Consciousness, brains and the replica problem

Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns are consisten with it. Here we show, by means of a simple gedankenexperiment that this has an importan logic consequence: any scenario involving the transient shutdown of brain activity leads to the irreversible death of the conscious experience. In a fundamental way, unless the continuous stream of consciousness is guaranteed, the previous self vanishes and is replaced by a new one.