Chapter 21
Why Continuity Doesn'T Matter
Here is one of the most common objections to the line of thinking in this book: "But there's a gap! The original dies, and the replica is somewhere else. There's no continuity. Without continuity, it's not really me."
This objection feels powerful, but it dissolves under scrutiny.
Continuousness means uninterrupted existence. Your consciousness is continuous if there is no gap or break in it.
Continuity means sameness between two states. Your brain at noon is continuous with your brain at 12:01 if the structure and functioning are similar enough to produce the same identity.
Most people assume that continuousness is necessary for identity, that you need an unbroken chain of conscious moments to remain "you." But this is clearly wrong, and you can prove it to yourself tonight.
The Sleep Gap
When you go to sleep, your consciousness is interrupted. During deep sleep, there is no conscious experience (or at best, very minimal, disconnected experience that you don't remember). You are, for all practical purposes, unconscious. Then you wake up, and you are you again.
What happened during the gap? Nothing, as far as consciousness is concerned. The structure of your brain was maintained (roughly), and when it resumed functioning in the right way, your consciousness returned. The gap didn't make you a different person.
Under general anesthesia, as we discussed, the gap is even more dramatic. Your consciousness is completely obliterated, more thoroughly than in sleep. Yet when you wake up, you are still you.
The Billion-Year Gap
Now apply this to death.
If your brain's structure could be perfectly reproduced after death (whether a minute later, a year later, or a billion years later) and that reproduced brain began functioning, the consciousness it produced would be you. The gap between your death and the reproduction would be like the gap of sleep or anesthesia: irrelevant from the perspective of conscious experience, because there is no experience of the gap.
Imagine this. You die today. A billion years from now, by chance or by design, a brain comes into existence with the same structure and functioning yours had at some point during your life. Consciousness begins in that brain. That consciousness has your memories, your personality, your ixperiencitness.
This is not science fiction. It follows directly from the three premises we established in Part One, combined with the insight, demonstrated in the previous section, that gaps in consciousness don't affect identity. If those premises hold, then temporal gaps of any duration are irrelevant.
The Continuity of the Pattern
The science of superimmortality replaces the traditional notion of bodily continuity with the notion of continuity of the pattern. These are very different things.
Bodily continuity means: the same physical body, made of the same matter, existing continuously through time. This is what most people think identity requires. But as we have seen, it is neither necessary (because atoms are replaced) nor sufficient (because a body can be radically restructured while maintaining physical continuity, as in the anesthesia extension argument).
Continuity of the pattern means: the relevant physical organization (the brain's arrangement and operation) is preserved or reproduced, whether in the same body or a different one, whether continuously or with gaps.
Key Terms in This Chapter
Read the rest of this chapter
The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.