> Would you say that there was a single consciousness that both bodies shared, but that it suddenly split once the meteorite hit?

I agree, this is super weird. In a sense this seems to be the difference between viewing consciousness from the first person vs the third person. But until we understand how (if at all) matter generates felt experience the latter view can not, by definition, be about consciousness itself.

I guess this kind of perspective commits one to viewing first person experience in the way we understand abstract concepts - it is nonsensical to ask what the difference between this "1" here and that other "1" over there is. Well, you can say, they are at different positions and written in different materials etc, but those are not properties of the concept "1" anymore.

So yes, coming back to the thought experiment, one of the consequences of that would have to be that both bodies share the same consciousness and the moment something diverges the consciousnesses do too.

The point about time is interesting, and also directly related to AI. If at some point machines become conscious (leaving aside the question if that's possible at all and how we would know without solving the aforementioned hard problem), they would presumably have to generate quanta at discrete steps. But is that so strange? The nothingness in between would not be felt (kind of like going to sleep and waking up "the next moment").

But maybe this idea can be applied to dynamical continuous systems as well, like the brain.

(Btw this conversation was super interesting, thank you!)