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Tuesday, 27 October 2020

What it feels like to be as you are right now, your integrated inner and outer senses, your climate of mind and heart, your cloud of memories and the floating veins of identity-reflections marbling the whole mass, could all of this be quite different and yet it still be you? The answer has to be yes. All of this spatio-temporal experiential meta-stable complex that is your identity is also a content of experience and could change without the 'experiencer' itself changing; the fact that you would not recognise yourself is immaterial - it is a different movie on the same screen. There are plenty of lived-through moments you've entirely forgotten, but they are still yours, and could be recalled by involuntary memory and reclaimed. And if those involuntary memories were imaginary, or rightfully belonged to someone else, you would nonetheless reclaim them with the same joy. All of which is to say that you are not whatever it 'feels like' to be you. Could the same be said about what you call consciousness? If your consciousness were switched to another consciousness, the same movie but on a different screen, would that still be you? This is like the 'uploaded brain' thought experiment. Here the natural answer is no. You are your consciousness in a stronger sense. This is so even though it seems that you only know of there being such a thing as consciousness by way of experiencings, which as already argued are not you. On the other hand, if your consciousness had already changed in the latter sense of being a different screen, you would not know it. It might happen every night during sleep, might be happening at right now, from moment to moment. What then are you?

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