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This is very interesting for me because I have almost the inverse experience of this. When I was a child I was diagnosed with migraine induced absent seizures. I think it was mostly a "we don't really know what this is, but here's a diagnosis so you can stop bothering us". I mostly grew out of it, but a few times per year I'll have an episode.

What will happen is that suddenly and out of the blue I'll completely lose any sense of reality. I'll have words, but that's almost it. I have no sense of self. If it happens when I'm doing something, like walking around the grocery store, I can still identify where I am, and what's going on, but there's no real sense of me doing it. It almost feels as if I'm in a video game and I'm "above" myself. My consciousness completely disassociates from my body. When I was a kid it would scare the absolute shit out of me and I'd panic. Several times I would run away from where I was, thinking I was going to die (it's really hard to explain the sense of not having a self, but it's incredibly frightening). As I've gotten older I've been able to deal with them as they subside within 60-120 seconds.

This sounds similar to depersonalization episodes [0]. I used to have regular episodes myself, and they scared the hell out of me. It didn't help they lasted 10 days, but strangely enough never more and never less. The experience is indeed hard to describe, but the video game analogy clicks with me. I usually describe it as experiencing life in third person.

[0] https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/depersonalization-disord....

Depersonalization is really bizarre and unsettling. During the pandemic while working from home (and shortly after our first child was born), I started to get these periods of time where life didn’t “feel real”. A room in my apartment wasn’t a room; it was just an arbitrary box that my body was inside of. Things that had substance or meaning started seeming sort of “hollow”, and I felt like I was watching a movie about myself rather than experiencing it. I started Googling and depersonalization / derealization showed up in the results.

I’d like to say it’s gone away since it first appeared two years ago, but it hasn’t entirely. The “not real” sensation seems to linger in the background of my life permanently now. I notice it’s worse if I’m stressed, haven’t had sleep, or haven’t hung out with any friends in person in a while. I also wonder if working remotely via Zoom meetings all the time contributes to the problem; it would be interesting to know if diagnoses of depersonalization spiked during the pandemic.

> It didn't help they lasted 10 days

Frightening. The longest I had one was about a day. Most come and go very quickly now since I've learned to manage them. I feel like the longer I panic and think about the longer they last.

I've had a similar experience, but only once, and only induced as an accidental side effect by months of mental and physical preparation. About ten years ago, I spent three months where I almost singularly (outside of my software job) thought about and prepared for a powerlifting competition (amateur, not crazy strong). This would be my second competition (and at the same location), and every night before falling asleep, I would visualize the entire day, from waking up, to driving to the location, weighing in, sitting in the stands, walking up to the platform, and completing the lifts. What I would be wearing, what I would eat, what books I would bring. What lifts I would attempt, and how I would warm up.

During the competition, while I was on the platform, I felt like my consciousness was ten feet above my head, and all my actions happened autonomously, without any conscious direction. I can hear, on the video someone recorded, my father yelling my name from the stands, but in the moment I had no conception of that. I bumped into the spotter while resetting my stance on one of the squats, and didn't even really register or respond to his presence.

It felt incredibly powerful, but that's probably because of all the purposeful preparation that led up to it. I can't imagine how terrifying that would be to have happen at random without any warning.

Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?

Somewhat unrelatedly, I've recently been toying with a philosophical idea: what is the inverse of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that the Self is the only real thing, since it's the only thing that can think. Everything else, and everyone else, may all be false perceptions. So I am real, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination. The inverse of that would be that everyone else is real, and I their collective mass hallucination. Who am I to say that I exist? The best way to exist is to not believe in one's existence. I wouldn't say I exactly subscribe to it, but I do enjoy thinking about it.

> Do you lose muscle control? I imagine you'd still be walking around the grocery store, just without a sense of agency of which steps you take, right?

No I maintain full muscle control, physical feeling, etc. It's much harder to explain because of this. It's more or less sudden onset ego death, which is why it's so frightening when it happens. You can only get so used to it, and even now as an adult my heart still races although I don't panic.

One physical way to think about it is that my movements feel like they precede my thoughts about that movement, but I'm still thinking and bringing those movements into existence. Time gets jumbled during these episodes much like what happens the moment before you're knocked unconscious, but the unconscious part never comes.

The only time I've been able to replicate even a small part of these episodes was when I was very very high. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time and I hadn't had an episode in a long while. I smoked a ton of weed with one of my friends and parts of that high felt like these episodes, though much more subtle. So I would say if you've ever been so high that you have a hard time keeping track of time, and you often get stuck in these mini loops of saying or doing the same thing, it's kinda sorta like that, but not really.

may be you need to look at what buddhists are saying about no-self and hindus are saying about brahman and compare and contrast your experience with these texts. What you are describing looks completely normal (except for migraine) and is in fact expected as per these texts.

