alt Hacker NewsThere are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
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seizethecheese • today at 12:34 AM
Interesting point but even those people’s brains aren’t immutable. The have habit change without memory.
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krupan • today at 12:03 AM
They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.
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micromacrofoot • today at 12:11 AM
they still have memory, just not new ones - they lived experiences
I think it's a little more complicated than that. In a 50 First Dates type of scenario, their ability to form certain types of memories is damaged, not non-existent. And I would argue that with enough brain damage someone like an extreme lobotomy victim may stop being considered conscious.