That's my thought on Stargates. Wouldn't your consciousness just stop as you were ripped apart? And a clone of you would then continue but it wouldn't be your stream. The more I think about this, about what my stream of consciousness is, my "session" if you will, the weirder it all gets.
I was out walking with a friend in San Francisco, and ran into one of his old friends he hadn't seen in three years. This guy said he had been abducted by aliens a thousand times, since. I only realized later that meant every time he slept.
After you have been Probed, how can you assume the you they let go was the original?
After a bunch of struggling with the knowledge that my consciousness will one day cease I've recently come upon this thought myself and I find it strangely reassuring.
Consider the case of drinking or drugs to the point of waking up not remembering what happened the night before.
And then consider people who, knowing very well that they are going to be in a state of mind where they will do things that they will not remember the next day, still choose to do it.
To me this is even crazier than mind uploading. They are lending their body to someone with which they don't have stream continuity.
It is a commonplace in surgery rooms that anesthetic is administered, and after it dissipates the patient continues speaking exactly where they left off, not noticing any gap.
That has to mean something about the physics and chemistry of consciousness as manifested in our meat brains.
You're not dreaming all of the time, so that doesn't work. Dreams only occur during REM sleep phases, which tend to cluster closer to the end of the sleep cycle.
I wasn't trying to argue for constant consciousness, just saying that if we can be aware of and remember some things that happen during REM sleep, that suggests that perhaps there's more continuity there than was being suggested above.
I believe the stargate concept is that your atoms are ripped apart, transported via wormhole, then reintegrated in an identical state to how they were. From a continuity of your stream perspective, this is no different than being knocked out.
