Death & Sleep

(Pseudo) Peanuts Life & Death

I started reading Fall by Neal Stephenson a few weeks ago. A big part of the story is what constitutes consciousness. When you are awake, you are conscious, when you are asleep, you are not. Dead to the world is a common way of describing sleep. I feel like my life has been continuous, but every time I fall asleep, I lose a bit of continuity.

It's only really a problem if you are trying emulate a mind with a computer. Theoretically, if you could create a digital mind, you could replace memories and the digital person would never now. Problem is could you really model a human mind with a computer? Maybe, but I think it is still a long way off. I suspect there may be thousands of layers of complexity and we have only scratched the surface. We may understand what we have found so far, but our understanding has now revealed another layer of complexity underlying what we have found. We will keep digging, but it's going to take some serious effort for a long time before we are able to accurately model a human mind.