Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
nautil.us
nautil.us
It just seems that the brain is a physical system, and consciousness is a result of its physical processes. If you change the operation of those processes then you change states of consciousness. All the attempts to explain it otherwise seem inconsistent with the behaviour we observe.
I loved your analogy. So using the same analogy, is it possible that the radio's frequency tuning is changed (if the brain is a receiver for consciousness) or going under anasthesia is an interference that stops it from receiving things at all (if chemicals can manipulate the conscious state) ?
I tried to make the analogy simpler. For thought experiment assume the brain is essentially a pocket calculator. Its lcd screen output is conscious state. It's a state, anyways. Just because you can alter the state you get after "1+2=" (pressing buttons, throwing acid onto the circuit board, etc) doesn't invalidate the number 3. We can agree on the concept of 3 and point to instances of 3. We can output 3 in different instances of calculators, even the human brain (in this experiment, at least, but I've heard even ants can count). The kicker for me is with a big enough lcd screen like one of those fancy graphing calculators you can output not just 3, but a picture of any such ideal, including a picture of the idea of a pocket calculator! Self reference. So what's up with that 3 and always running out of batteries?
Hard to say anything else at this point. Curious about what people may suggest. I'm sure it's not new.
Can we all agree on the concept of 3 though? :) I mean PhD dissertations are written and successfully defended each day pro-and-contra 3.
Do we have a shared concept? Is 3 the same for a research mathematician and a 5 year old?
In practice if it works it works. The same with colors, or music, or ... well, any sort of thing and associated qualia. After all when you say 1/3 + 2/3 most people will say 1 (hopefully, though I have no idea how well known fractions are), but those pesky programmers might just laugh and say that you can't even represent them accurately.
This shows that integers (and the natural numbers) and basic arithmetical are so old in our culture that they truly are probably shared with 99.9% of humans (or let's say English speakers). But if we step a little bit outside of that by taking 4 and 8, then you might like them because they are nice powers of 2, but some Chinese people might not like 4 because it's association with death (but do like 8 because it's association with wealth & success).
And so the question is: the mind that wakes up is the same as the one that went unconscious? Is there even an abstract concept of our minds? (How tied minds are to their physical representation?) Solipsism states that despite everything indicating that there are things independently (materially or not) outside of our mind it doesn't matter because our mind is truly the only thing we have, we are, we'll ever have. (It can be a complete simulation, it can be just a dream, we can never know!)
Joscha Bach's "computationalism" (maybe he doesn't call it that) says that consciousness is evolution's answer to "how to regulate the organism in relation to other self-regulating organisms", so it's a self-directed attention of intelligence (which is also a model of things that we pay attention to). In this regard consciousness is just as part of the population as the genome, so while there are definitely you and me, but at the same time it's the same "evolutionary software" just running on a big shared pool of brains. (Which also means that we could compare every concept via computation - eg. enumerating its properties (and so on the properties required for those properties of course, so infinite regress creeps in), and this means that we can have a shared concept of 3, if it's computationally equivalent.)
Similarly, solipsism feels like trying to reason with the kid that shouts "LALALA I CANT HEAR YOU~" at the start of each sentence.
I'll have to think more about evolutionary pocket calculators and computational equivalence. There's definitely some sneaky stuff at play https://youtu.be/92WHN-pAFCs
Wait, what?
So get a wood panel, put a few pegs on it, submerge it in soapy water and then slowly raise it from the water.
The soap film that forms between the pegs wants to minimize its surface area (to maximize its energy) so it forms a Steiner tree beteween the pegs, but .. not always!
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1720 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=122
> solipsism feels like
Yes, exactly, yet it's unfalsifiable. Which makes it unscientific, but doesn't make it incorrect. It's just a maximally useless (trivial) model of the world.
Isn't the trivial solution in the non-material case just regular mumbo jumbo? Ie. the connection between the consciousness and the body is severed by propofol while it's active, and so memories are not formed to keep you sane, or whatever? It stops when it gets to Nirvana, etc?
All the attempts to explain it with non-materialism seems to very bluntly fail Ockham's razor. Sure, before fMRI and anesthesia it was a lot easier to compare the two theories and not see the huge extra burden for proof of any kind of non-materialism.
Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so
I think you speak from an already materialist perspective, in that you accept the physical world as something that really exists out there, and that your own subjective being is less tangible or somehow illusory compared to that. That is the opposite way round from how Buddhists felt it obvious to consider it, which was to always frame everything from the first person, human experience (the five skandhas, the eight consciousnesses, etc.)
Personally, I think it's simpler and more obvious to have that first person explanation from the point of view of where I actually seem to be, rather than an explanation that everything I see is real but somehow I am not. Why would I see my immediate experience of reality as less real than the objects that I perceive to be external to me?
> Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so
Backtracking a bit from that little word "theory", it's foremost about being able to formulate predictions about the real world. So, designing a suspension bridge over there, how much steel do use per cable? 1 ton? 2 tons? 42? Use the eight consciousnesses, sure, but get the answer, build the bridge, and be the first one to cross it.
If you don't have two competing theories that offer a prediction, there is nothing to apply the Occam's razor to.
A theory which is a mix of physics (for steel bridges, etc.) and Buddhism (for this or that domain) does work for many predictions. It is also inherently much more complex than "only use physics".
A "model" is predictive, but a "theory" explains. A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future. A model of consciousness would. This word has just been mixed up a lot in science. The reason is that theories in physics are almost always also predictive models. However, this is not usually explicitly the case in philosophy.
If you don't feel the need to predict anything about consciousness in the real world, I'd say I won't be interested in such a "theory" (or "explanation"). But glad to see your take on the definition of the term.
Going back to Occam's razor, if you only apply it to get the simplest map (in some sense of "the simplest"), and abandon verifying whether it predicts the territory or not, it seems a blank map always wins.
To be fair with humans, the simpler theory is almost always "my neighbour is a witch, she did it"
Hand waving complexity as that thing you feel in your gut instead of having some proper definition for it was and still is the standard human experience
Then why appeal to Occam’s razor?
I prefer not to use the 'illusion' terminology because I think it's misleading. We do have a real experience of consciousness, just not always. For me Buddhism and panpsychism, and the idea of consciousness as being fundamental is a hierarchy inversion error.
If consciousness is a computation or an emergent phenomenon of brain activity processing information, then we are a kind of information system. It doesn't therefore follow that all information systems are in some way conscious. That's like saying horses are all animals, therefore in some way animals are all horses. Yes we have some things in common with all information processing systems, so we have some of the same features like persistent memory and such because we're members of the same conceptual category, but that doesn't make us the same thing.
Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)
If the world arises from consciousness, we would expect that changes in conscious states would persistently alter consensus reality. But we never see that happen.
The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.
Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.
There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.
[citation needed]
The mind is not a physical thing, that's correct, but we need not claim the existence of anything non-material to explain the mind. The mind - or more specifically consciousness is made of information, which is 100% encoded in matter, hence materialism. (See Joscha Bach's detailed description of this.)
> But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Yep, and that's platonism in a nutshell, but that doesn't contradict materialism either.
Entities are encoded in our brains.
You could have stopped there. A thing that is not physical, exists. Bye bye materialism. Materialism is monism, holding that things are only made of one kind of 'stuff', specifically physical stuff. You can't get around that by saying that "you don't need to invoke anything non-material to explain" non-physical things. The mind is the non-material thing. As soon as you say it exists, you've thrown out materialism. The thing you're trying to defend is physicalism, which is an entirely different ball of wax. Physicalism is exactly the sort of 'multiplication of entities' that I was referring to in the first paragraph of my original reply.
> Entities are encoded in our brains.
That doesn't make them physical, any more than '4A' is the same thing as 'J' because that's it's ASCII representation. An encoding is not the thing. The representation in the brain is physical, the thoughts in the mind concerning them as well as the entities themselves aren't.
The mind is a description of the organization/structure/function of a chunk of matter. And the matter part completely determines the non-material part, hence materialism, no?
> If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s happening in the recording studio.
Interfering with a radio distorts the transmitted, outcoming sound. You could say your perceived consciousness is just that: something transmitted from an origin. The state of the brain could then very well mess with conciousness. It could add or remove harmonics, delay, EQ, filters, etc.
> There is only one reality per person. It is set up by the soul specifically to obtain experiences from. We do not share our reality with anyone. It only looks that way.
> To facilitate educational growth, Souls create “Realities”. Realities are a classroom that Souls can grow through a surrogate “human”
> Soul places an “interface” within the constructed “reality”. This is known as “consciousness”.
> The universal template consists of every single human, and every possible action that they were involved in, from the earliest dates to the end of humanity. The soul selects individual realities out of this universal template.
> Once the experiences, and the lessons, are finished the consciousness leaves the physical reality. It returns home to soul.
> There are a (near) infinite number of world-lines that a consciousness (person) can experience.
> Consciousness can migrate from one reality to another reality. This is commonly known as world-line travel. As such, these changes help to bring about desired experiences and lessons
... and so on
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/consciousness-migration-...
- Taking red paint and spraying it over your wall will modulate the dream in such that the wall appears red.
- Taking a hammer and hitting your head will modulate the dream in more unpredicatable ways.