Can I quote this story in an anecdotal context in a book I’m writing about Why We Play?

Sorry for such a short, bizarre reply. Your comment and GP are fantastic accounts, and I genuinely appreciate you both for sharing these experiences. Let me know if you have questions, but certainly no need to reply otherwise. Cheers :)

Sure thing!

Thank you!

Are you allowed to drive? Because it seems it would be really dangerous to have one of these while operating a vehicle.

Yeah I can still drive. In fact, I’ve had episodes while driving.

It’s not dangerous. I still know where I am, how to drive, and what’s going on. It just doesn’t feel like I’m doing it. So if I think “I need to pull over” and then I pull over, it’s as if I’ve observed myself doing that in some sort of higher abstracted state. I’ve thought the action into reality, but I had no connection to my body doing the action.

The hard part to explain is that I can still “feel” my body during these episodes. But it just feels like data being processed by my brain. I have no sense that the things I’m feeling are me, or a part of me. This is why the video game analogy sometimes works.

If you’re playing a game you’re making decisions, you’re physically controlling the actions (through a keyboard or controller). You might even have some haptic feedback that you can feel. But you have no sense of that character being you. You have no ego connection to that character, at least not in any meaningful way.

That’s what these episodes feel like. It’s like experiencing an ego death, just very quickly and without any lead up or warning.

Why does it seem that way to you? They specifically detailed they can still act in the expected way, just with dissociation. Nothing inherently dangerous about that. To get a driver's license, I don't think a sense of self is required at all. Just the knowledge of the script.

Huh, most of my thinking isn’t language, and that which is is mostly something of a bad habit, like a voiceover narrator trying to recreate thoughts that already happened (And is quite hard to pull attention away from)

This occasionally leads to communication difficulties in translation into language.

Yeah, I too get an abstract concept fully formed in my head and then have to unravel it slowly and describe it in words. Are you bilingual perchance?

During total ego death (from quite a significant amount of shrooms) where I have totally forgotten who I am, where I physically was, that I am human, or where I came from, I thought to myself “do I exist?” shortly followed by “wow! I still have language! I must exist!”

Shrooms are wild.

That's a literal retelling of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum".

I had an interestingly similar experience. As the shrooms were starting to hit, I recall my internal monologue was racing with thoughts, as if that part of my mind was desperately struggling to hold on to the reins of consciousness. Then suddenly... silence. My thoughts were completely stilled as my mind entered into a wordless state, and the sounds of the world around me became incredibly overwhelming. I didn't last long (I can't give an exact time frame, but it certainly was not anywhere close to two hours), but during that time, I developed a strong sense of empathy of what it must be like to be an intelligent yet wordless animal like a dog or a cat. It was a humbling experience, to say the least.

500 micrograms LSD. Experienced "personality regression." I lost my ability to process and generate language. I had only emotional responses to noises that I heard. Some of those noises were human voices, but they sounded like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: just a wah-wah-wah-wah trumpet-like sound that was more a placeholder for the speech than anything like real speech. The emotions that the sounds caused were basic and strong: a longing to be closer to a voice whose timbre I recognized, pure joy at hearing the rhythm of a song that I knew.

Once my language facilities came back, I could remember only the "shape" of the experience, but none of its contents. I remember feeling the emotions, but I don't have the usual internal voice that narrates them. I knew there were sounds, but I can't describe them well, except in terms of my emotional response to them.

At this point, because of a long history of meditation and other factors you'd recognize, I'm absolutely certain that there is nothing to our consciousness other than a narrative machine that creates who we are using words. This is why I believe were so close to AGI, just looking in the 'wrong' direction. We think AGI should have more than just a self-centered narrative, because we think we do.

> a narrative machine that creates who we are using words.

That's a really interesting thought that I'll have to spend some more time with. It makes me think of an experiment I heard about[0] with people who had lobotomies. The split brain leads to one side having verbal facilities, and each side having one eyeball sensory perception. They showed the non-verbal eyeball a sign that said something like "stand up", and most patients did. When then asked why they stood up, they had unrelated answers, like "my legs were stiff". So the idea that we just create narratives as post-hoc explanations of our actions is pretty compelling.

[0] I really wish I could find the reference to the experiment, but my google-fu is failing me and I don't recall where I read about it.

Sounds like one (of the many) experiments Sperry & Gazzaniga did on split brain patients.

