All theoretical concerns about whether you'd be the same 'you' after going through a teleporter can be applied to our consciousness in general. (thread)

If u died for few seconds & were brought back to life, that 'you' has been disconnected temporally from previous 'you'. Your body has even changed a bit.

Is that still same 'you'? Seems same as being destroyed & reconstituted in teleporter scenario, w/ same potential concerns.

Some would say 'but it's same physical body, so same consciousness.' But that assumes there's something magic tying a physical body to a single conscious experience; not logical to me.

(Another angle to view this from: our bodies are always replacing cells w/ new material.)

With that in mind, time passing for a conscious being can be seen as a series of moments with different 'you's moving incrementally into the future. A series of 'now's and 'me's.

This points to what is so amazing about consciousness. The feeling of ourselves as continuous, complete-over-time beings is so complete, so real. But are we just a series of feelings/moments experienced by different selves?

If we're somehow more than that, how would that be?

Consciousness isn't that amazing when viewed from outside (creatures exist & must have POV, duh); it's amazing when viewed from inside, when we think "Why do I seem so continuous? Why am I still around & not some other me?"

But obv we must exist to ask that. Back to square one.

I sometimes find these ideas scary, more scary than more common 'fear of death/meaningless/no-free-will' type fears. "What's stopping me from no longer existing & a different me from existing?"

But it's also entwined w/ what's so inherently wondrous about reality/consciousness.

Kind of related (in sense that thinking about existence can be anxiety-producing), I have this thread about the stress of realizing how weird/strange the world is. https://twitter.com/apokerplayer/status/1245538799460831233?s=20