What if these processes are the same? It's nothing but stuff made out of consciousness affecting consciousness.
I think of it similarly to how atoms are mostly empty space - we can know that's true but the main thing that matters most of the time is that you don't fall through the floor, so we reason about the world as if solid objects are actually solid
Obviously I'm just making stuff up, and I don't actually believe any of this.
I had some dreams when I was anesthesized once. I do no longer clearly remember them, but I do remember telling the medical people there, that I did dream something. How could I dream without consciousness?
Reasonably I think stop of consciousness is both not storing and not reacting to.
My only point is that to be conscious is tautologically to know that one is conscious. And knowledge is dependent on having (= being able to recall) a memory of something. Yes, colloquially there are instinctual forms of 'knowledge' where you get some vague sense something must be true (despite having no information to determine one way or another), but I'd suggest that's probably a misuse of the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness Here's a better source with more levels
I've had dreams when sleeping where in the dream several minutes or even hours seemed to pass where something happens at the start of the dream and the rest of the dream is trying to deal with it, such as an alarm going off. When I wake up, I find that the thing that started the dream, such as an alarm going off, is actually happening for real and it just started a few seconds ago.
It seems then that the time experienced in a dream can be much longer than the time actually spent in the dream, and so it is possible that every dream remembered is one that occurred just before waking up.
In fact, non-material monist views exist! See, for example, Kant and Schrödinger. Some of Wolfram’s ideas[0] at first approach seem to be interpretable from this angle.
I’m not going to do the entirety of monism justice in a paragraph, but as one take: perhaps interacting with other conscious entities involves changes in yours and tends to manifest itself as physical changes within time-space, a lossy map constructed as a shortcut/interface to the otherwise overwhelming underlying territory? This does not require conjuring an entire universe, with its arbitrary laws and constants, to explain perception supplied by consciousness (the only thing we have direct access to, that physicalists nevertheless tend to treat as a magic side-effect of magically existing reality).
[0] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2022/06/alien-intelligen...
Also see Buddhist philosophy such as Yogacara
Doesn't that perspective require a magically existing mind, which happens to magically discover an entire universe with consistent laws and constants as a side-effect of its experimental enquiries? Not much gained by the change of perspective, then?
And no, I don’t think an elegant explanation is one that magically conjures up the existence of an entire universe that’s not directly accessible except as a representation within said consciousness.
All one needs to do is look at Oliver Sack's books to understand that either of these must be true:
1. Consciousness is a physical system. This is the simplest explanation and accounts for all observed phenomenon.
2. Consciousness (or "soul") is metaphysical but is such a blank slate or so dependent on the physical state of the brain that we can exclude all consideration of it. Memory is clearly physical otherwise brain damage wouldn't ruin only some memories or the ability to comprehend certain things (such as right-left agnosias where someone loses the concept of the left side of the world both currently and in recalled memories). Brain chemistry very _obviously_ influences mood. Mind-altering drugs can induce temporary personality changes. It goes way beyond simple "radio receiver" analogies like alcohol inducing distortions. Your ability to understand anything at all, your ability to remember anything at all, even your personality can be dramatically affected by brain chemistry and physical state.
There are just so very many examples of real situations involving the brain that require extremely complicated hoop-jumping to maintain the idea that "you" are anything beyond the physical process happening in your brain. They all devolve into claims that the metaphysical essence is so dependent on and influenced by physical brain processes you can just cut out the metaphysical part with no loss.
If a stroke or dementia can make me a much angrier or violent person then what need is there for a soul?
Why even go beyond 1? It feels like people want there to be something more
We should not exist per Occam.
If you can hold on your awareness that the atoms of your body are not 'matter' but signatures of energy bound in a field, then the physical brain is much harder to consider the real and constructing element of reality.
I think many of these discussions are just measuring the difference in what we each perceive as the lowest building block.
Everything we are is wavelengths of energy. This isn't something metaphysical. Electron, proton, nuetron are all combinations of quarks which only exist independently as a discrete quantized energy in a field. The orderliness of the field is dependent on how much energy is exchanged for (converted to) mass. What is mass? Voltage - per modern understanding of physics. So the defining characteristic of reality is potential.
If we exist in this way as a consciousness then there is every reason to believe consciousness is pervasive in the universe
Taking it further, is the atomic world the only medium where this "me" could be represented? What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?
What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?
If it is a perfect digital model of you, yes. Since you feel consciousness, the digital copy must also feel it. Otherwise it would not be "perfect".
In the case of the model, "feeling" means that some bits (probably a big number - billions or trillions) inside the model would flip their state.
> What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?
I believe that the mind is sustained by a particular set of physical atoms. A human brain is ~1.5 liters of water plus ~0.5 kgs of other stuff.
