Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's…
The sleep example was a bad idea, I only complicated things with it. In fact, my claim is that there is that the continuous nature of consciousness is an illusion in general. Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it. From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries. Am I the same thing as the feri…
I'm not sure what that even means. How can an experience be an illusion? It seems to me that at point everything just breaks apart.
>Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it.
The point isn't that you remember it (false memories are a thing), but that you're experiencing continuity from moment to moment. If you think this continuity doesn't exist, how could you care about anything at all?
>From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries
How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
>Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
If you reject continuity, sure, but otherwise the key difference is that there's continuity between the objects.
Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
>And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this. You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.