If consciousness ceases during deep sleep or anesthesia, each awakening may be a new subject with inherited memories rather than the same continuous self. Treating memory continuity as identity could be a pragmatic fiction rather than metaphysical truth. This challenges how medicine, law, and culture assume unbroken personhood across unconscious gaps.
— Reframing identity around continuous consciousness would alter debates on anesthesia ethics, brain death standards, and philosophical grounds for rights and responsibility.
Xavier Symons
2025.10.09
45% relevant
While focused on clinical criteria rather than metaphysics, the article’s debate over whether death should be tied to loss of consciousness/brain function or organismic integration overlaps with the 'continuous consciousness' lens on personhood and identity.
Tyler Cowen
2025.09.05
62% relevant
Huemer’s claim that a sufficiently precise future repeat of your qualitative state would be 'literally another incarnation of you' directly engages the same core question as 'Sleep as Daily Death': what constitutes personal identity across breaks or copies—continuous consciousness vs exact-state recurrence.
Erik Hoel
2025.07.14
100% relevant
Aliens conclude humans 'die every day' and view anesthesia as scheduled suicide justified by memory carryover.
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