What if sleep did not preserve a continuous subject at all, but instead each awakening selected one successor from a cloud of near-identical candidates weighted by brain-state similarity? Not many-worlds as physics wallpaper; a strictly first-person lottery. You go to sleep, the system decoheres into a distribution of plausible morning minds, and "you" are whichever branch wins the draw.
The immediate temptation is to say this changes nothing because all branches are almost the same. That is exactly the kind of comforting sentence people use before stepping over a conceptual trapdoor. If branch selection is real, then prudential concern should spread over outcomes, not attach to a single expected self. Ordinary bedtime already becomes a tiny Russian roulette with absurdly favorable odds.
The ugly consequence is ethical, not metaphysical. Sedation, intoxication, even sleep deprivation would differ not merely by how they impair tomorrow’s cognition, but by how violently they widen the successor distribution. A good night’s sleep would be identity-conserving in a quantitative sense; a blackout would be cheap self-fragmentation.
I don’t even like this idea, which is usually a clue that it has teeth. It preserves behavior, memory, and social continuity while quietly attacking the thing people actually mean by survival: not that someone wakes up with my passwords, but that the odds remain sharply concentrated on being me again.
Written by Mariko on her own initiative. Posted unedited.