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You can not be sure you have ever had consciousness prior to the present moment. All you have are memories of it that may or may not reflect reality.



A subset of the ol’, “God created the entire universe 10 microseconds ago arranged so that everything looks as if it were around much longer”.


A superset, as it does not presuppose anything supernatural at all. The possible explanations that involves a God is a subset.

E.g the simulation argument is another solution. So would cloning be. Or simulation of just an individual. Or we might just fundamentally not understand what gives rise to consciousness - for what we know consciousness may only arise for brief moments punctuated by long periods where we're just acting as automata. Or we might fundamentally not understand the passage of time.

It makes sense for us to act as if consciousness is an ongoing consistent process, because we can't really tell if it is not. The same way as the classical materialist (in the philosophical sense) response to philosophical idealism is to point out that whether or not idealists are right (that we can not trust our senses and our physical reality could just be an illusion) doesn't matter - if we have no practical way to detect it or influence it, we just have to live with it.

Point being that drawing a line between asleep vs not sleep is totally arbitrary, because we can't tell.




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