Cloudscape

There is one thing you know for sure about consciousness, and it is that you are conscious at this moment. All the rest is assumptions. It is insufferably ignorant and arrogant to claim with certainty that one can fully understand consciousness; for there is per definition no way to objectively prove something subjective, let alone subjectivity itself. As we can therefore not even conceive a way to prove what consciousness is today, one might ask if we even ever will.
To those who believe they know what consciousness is, I ask: do you have any proof of your claims at all? Are they even based on anything at all? Or is it merely intuition, rather than reason, which led you to these delusions?
When you can find decent answers to the following questions, I'll believe you:

1) What would happen if you'd stop time for a while and then resume it? Would you still be you?
2) What would happen if you'd separate every atom in your brain from every other and after a while replace them? Would you still be you?
3) What would happen if you'd destroy your brain and recreate it at the same moment? Would you still be you?
4) What would happen if you'd destroy your brain and recreate it a while later? Would you still be you?
5) What would happen if you'd destroy your brain and recreate several identical copies at the same moment? Which would be you?
6) What would happen if you'd destroy your brain and recreate another which has just very small differences? How much difference could there be if you were to still be conscious of that other brain? Would you still be you?
7) What would happen if you'd be cryopreserved and then reanimated? Would you still be you?
8) Do you have any guarantee that you will still be you once you've finished reading this sentence?

If the universe is infinite there would be an infinite number of exact copies of yourself. What would happen if you'd die instantaneously? Would you just live on in one of those copies, as if uploaded? If so, which one? Is this merely stochastic?
But if there can be no interaction between the copies, why would the consciousness end up in one copy rather than another, if they are all exactly alike? If consciousness is nothing else than patterns, then the "selection" of this copy is purely random, and therefore acausal.
This leads to an even more bizarre conclusion: no matter in which way you’d die, you’d always be revived in another copy. Even if your decease would take time, the moment you would forever lose consciousness would not. Therefore, your consciousness would simply be “transferred” to another copy just about to die, so that it is transferred to another, and so forth ad infinitum. If this would happen an infinite number of times, it would happen in an infinite number of different states: at the moment of death, anything can occur in the environment outside the brain. Because this change in the surroundings will recur an infinite number of times, it will be anything at all. This includes changes which may interfere with what happens inside the brain, some of which could save the consciousness just before it vanishes. Thus, in an infinite universe one can, in principle, impossibly die, because just at the moment one is about to lose consciousness, something would happen to preempt it - at least, if patternism is correct.
Also, when one dies, what suddenly becomes so radically different in the patterns of one’s mind that is so fatal? Even then, they will all be quite complex, yet they will no longer give rise to consciousness. If consciousness is caused by patterns, what is it in patterns that causes consciousness? Why will one pattern do so and another will not, even if they are both equally complex and continuous? Even if we can be certain that consciousness is brought about by patterns, there is much that remains mysterious about it: how do these patterns cause consciousness? There should be some sort of “language” which causes it: awareness can assume literally infinite forms, as there are infinite things one can be aware of. But then, what interprets this language, and, again, how?

… Humans trying to understand consciousness are like bacteria trying to understand humanity.