Continuity of consciousness (short)
Do you think you would survive your body being disintegrated using a teletransporter, than recreated elsewhere? I’ve spoken to a lot of people who say no. Often what they say is not what most philosophers who say no say, which is “but that’s not my body, and I am my body”. Instead, I think they have a wholly different objection in mind- they will say “It’s not my consciousness, it’s not my point of view, it’s just someone like me. They accept the mental character of personhood and survival, they’re just worried about a certain kind of possession of mentality. What they seem to be gesturing at is something like continuity of experience, not just similarity and causal connection. But I don’t think continuity of experience (or, more illusively, ‘viewpoint’) is required for survival.
Every night- hopefully- you go to sleep. Now it’s possible that while you sleep, your consciousness is maintained, just in a different and often unremembered way, but it is entirely possible that, for at least some of sleep, consciousness stops- it’s 100% switched off we don’t know enough about consciousness to say. If we found out this was the case, would that make you think you died each night when you went to bed? I should hope not. Therefore whatever continuity of consciousness is, if it even exists, it is not a requirement for survival.
If you just refuse to accept that consciousness might stop in sleep-however briefly- then consider very powerful anesthetics, or people who die and are revived, or even the possibility of frozen suspended animation- surely these don’t count as death...
/Obviously, I’m not so arrogant as to think these thoughts are original to me. The problem is called the bridge problem in the literature. I was just bothered enough by seeing people saying this that I wanted to say something about it. One strategy is to try to argue that maybe there is continuity after all- e.g. between the moment of falling asleep and waking up if there are no dreams whatsoever in between- it would just be as if one immediately followed the other. My reply to this is what I call the mad neurosurgeon. Imagine a neurosurgeon fiddled with your brain a bit when you went to sleep- just enough that there wouldn’t be continuity of consciousness with your waking experience but not enough to change your personality or memories- that would still count as survival!/
I think, as you suggest, that general anesthesia is where the answer lies. And my personal belief is that the central nervous system can indeed be shut off and restarted, and whatever the delusion of "self" is, pucks right up.
This is a much more interesting and also complicated problem than it seems on the surface.
On the one hand the argument of "that's not my body" would imply that the theoretical teletransporter somehow changed the body so that it is indeed not identical to your original body anymore. If you posit a perfect teletransporter that somehow can re-materialize you down to the quantum state level, then that objection obviously goes out the window. However, there is a more important objection to the "that's not my body" argument and it relates to your argument around sleep and anaesthesia (albeit recent research has suggested that discontinuities in consciousness are a common aspect of both waking and dreaming cognition - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2017.00159/full), which is that during these states when your consciousness is disrupted/interrupted you body naturally changes, it does not remain in stasis, your cells function, they age, they die, etc. For all practical objective purposes, the body you wake up with in the morning is very much _not_ the body you went to sleep with. I think with the current neuroscientific knowledge we have we can safely say that as long as the electrochemical state of your brain is preserved relatively in the same state as it was when your consciousness was disrupted, you should still be you when you regain consciousness, whatever the intermediate "bridge" was.
There is an even more interesting thought problem here though, which is really the one that baffles me and leaves me with no practical answer because we have no science or intuition on what would happen. What happens if the teletransporter creates two (or 50, number is irrelevant as long as >1) of me instead of just the one. If you were dealing with a cloning machine, things seem a tad simpler. Sure there's an identical copy of you continuing your consciousness from where you left it off and divering in experience at that point (since something as trivial as where they are sitting in the room will be different, the instant they regain consciousness they have become a different person and you remain as you were and can observe the other you). However in the case of the teletransporter, the original you has also gone, but where there should be one of me at the other end there are now two. In which does my consciousness continue and how would we experience that? I have no answer to that I don't think.