> I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness.
One argument that just came to me now: we already know we don't have continuity of vision - we go blind during saccades. We just don't notice, because the brain is happy to extrapolate from the last visual inputs, or otherwise completely make up what we see, going as far as screwing with our perception of time to fake continuity of experience.
The same could be true for consciousness itself. Visual system is a proof that the brain can and does aggressively smoothen out discontinuous experiences.
> I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?
Exactly. It's a different "running of the engine" for the purposes of your typical conversation and thinking. It's a different "running" in terms of battery charge maintenance. It's the same "running" for general car maintenance. So, different/different/same. If you're on a trip, your engine dies, and you immediately restart it, it's same/different/same. If you drive your car after having it sit a month in a garage, it's different/different/different.
When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time. But there could be other cases where we effectively lose consciousness for shorter periods of time - seconds perhaps - and the brain produces illusion of continuity, in the same way we get blind during saccades and the brain masks it out from our awareness by synthesizing data and screwing with the clock.
> When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time.
Not always, at least not in the ways that matter.
When I was a teenager, there was one occasion when I went to bed at night, pulled the bedsheets over my head, and with no subjective pause or discernible change of subjective internal experience of my mental state everything became bright, I pulled the bedsheets away from my face, and it was morning.
One argument that just came to me now: we already know we don't have continuity of vision - we go blind during saccades. We just don't notice, because the brain is happy to extrapolate from the last visual inputs, or otherwise completely make up what we see, going as far as screwing with our perception of time to fake continuity of experience.
The same could be true for consciousness itself. Visual system is a proof that the brain can and does aggressively smoothen out discontinuous experiences.
> I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?
Exactly. It's a different "running of the engine" for the purposes of your typical conversation and thinking. It's a different "running" in terms of battery charge maintenance. It's the same "running" for general car maintenance. So, different/different/same. If you're on a trip, your engine dies, and you immediately restart it, it's same/different/same. If you drive your car after having it sit a month in a garage, it's different/different/different.