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.
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.
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.
It doesn’t actually shut down though. Did the person behind this theory not have dreams?
You don’t dream the whole time you’re asleep. Not to mention non-sleep unconsciousness like anesthesia.
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.
Hence me using an analogy where the computer also doesn’t actually shut down