, we can only feel like "ourselves" when the experiences we are living right now are actually burning in the physical structure of our memories? IDK, as i said, it all feels so weird because, in the case of that drunk video i cannot even say that maybe it happened but i don't remember, it literally feels like another person took my body, and in all honesty, it kind of gives me a little bit of existencial dread when i think about that occasion, but it somehow also fills me with intrigue about the hidden mechanisms of the brain and, in the extreme cases like identity disorder, how the brain literally wires itself differently to cope with traumatic situations

>>94828 1. sleep-related soykaf belongs to /zzz/ 2. Why the fuarrrk you care about that "me"/"not me" bullshit? You are yourself not constant, your neurons die constantly and new neurons grow, and the existing neurons grow new synapses. Any sufficiently accurate instance of you is you. If you worry about that bullshit, you will never ripe the benefits of mind uploading, such as making multiple parallel self, and sending one to watch a movie, another one to read a sci-fi book, the third one to read an article about AI, the fourth one to write an own article, the fifth one to to write some code, the sixth one to have intimacy with your partner, the seventh one - to another partner, and the eight one as a von Neumann probe to mine asteroids and build your backup instances ... and then reintegrate again to a single personality having knowledge and experience of all the parallel instances. You will be just a pity mortal animal that will die for ever.

3. And, as some here have mentioned, your consciousness is not interrupted during sleep. I had an experience that I has been delaying for too long into night coding when I was sleepy. Then I turned the PC off and laid sleeping. Then ... a strange thing. I felt like my body has transitioned into sleep. Yes, the physiological changes. First erection, then kinda a ... wave front moving from toes to head, that causes numbing of everything below that front. Not a fast one, but gradually going towards head. Changes in breathing pattern. The hand that I had laid on my belly has suddenly felt like weighting enormously. The worst of all - all that has caused itching on my face. I mean all these numbness - it is a suspend state, you can move the hand and the body will wake up. So the first time I just scratched the itch, and got woken up. Well, the next attempt I just ignored that. I don't know how long I was lying like that with mind working and body in suspend, but pretty many breath-in and breath-outs. Eventually my mind has suspended too. 4. And sometimes I have nightdreams are consciously realized as nightdreams. And it is usually not an adequate state of mind. Usually these are nightmares about something happening to my relatives and I in dream decide "I need to wake up just to check" and wake up. The analogy is kinda ... swimming from depth of water to surface. 5. And one more thing: when I usually become sleeping (before my body suspends, I mean usually), I have hallucinations realized as such. Usually perceived as strange sounds and flashes of colourful light. But in the rare cases when my body suspends first, I don't remember any hallucinations. So, don't be afraid, just enjoy. Sleep is an enjoyable activity. The only pity it is wasted time, I'd have preferred not to need sleep. I have tried to utilize it for modelling problems, but with zero success.

>>95414 Yeah, sleepwalking is a thing sometimes, and drunkwalking is a similar thingy too. >When you are dreaming, it's not like you fully lose consciousness. This. However, OP may talk about *memory* problem. There was a case when a person could either remember stuff that took place behore a certain incident... ...or stuff that happened throughout the day but could not remeber anything that happened to him during the incident or later unless it was a fresh memory. For this person, every night was a new little death, but this person somehow could keep ahold by remebering - there *was* a "normal" life before this unpleasant incident. >>94828 OP, I am so sorry you have to deal with this. Sometimes, due to an "organic disease" aka brain physically hurt at a ceartain area, this very problem may happen. Not to talk about soething looney.

>>94828 > our own consciousness You do not have a separate, individual consciousness, and neither does anyone else. There is only one consciousness, and it permeates all of reality. >I go to sleep I will be replaced by a new me How is that different from the changes that occur with each breath? It is not. There is no fixed “you”; the idea that you exist as a separate self is just a story you repeat to yourself. You are identifying with the ego, which is not bad or malicious, but simply a container for awareness. What this means is that you are not what you tell yourself you are, and neither is anyone else. Personas are characters in a story, and they are only as real as you choose to make them.

>>95467 >You do not have a separate, individual consciousness, and neither does anyone else. How do you know this? From how I experience existence, the default position should be that everyone has a unique consciousness attached to a collection of mental processes that belong only to it, even if they all leave a trace on a certain layer shared by many consciousnesses. And... these processes might be invisible, but they are still felt. They are stressful. But only for the specific consciousness they belong to.

