Yeah, but "it" is the same sky. The presence or absence of particles does not alter the sky itself. More accurately, space is independent of it's contents. Mind you, this is only a metaphor. Consciousness is not physical space. Just like physical space is the "space" of physical objects; Consciousness is the "space" of perception.
You share almost nothing in common with who you were when you were 5 years old. Even if all the cells in your body have been replaced, and all your thoughts and your way of thinking itself has changed, you are still the same person. It's the same consciousness. That continuity is you. You are that consciousness. Do you see it?
That’s the Ship of Theseus argument. I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness. Yes we are consistent persistent beings up to a point, but inky in the way that the ship of Theseus continues to be the same ship.
I think of consciousness as being an activity. It’s something we sometimes do. We don’t do it in deep sleep, or when anaesthetised. But when we wake up is it the same consciousness? We remember being conscious previously, and that memory accords with what we experience ‘now’, but is that the same thing?
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?
> 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.
Take one more step back. When you are in deep sleep, your mind is absent, and so are all sensations, but what is it that registers these breaks-in-mind-continuity? You are that host, that reality, that being that never sleeps.
Yeah, but "it" is the same sky. The presence or absence of particles does not alter the sky itself. More accurately, space is independent of it's contents. Mind you, this is only a metaphor. Consciousness is not physical space. Just like physical space is the "space" of physical objects; Consciousness is the "space" of perception.
You share almost nothing in common with who you were when you were 5 years old. Even if all the cells in your body have been replaced, and all your thoughts and your way of thinking itself has changed, you are still the same person. It's the same consciousness. That continuity is you. You are that consciousness. Do you see it?