As the person said, they still had qualia while without the ability to form a narrative, and another person has said it was hard to remember, because narratives act as a mnemonic. Having experienced ego-death myself, I can confirm that I still have a memory of the experience, but that it is more of disjointed impressions (hard to maintain memory of the chronology, which a narrative might be able to cement). But I was still conscious and experiencing things; that is precisely the weird part.

You may have a point in some way (not specifically narrative alone, though): It is true that certain anesthetics don't even render us unconscious, but just make us forget what we were perceiving while having our CNS motor functions paralyzed... and maybe deep sleep is similar--while paralyzed maybe we forget our senses moment by moment. But ego death from psychedelics is not the same thing: it doesn't completely erase your ability to recall impressions and images.

Either way none of this explains how qualia can arise other than it helps to remember things for us to have a sense of chronology/persistence of experience, and so I doubt a machine that can come up with a narrative of what it is sensing would magically have qualia (we would have no way of knowing, even if it claimed it did--all we could know is that WE are consciously observing an apparently conscious thing).

I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body. Like "the prestige" the man drowns each night and experiences death, but the clone has the illusion that it has been alive up until the point it was created. In this case I see consciousness and qualia as a temporary instance/shape of neurons activating in unison that is suddenly conscious, but can lose residency, and when it re-forms has the illusion "it" is the same thing and maintains an identity.

Considering it takes many depths of artificial neurons to simulate a single human neuron, and the speed at which learning can regress is so slow now, I think we are a very very long way from having such an instance of consciousness appear in an active neural network. Such a network would need to be so analog that it would be effectively the same thing as actual grey matter, and you may as well just have a baby. At least with a baby you would have a true sense of the responsibility you have in creating such an instance (or persistent series of instances that creates an identity).

> I sometimes think that persistence of experience is an illusion maintained by memory. That every time we lose consciousness then regain it, "it" is simply a new instance that is a clone of the old instance with the illusion it is the same person due to memories and being in the same body.

That makes me think about a saying I've heard about how memory isn't read-only, it's always read-write, and you write back the modified version of what you read. We're constantly changing our past to be more more like what wished it was, and you can see an example of that process in another of my replies in this thread.

> I lost all access to my language faculty...One moment I had thoughts. The next moment, after the last word blinked out of existence, I had only feelings.

It's a common belief, but a myth, that you need language to think. You can tell you don't, like when you can't remember a word but you know what you are trying to say, or when can't remember someone's name but you remember everything about them. Deaf children (certainly before modern times), they know how to think no problem, but they don't have language.

What's odd and sorta frightening is that some people lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. They apparently think in symbols and visual elements.

You think that's odd and frightening? I find it a lot more odd and frightening that y'all constantly hear voices in your heads and think that's normal.

Jokes aside, yeah, I have no internal dialogue, I at best have an internal monologue if I'm specifically trying to express something in language (e.g. to write it down like now).

I wouldn't say I think in "symbols and visual elements" as I also have aphantasia, which means y'all literally seeing pictures (or even being able to place imagined objects in your perception of the physical space around you) in your head feels equally weird to me as the voices.

I find it hard to imagine my future selves ("Where do you see yourself ten years from now?" is hard to answer for me because I literally can't) and feel detached from my past selves (memories are somewhat abstract because of my aphantasia), but I've read that this may be related to my autism. I can anticipate changes/events but it's more like seeing a cartoon sketch than directly interpolating the present and the predicted outcome.

My thinking is definitely spatial though. If I work on anything that requires focus, I sense concepts I work on persisting outside my "peripheral vision" much like you'd perceive a faint directional noise.

I also have terrible memory when it comes to names and dates or mathematical formulas (or chemicals for that matter). I find it easier to memorize processes (if they have a logical flow), which is probably how I ended up in programming.

Oh, and I am terrible at perceiving things like hunger or needing to pee until it's urgent, but that again seems to be an autism (or ADHD) thing.

I don't have an internal dialogue. I think in symbols and visual elements. Sometimes a realization hits but it's never in the form of words or a sentence, but rather like entering a new state of consciousness.

Language is more like a tool than an innate part of me.

It's not that I'm incapable of having internal dialogue, it's just that it is putting in words others could understand a thought, or series of thoughts that happened in fraction of a time it takes to form a single sentence. The result of the thought process isn't something expressed in words, it's internalized knowledge, conclusion or decision

But maybe some people do lack the capability to have an internal dialogue. Why do you feel singled out?

I don't feel singled out, I feel inclined to think that most people do have internal dialogue, but for some it's after the fact, it's not part of the thought process

And others, like me, lack the ability to visualize or recreate music/sounds outside of our own voice in our mind.

For someone who's experienced loss of language, I have to say that your writing style is very vivid and poetic. I could only wish to have even half your diction