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> Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole

I disagree, it seems to be totally disrupted by general anesthesia. Having experienced it, from my perspective it was time travel in a way that normal sleep never is. When you wake up from sleep there is some perception of time passed, and therefore a sort of continuity. Not so under general anesthesia. The time spent under is simply gone without even leaving a sensation of a missing gap.

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There are some interesting hypotheses around microtubules and their potential role in consciousness; this directly ties in with your comments around anesthesia - I've certainly had a similar subjective experience under anesthesia, when compared to other forms of consciousness disruption (sleep, psychedelics, and seizures).

This talk is definitely out on the fringes, but I find it interesting for stimulating thinking about a lot of this: https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/video/a-brief-history-o...

It's seamless to the experiencer (you don't experience the moments or the objects unexperienced), but not necessarily at a 1 to 1 correspondence with properties of the world. Discontinuities in time is a good example.

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