Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
Yeah, the comic’s story and message are beautiful, but the “sleep kills you” argument is poorly thought out, and based on a shallow understanding of what continuity actually means. It’s not about consciousness, it’s about continuity. The processes in the brain that make up your mind don’t stop as soon as you fall asleep.
There’s an argument to be made about how you’re never the same person that you were even just a moment ago, because you’re constantly changing. That’s also shallow and lazy, and ignores the continuity we’re talking about.
There’s an argument to be made that from your perspective, continuity isn’t broken. That’s also shallow and lazy, because it treats the perception of continuity as if it’s the same thing as real continuity. As far as your clone is concerned, continuity wasn’t broken. But I was never worried about whether my clone will die when I go in the teleporter, you know?
We don’t even know that the brain makes the mind, it could easily be the other way around.
No, we do know that the brain makes the mind. Physical changes to the brain can make predictable changes to the mind, but your thoughts don’t change the structure of your brain.
While your first point is true, your second is not. It’s actually been found that if you change the way you think about stuff, your brain actually changes. It’s this little thing called neuroplasticity and it’s fucking wild. - https://www.healthline.com/health/rewiring-your-brain
We’ve also observed intelligence and seeming awareness from things like fungus, which don’t even have brains.
