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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
For a long time, mine was dreamless. It wasn't until I turned off the TV before going to bed that I started to have dreams. I theorize that the external stimuli hindered my brain from creating dreams.
It was a super weird period because my dreams started as nightmares, like my brain didn't know what the hell was going on. Then I drifted through a period of recurring dreams and then lucid dreams. They've settled down into more normal dreams, but I'm still super excited to dream each and every night. It feels like I found music after being deaf or seeing colors for the first time after being blind.
It wasn't dreamless, you just weren't remembering your dreams. If your sleep was truly dreamless for a lengthy period of time you'd be dead.
Often simply changing your sleeping habits in any significant way is enough to get you to start remembering dreams. That's because you need to wake up "unexpectedly" in the middle of a REM sleep phase to have a chance to form memories of them. Normally your brain has its memory-forming mechanism disengaged during REM sleep because there's no good reason to remember that stuff - it's just a side effect of a mental housekeeping routine.
You can also "train" yourself to remember dreams more often, to some degree, by trying to record a dream journal or otherwise forcing your brain to lay down some memories of those dreams the moment you wake up and they're still present in your short-term memory.
Technically, if you remember a dream it's because you woke up during a REM cycle. If your sleep cycle completes fully, then you won't remember your dream and will feel more rested.
I think this is false but I don't have information to refute it other than my own experience. I used to write a dream diary. When I did, I remembered my dreams almost every time I woke up. Not just half the time or 80% but more like 96% of the time. And it was very detailed with multiple dreams tied to each other.
I mean to be honest I wouldn’t say that we “die” at all when you sleep… your mind is extremely active while sleeping, it’s just disconnected from motor control.
It's way more than just that, though. You're also disconnected from your sensory inputs, and furthermore, your conscious experience is interrupted. It's not like you're just in a sensory deprivation tank, because there you'd still experience conscious thought, and the passage of time. It just seems to turn off for a while.
I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it's difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn't require brain activity either. There's a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of "death" is oversimplifying things.
It's terrifying at first, but if you reflect over it further it becomes natural. Sure, we can't guarantee that we are the same continuous individual, but "not sleeping" would only see us have a more profound and permanent discontinuity. It's not a possibility for us. Still, we do carry something of the people we used to be regardless. Consciousness vanishes and recreates itself, as do most of our cells. We are evolving entities, as is everyone around us.
This existential fear is rooted on a desire for permanence that we never had to begin with. There was never a fixed self that we could possibly know.
That there are more than one definition is kind of the problem. And that you'd characterize any of them as "good" sounds more like a euphemism for "good enough for a particular scenario."
A human being is a process of computation. Ending the computation is death. Pausing the computation is, well, simply pausing the computation. It has no profound significance.
(This is also my answer to the "teleporter problem." As long as the computation continues, a change in the substrate on which it takes place also has no profound significance.)
Creating and destroying perfectly identical copies of the information that corresponds to a person neither creates nor destroys people unless the very last copy of that information is destroyed, in which case the person is killed.
Small divergences aren't a big deal. For example, if a person spends an hour under the effect of an anesthetic (or alcohol) which prevents the formation of new long-term memories, this person isn't dying when he goes to sleep and wakes up without any memories of that last hour.
Larger divergences are a big deal - losing a year of memories is pretty bad, losing a decade is even worse, and having one's mind returned to the blank slate of an infant is very close to the same thing as dying.
So what I'm saying is that the two copies start out as the same person and then gradually become different people.