I don't think that the paradoxes of Parmenides was presented to prove that a certain condition existed but to marvel that an essential aspect of our experience was not something that could be explained the way other things are talked about. We don't know much and we understand that little even less.

That's a lot of questions, much of them the classical ones. I think we enter into even more difficulties, instead of less problems, if we start doing the transportation experiment, in which .01% of you isn't the other person, but that 0.1% happens to be the real you.

We have very different ways of thinking about the self and consciousness which need not fall under the "materialism" of science, which is a misleading term, I think. Ok, so let me try to answer one of your questions:

When you wake up are you the same person as yesterday? First, I need to ask, is this a factual question? It's not clear to me that it is. For if we say "yes", I am the same person as yesterday, yet I'm slightly skinner and some of my cells have changed or died off. So yes, I'm the same person except in those parts in which I'm not. But I don't know which parts of me have changed, it seems to me that I'm exactly the same person I was yesterday.

In other respects, we can, if we so choose, act as if from *now* on, we will be completely different. So we can speak of yesterday's me, and the me from now on. I'm certainly not the same as I was when I was a child, but I'm similar in some respects. It seems to me that the self refers to many phenomena which we mistakenly take to be one single thing. It probably isn't. It includes many facets which fit under one theme "self", but if we take one aspect apart, the concept falls apart.

It's a bit like a country. A country isn't it's borders, it's its flags, it's citizens and so on. But if you move the border, you are standing outside the country. Likewise, if you change the flag of the country, you aren't speaking about the same country before the new flag. Same if totally different people displace other people, then the country isn't the same and so on.

That's my guess, but it's an extremely hard question.

Thanks for your comment.

When you wake up are you the same person as yesterday? First, I need to ask, is this a factual question? It's not clear to me that it is.

To clarify, here, with "self" or "you", I don't mean some identification based on afiliation or proximity (like considering different clones of you being "you"), but the subjective point of view what constitutes your consciousness. Assuming that it is the same moment to moment, will it be the same day to day despite the gap at sleep? From a physical point of view some atoms are different, but this happens when you are awake too, your body has changed in the last 5 hours.

Of course, for answer this I guess we would need to understand well the consciousness, and we are really far from it... It will be interesting to evaluate different approaches and see how they relate with identity.

For example, for panpsiquism I guess in some sense you are constantly "splitting" and "merging", since the particles are sentient by themselves, but even in this case, since is not clear how happens the binding which give you an unitary sensation, I don't know if the subjective experience could continue out of the brain.

We have very different ways of thinking about the self and consciousness which need not fall under the "materialism" of science, which is a misleading term, I think

Yes, applied to consciousness "materialism" could be misleading... I guess the classical non-materialist approach is the Cartesian Dualism, but surely there are more. Which are the ones that fits better with closed Individualism ("materialists" or not)?

Eternalism basically says that causality is real in our world but the casual series is subsumed under (or into?) something more fundamental (greater?).

As you can see there is a lot involved in the concept. Individualism means a lot in certain countries, but you'd be surprised how different peoples with different philosophies see reality. I could take the example of aboriginal tribes and what I learned from Huston Smith about their ideas of "oneness with the earth", but I think I'd like to direct you to Actual Idealism and Giovanni Gentiles. Many many Italian works from this period have not been translated into English because of WWII and I am not advocating any political system here. But the idea of Gentiles that we swallow up and become one with our country (ontologically) by literally being one "great Mind" in the "soul State" (each nation has a government and again im not promoting politics) was probably believed by many nations, tribes, and empires of the past. In the West we think only in terms of individual souls and believe that this view is the most accurate and advantageous. Lateral think might be dangerous, that's true.. but sometimes truths can be found where you don't expect them. The idea of individualism as understood in modern times might have started with Descartes. There was hundreds of thousands of years of humanity before him..

Do you exist more than a moment? Are you a different person every day? Will your subjective experience continue after your death? What are the theories of mind that match with Closed Individualism? — Philosophuser

The following is based on a model that just makes sense to me. For discussion purposes I'll make a distinction between "physical" continuity and "identity" continuity. By analogy, suppose I just plant an acorn and it grows up to be a tree. Then there's a thing I mean to be describing by claiming that the acorn grew up to be a tree... that thing is physical continuity. Factually speaking, acorns can become trees; they don't for example become tigers. Were I to plant an acorn, I should not be horribly surprised if it didn't sprout. Neither should I be surprised if it grew up to be a tree. But I should be horribly shocked if it sprouted to become a tiger, because that just doesn't happen. So we might speculate about the nature of time, what change means, and what physical continuity means, and there are good questions there to ponder for all of these, but we shouldn't forget that whatever answers we come up with, acorns can grow into trees. However we account for that would be an example of physical continuity.

