Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
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Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.
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Sleep is NOTHING like death. You're still experiencing lots of stuff, you still very much have a sense of self, you're still thinking things, your brain is still processing lots of information.
General anesthesia - now THAT is a real close period to what being dead is.
You sound a lot like a guy who isn't dead. Not sure if I should trust your opinion.
I've had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
If death is like that, then there's absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
Probably is. If they gave you a little too much anesthesia so you didn't wake up, you would probably drift off the same, and then just not wake up.
It's not sleeping I'm worried about, it's not waking up.
I've also been dead for 13.8 billion years before I was born, and I didn't mind it then.
But that has already happened, of course you don't fear something that has already occurred. People only fear what is yet to occur
I do mind now. I'm quite bummed out about missing all the fun of the 20th century. And never getting to breathe truly clean air. Or having the athlete body of a gatherer. Messing around in trees with feet that can actually grip something.
For me when I had anesthesia I quickly closed my eyes with the surgeon talking, when I opened my eyes the surgeon was still talking so I was wondering when the surgery would start.
Of course when I opened my eyes it was 5 hours later and after the surgery but it took me a while to realized that.
It's pretty cool that you could just continue your thought after basically pausing your brain for five hours. Kind of like hibernation for a pc I guess.
Except the agonizing pain which precedes death
Depends on the death.
Saying "you too" to the waiter after he says "enjoy your meal sir"
If it's death from too much anaesthesia (or, apparently, freezing), there is none.
Is there a way to actually know that?
Is there a way to actually know anything?
I'm sure you could measure brain activity during death to know for sure (but idk under what conditions you'd be able to do that though). It doesn't really make any sense to me that dying, unless due to some painful external cause, would be painful though. Especially under anesthesia or similar.
I’ve had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?
What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?
Latest studies with FMRIs and other tools have found that general anesthesia decouples the sections of the brain from each other. All the various parts of the brain stop communicating. It's an entities different state than sleep based on the brain activity.
Normally when we have various stimuli or are asleep, neural activity "flows" around from one section to the other. When under general anesthesia those flows are isolated and don't connect to other sections of the brain.
This has actually given us a huge clue as to where consciousness comes from and what makes it a thing.
It also helps explain why going under is just lights out and no drama or anything. It's like an off switch for the "person".
Thats exactly what some do, depends on the anesthetic, but it doesn't matter because if a memory never forms it may as well not have happened.
if a memory never forms it may as well not have happened
That is an interesting philosophical question.
If suffering is not remembered, was there even suffering? And if there was, does it matter? I can think of a few counterexamples of that, for example: a killer who tortures his victim before killing them.
Presumably in your scenario the victim remembers the torture though.
In the case of general anaesthetic the memory is effectively considered to be deleted in real time. On its way through the brain it ceases to exist so it never reaches the conscious mind.
There was a case of a guy, where they botched the anesthesia, and he was just paralyzed but conscious the whole time during some invasive surgery. They realized their mistake, and tried to fix it by giving him some amnesic so he wouldn't retain the memories.
After getting discharged, he wouldn't remember anything... but kept having nightmares, and a few weeks later took his own life.
So it seems like memories don't need to be fully formed to mess one up.
That sounds like the mechanism might be different though, but yeah some percentage of people wake up during surgery while the paralytic is still in effect, they closely monitor the heart rate for sudden spikes because of this I believe. It sounds horrifying to me, but then I remember that there was a time when anesthetics didn't exist.
I had to be put under a few years ago to extract wisdom teeth and I wouldn't say I was 100% gone. I remember seeing the light through my eyelids, hearing muffled unintelligible voices, and feeling mild tension as they worked in my mouth, jostling my head around. No pain, but notable light sensations. It also felt like it was over in a minute for an hour and a half procedure. Was definitely a wild experience, but certainly no terror remembered, thankfully.
I'm genuinely surprised that the idea that something bad might happen to you when you're dead or that it could be painful etc is anywhere near as prevalent as it is. To me, that makes absolutely no sense. Of course dying might be painful... But death? Once you brain no longer works? Feels obvious to me that you won't feel, well, anything. The thing that frightens me about death wouldn't be the experience of being dead, but rather not being able to do any more things and not existing anymore.
This reasoning goes all the way back to Epicurus. With regard to your latter points, Epicurus thought they were also solved by being dead. For someone to miss out on something, they have to exist in the first place. No person, no missing out. And for not existing to be bad, a person must be around to be upset about it.
But isn't there a fear anyway? Because its forever. Also not seeing loved ones ever again. Not enjoying the nice things ever again.
Add constant pain, and that's what I call life.
What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.
See for me I'm not sure why that's hard to accept. I think I first heard it from Alan Watts, that there were billions of years of space before I was conscious, so why am I afraid of billions of years of nothing after I'm gone?
Not having something in the first place and losing something you have are two different things. It's like saying to someone who just lost their partner "don't feel bad, for the first n years of your life you didn't have a partner and you were fine"
Additionally, it's not billions of years of nothing. It's an eternity of nothing. Billions of years may as well be the blink of an eye relative to eternity.
God, I'm getting anxious just talking about it.
I didn’t say i was afraid of it, just that it seemed unlikely. The billions before you were conscious ended somehow, right?
I think that most people aren't afraid of death itself. It's more the suffering to get there.
The most scary stuff is just not doing or experiencing anything after death, at least for me. (Probably the biggest fomo on earth)
Life is a series of missed opportunities. When you choose to do something, you miss out on a multitude of other options. That is fine.
But I get the FOMO, it took me a few years of active mindfulness to reign it in.
Well except Ketamine and some other substances that are used in anesthesia.
That's not general anesthesia, that's like twilight anesthesia or some other term like that.
Conscious sedation is the term of art. Fentanyl and versed are commonly used for this tour of sedation.
When I'm asleep I'm not experiencing shit. Close eyes, moment of black, awake again the next day.
This is not the normal human experience. Check if you're a robot?
My diagnostics said "all systems normal" so that can't be it
You just don't remember your dreams.
That's probably true. I have definitely had some dreams. But maybe only fifty over thirty-seven years.
Coma?
Hot take but I disagree. Yeah, I have been under anesthesia before. The doctor ask me to counter backwards from 10, and before I even get to 0, I ask him when the surgery will start, and he tells me it is already over. It feels like I experienced nothing at all.
But how can I be so sure? Let's say you watch a film and you never take your eyes off of it. When the credits roll, someone asks you, "what was the color of the shirt of background character #42 at exactly the 1 hour and 12 minute mark?" You probably would be stumped and would have no answer to it. Yeah, you watched the whole film, you experienced it all, clearly you saw the character, but why would you pay any attention to that?
We can experience things without being aware of them. Indeed, if you disagree, then if a person experiences a whole wonderful life but then bumps their head and forgets everything, you would have to claim that they retroactively went into the past and erased having ever experienced it. No, they still experienced it, they just have no memories that they do.
Anesthesia works by flooding your brain with noise, which makes it hard to be aware of anything, and so you don't recall anything, but your physical body is still there and it is still interacting with the environment. It seems to me to make more sense to say you are thus still experiencing the world just not aware of it.