>>95468 For one (which probably will not matter to you that much) I have tasted it in two very different ways. First, when I was young and trying meditation, my awareness did something I can only call a “step back.” I suddenly “saw” thoughts, feelings, and experience from a distance, without any inner judgment, just bare observation, and it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. It felt wrong, like something I was never supposed to see, as if I was peeking over the shoulder of whatever usually runs the show. The other experience was when I completely broke down in the confessional. Whatever I was identifying with shattered into pieces and I was simply free – merged with everything, with nothing left but life itself, the unifying force of existence. But both of these are just my subjective experiences. If you want to learn about this in a more theoretical way, what I would suggest is looking into the work of Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Levin, maybe even Bernardo Kastrup, just to get familiar with the basic concept of a Mind at Large. Obviously this is “just” philosophy and science, which are literally models you can use to interpret what is happening and, if the model is any good, to predict what might come next. So take it with a grain of salt. You cannot really trust your own mind anyway, right? When you look at people and you see their heads, it is strange that in such a small space something can feel so enormous from the inside. We do not feel any tightness in our heads. Thoughts are fleeting. That alone is weird. You can try to explain it away or find comparisons, like digital media and so on. It does not really matter. What matters is this sense of being struck by awe. Mental models are just stories. By design they are incomplete. They try to capture behaviours that are actually still forming and solidifying as we speak. The universe is learning how to be. Anyway, the only thing you can really trust is the experience of the breath. Nothing feels more solid than that. Or just look through window and observe how birds form the swarms I guess

>>95469 >which probably will not matter to you that much Well, obviously. You can't prove we share the same consciousness with an experience that had a profound effect on you but didn't affect me at all.

>>95474 >Well, obviously. You can't prove we share the same consciousness with an experience that had a profound effect on you but didn't affect me at all. I’d say that’s not quite right. Whenever someone figures something out, it gets easier for everyone else to get it too, even if nobody’s directly teaching them, like it’s getting dumped into the collective unconscious (into the Lain, heh). The Flynn effect is a good example: IQ scores keep going up over time without a clear jump in “real” intelligence, so it’s like people are just collectively getting better at IQ tests without consciously working together. The more two people are alike (same kind of “signature”), the easier it is to tap into each other’s records, or memories.

>>95488 >Whenever someone figures something out, it gets easier for everyone else to get it too, even if nobody’s directly teaching them Funny. I believe I've read something about this "holographic effect", let's call it, from somewhere else before. Though, I don't have any real-life examples to give in its support. From the top of my head, I'd say maybe the river-crossing puzzles are easier for everyone to ride through than they were maybe in the middle ages when they were first thought out, but I can't say if this is a good example to give, seeing as it might have something to do with a) it becoming way too familiar, and b) from my understanding it was designed for literal children as a challenge.

>>95493 Interesting example, but I think it doesn’t quite capture what’s really going on here. There’s probably a simpler explanation for that kind of thing - the pattern behind those puzzles just leaked into culture over time. The ways of solving them became part of the stories people told, the games they played, and even the language they used to describe problems. What this really shows, though, is how ideas get synthesized into culture itself. It works a lot like how consciousness - or whatever you want to call it: the collective unconscious, the morphic field, the mind at large - develops. An organism learns something, discovers a new behaviour, and with enough repetition across many individuals, that behaviour becomes integrated into the collective mind. It’s basically the same mechanism as forming a habit, just scaled up to the level of an entire species. Now, this is just a model, but it seems to explain quite a lot - and it’s not overengineered or oversimplified either. The interesting part is how it might predict future developments. I’d suggest testing it yourself; pay attention to how behaviours or ideas seem to spread and solidify over time.

>>94828 You tackle the issue from the wrong perspective. >How can we be sure that when we go to sleep that our own consciousness is replaced by an entirely new consciousness with all of our same memories when we wake up? And suddenly you find out that it's so hard and absurd to prove that you're just worrying for nothing.

Imagine thinking consciousness is even maintained from one moment to the next. Imagine being distressed by this.

>>95511 I define consciousness as the "location" where qualia exist. Sensations come and go, but this location stays. Even if its existence can't be noticed without them. Since the same can be said for literally everything that exists.

>>95498 With that being said Jesus Christ is our Lord and Saviour

it does anon, what you gonna do about it?

I think therefore I am. As long as you peer through your own eyes you're still you. But the moment you stop, you won't notice and that's the tricky part to verify. >>94846 Your mom is Theseus' ship. >>95467 You go, champ! Break the matrix! >>95488 >IQ scores keep going up over time They did. >>95493 But even if the alignment is true, which I doubt, the next best thing to tapping into someone's memories is to just observe their behavior, results, their words and expressions, especially when accessed by millions over the internet. >>95540 This made me think of another painting of a man drowning because he dared to succumb to doubt. I don't remember it accurately but this idea stuck with me. Something about simply doubt being so fatal. I'm not sure how to relate it to OP's post but I sense there's connection that can be drawn.

why would the consciousness be yours even at all, the memories and experiences are yours but the consciousness is just experiencing itself. It doesnt have any leanings this way or that way or change person to person. Your consciousness and my consciousness arent any different unless there really is some variance in how aware people are. It would be more like putting your phone in airplane mode and then taking it off and asking "does my phone have the same wifi connection as it did before I put it in airplane mode". Im not a wireless communications expert and im sure this question maybe does have some relevamce or answer that id love to hear but broadly it doesn't matter if its the same connection and the question doesnt apply. Weve all seen people confuse their memories with their consciousness but something kind of particular to men often is confusing their emotions and feelings and emotional state with consciousness. Just like your thoughts and memories your mental state and the sort of background emotions that color your world are something you are viewing through a conscious lens, they arent your consciousness. Something could be not conscious and still have feelings about things, it just wouldnt have a meta awareness of those feelings.