We as humans have physical continuity just as the tree does. An acorn grows up to be a tree, and a baby human grows up to be an adult human. But trees don't have identities (in the sense we're discussing), because they don't have minds. Humans by contrast do, because we have minds. Note that this doesn't imply we have souls; just that we're distinct from trees in this fashion. But it does imply that identity continuity is a distinct concept.

But what underlies identity continuity IMO is two things; (1) the nature of identity, and (2) the nature of continuity of identity. To explore 1, let's explore why we think there are different identities in the first place. Why do you believe you and I are different people? Well, it seems obvious is one answer, but I think we can do better. There's a reason it seems obvious we're different people... we have different points of view. I see through my eyes and you see through your eyes, but my experience of seeing through my eyes is uniquely different than how I understand that you see through yours. The former is tied directly to experience itself; the latter is entirely theoretical, from this "mind" point of view, which leads similarly to the fact that I seem to have a mind distinct from yours... I have knowledge of things you don't have and vice versa (e.g., I know what color cup is right of my mousepad; you know perhaps what kind of computer you're using). We both tend to believe that our points of view symmetrically apply to other people, but each mind experiences exactly one point of view. One very special property of the mind leads to (2), and that is our ability to remember. We remember stuff from the past, but more precisely, we can remember having had a unique point of view; I remember seeing things through "this" set of eyes, not your set, where "this" refers to the eyes in the past in the physical continuity of this body (not to say I remember everything, but everything I do remember is only through that set).

So my understanding is that this precisely is where identity and continuity of identity comes from. If we add the premise that consciousness is a product of a working mind in a human within an environment (such as what one would suppose from a basic materialist view), then identity and identity continuity can easily be a result of this mind.

This is often discussed with the Teleporter Paradox: if a machine scan your body, destroy it and create an exact replica with other atoms in Mars, is he you, or another person? — Philosophuser

Per the above model, there is an identity staring out of the undestroyed Terran body's eyes, and there is a distinct identity staring out of the Martian replica's eyes. But both identities have equal claims to being the guy who was standing in line for the teleporter five minutes before entering. This relies more on the identity continuity model above than any particular view of time; one can easily believe time to be an illusion, but so long as you can account for the apparent illusion (e.g., that the physical structure of the block is such that traces through time-like directions within this sliver of the universe follow causation-like rules), the entire model of identity can fit into that account.

After your death, since all of your experiences are just based on atoms, — Philosophuser

Well to be more precise... the atoms are just a substrate... as you noted, the body's eventually replaced like a Ship of Theseus. The most we can say under a materialist premise is that the pattern of atoms implement points of view. After death, there presumably being neither a point of view nor a conscious mind that could remember being a person, there would be no sense in which you could say there's an identity or continuation of one.

Perhaps, if consciousness emerge from some particular arrangement of atoms, the brain as a whole is conscious and his activity just make it feel one way or another, allowing you to have always the same consciousness all your life, because what matters is the sistem as a whole. What are the theories about the consciousness that allow you being always the "same", and stop feeling at death? — Philosophuser

...hopefully this model explains such a theory. The consciousness being a particular one is related to it having a particular point of view; and it's being "the same" is related to its ability to remember having one.

We haven't been able to understand consciousness in over 2000 years. Some are now hopeful neuroscience will tell us what it is and how it works, I think that view is very mistaken and they basically are engaged in a category error: thinking that the brain with all it's interactions, will explain how appearances are possible. These are different epistemic domains.

The same problem arises with the self. We don't know what it is. But unless we think about it in a different manner and consider it perhaps as an agglomeration of many facets of reality, we will continue with these puzzles about if I am the same person as yesterday. Atoms and quarks and all that physics stuff are way down the explanatory ladder and are much simpler than human beings. I understand that, given the success of physics, some look to it to explain consciousness or the self. But can physics explain laughter or thoughts?

Why not? I think it should be clear, these things are just very, very different and require different ways of thinking about them.