• pjwestin@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Never bought into the whole, “sleep is the same thing,” argument. There’s no period during which your brain functions cease during sleep. They slow during non-REM sleep, then reach near waking levels once you enter REM, but they never end. That’s not remotely like having your entire body disassembled at molecular level and rebuilt somewhere else. One is essentially like a computer that’s screen has gone idle while it performs background tasks. The other is like transferring all of your files to a new computer and then throwing the original into a woodchipper.

      • Conciousness, what makes you, you, is not your brain functions. A “braindead” person usually still has a functioning part of the brain that regulates heartbeat. But the parts that are required for conciousness are gone.

        The point behind the sleep analogy isn’t that everything shuts down as in death, but your conciousness shuts down. It’s more like a computer that has suspended it’s processes to disk (aka hibernated) but then went into low-power mode instead of powering off completely. You can wake it back up and it restart these processes. You could even buy a new computer identical to the old one, copy the hard drive over bit by bit and have the new computer launch all the old processes. Are they then the same processes or different ones? A calculation that was suspended will pick up where it left of after all.

        • cevn@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          It doesn’t actually shut down though. Did the person behind this theory not have dreams?

          • Soggy@lemmy.world
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            2 hours ago

            You don’t dream the whole time you’re asleep. Not to mention non-sleep unconsciousness like anesthesia.

            • cevn@lemmy.world
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              36 minutes ago

              I guess I would say it is the same computer then. Same disk, same information, same hardware = functionally identical computer. If the body can be understood to that extent then that is my conclusion.

    • nullptr@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Soo… Did i just spent 10min opening each image on a new tab, zooming in, reading it, while on toilet, for nothing? This has to be one of the most underwhelming stories out there