They’re not the same self but then again neither of them are the same self as you are now. Ship of theseus.
But then the self itself is an abstraction. Consider Indra’s Net, the subconscious, dissociative identity disorder, and all realms of complication.
I suspect that the best way to understand the difficulty of talking about consciousness is that it’s a weakness of how language works.
Similar to arguments about whether God could create a 4-sided triangle? God’s omniscient, says one side, so yes. God still has to follow logic, says another. Yet my stance is that it’s an ill-posed question. Just because words can fit together grammatically doesn’t mean the phrase is meaningful.
I think the self is just an abstraction and label to group together a class of linguistic phrases or bodily behaviors. Where are these or those words coming from? Some come from my ears with a high pitch, some from my ears with a low pitch, some come from inside.
Not sure I’m making my point but I suspect language is to blame for the difficulty in understanding consciousness
Alright, another for you because I like the cut of your gib.
Consider the octopus, whose nervous system is distributed into nodes in the head and limbs. Would severing a limb of a hypothetical sentience-uplifted octopus be a greater crime than severing the limb of a human?
A human loses twice as much in terms of limb, but ignore that for sake of argument.
The octopus loses a more significant part of its nervous system. This feels like another aspect of robbing a sentience of agency.
So with sentient machines, if I removed a stick of RAM or underclocked the CPU, what do you think of these?