Sorry about that ridiculous watermark.
Because I want to see where I’m going, and if my consciousness ends, I don’t get to see it
I just don’t understand why a gap matters. I had to get knocked out for surgery once and I woke up the same person, sans appendix.
This is why I hate using the word consciousness in these debates. It’s too ill defined, and isn’t really what I mean anyway. The process of chemical reactions in my brain is my mind, regardless of whether it’s aware of any external stimuli.
It’s also irrelevant to the discussion about teleportation. Whether or not you’re the same person after you’ve gone to sleep and woken up is debatable, but whether or not the person who steps into the transporter is the person that steps out of a transporter isn’t. Like I’ve said too many times in this thread, if you step into the transporter and it fails to dismantle you when it creates your copy, you and your copy are two distinct individuals. You don’t get to see through your copy’s eyes. So when the one who stepped into the transporter dies, that individual’s subjective experience ends. This is the same whether they die before the copy is made, as the copy is made, or after the copy is made. They never get to see the other side of the transporter.
For the iteration who came out the other side of the transporter, this is a meaningless distinction. But for the iteration who stepped into the transporter, the distinction is quite literally life and death.