In theory you could represent consciousness using whatever else physical objects you wanted. In practice, the mind-bogglingly big numbers and processes involved that make it difficult. If you used grains of sand to represent atoms, each neuron would take ~450 liters / 16 cubic feet of sand to model, assuming that you can make each individual grain of sand act as an atom.
There's also the fact that modeling how atoms behave exactly seems to be extremely computationally expensive. Apparently Quantum Mechanics don't like being modeled on a non-quantum computer, and you rapidly reach the "you would need a computer the size of the whole universe in order to model that" limit very quickly. So your grains of sand would need to be Quantum-aware Grains of Sand.
You might end up needing a Jupiter-worth of grains of Quantum sand. I don't recommend using this approach. Definitely don't try to model the human brain using pebbles.
Good point
We barely exist. Our history spans only a brief part of the Universe's history, we are confined to an infinitesimal bubble of all the space that is available. When we consider the Universe as a whole, Occam is correct. We are not even a rounding error.
But also: the Universe itself should not exist, per Occam. Yet it does. And we do. So let's work with that.
I mean we don't believe in fairies and santa claus anymore since we know how and why they were made up, but sure there is some utterly inexplainable magic that breaks all physical laws that we know... just to feel more special? Give our immortality a chance?
I do believe a lot of weird, illogical and sometimes completely fucked up beliefs simply come from common utter dismay of most folks when confronted with their mortality and the very real and perfectly fine chance that once we die that's it, our version of this universe and all of our experiences, loves and fears will simply vanish, forever. Every single religion primarily address this fear, the rest are mostly rituals folks made up early enough for them to stick around and management political structures just like in any other office.
For people brought up in religion this is simply unacceptable, whole world falling apart. Why any parent still does this to their children is completely beyond me, but I guess road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
I may be wrong and most logical solution may not be the right one, and that would make me in fact very happy. But religious people are mentally cornered, they can't accept any other option without their world breaking apart in the seams. That's a position of weakness and fear on the most important topic in life.
If you consider that only the atoms "count" for existing, then the line does not exist. (Neither do the stones, by the way - since they are constantly exchanging minor quantities of atoms and electrons with the rest of the environment, the set that defines what each stone is is constantly changing. But let's ignore that bit). The line is a "mathematical abstraction", layered on top of the "real" world.
Now consider that you measure and define exactly where that line is, according to the system of coordinates that you prefer.
Now imagine that you remove the three stones. Now there's no atoms "sustaining" that the line any more. But in a sense the line is "still there", it's defined by the coordinates you wrote. It can be argued that it has always "existed" - before you put the stones there, before Earth existed, that particular line in space already "was", in the same sense that numbers "are" - that the line has existed in some way or another since Space itself started existing.
You now pick 3 bottle caps and put them on top of the line again. Now the line is again defined by 3 clumps of matter. Does it "exist" any more than it existed in the previous two cases?
It all comes down to how we use the verb "exist" - it means several things depending on the context. "Exist" in the atoms world, or "exist" as information.
I believe that mind and consciousness is a bit of the same thing, just many orders of magnitude bigger. Instead of 3 stones what defines a mind is trillions of neurons arranged in a certain way. I am materialistic, but I believe in the be encoding of information. To me this means that each mind, at some point in time, can absolutely be "encoded" into a big enough number (huge, billions of trillions of digits). So in that sense minds are "defined by atoms" but also "exist independently of atoms, and are eternal".
I take my cue from the physics of information theory and computation. In that view a computation is a process physically performed by a system. The same applies to mathematical calculations. The result exist independently in some transcendent sense, but in order to actually obtain a result a physical system has to perform the process. That physical system exists independently of the abstract mathematics, and independently of any other system performing the same calculation, or computation.
In the same way my brain can have a thought. I can perceive a colour. The pattern of activity might be extremely close to the activity associated with you perceiving the same colour. It might be identical with the pattern of an identical clone or twin of mine experiencing the same perception. Nevertheless they are separate, unconnected, completely independent activities that just happen to have similar interpretations.
That's a strict physicalist view, and it's one I subscribe to as being the most plausible. Nevertheless I'm a human being, I have children, I care about my family and friends, and humanity generally. So clearly patterns matter to me as a person, but that's just in my nature. I don't see any reason to think it's fundamental to anything, because thinking that way IMHO leads to some very wooly thinking. just because gold is shiny and pretty, that doesn't mean I think there's something cosmically magical or special about those wavelengths of light. The experience and appreciation of things is important to us, but it doesn't define reality.
The lines you describe are placed by your intuition. Most math is intuitive as such, and exists outside of mind, which is why anybody can "discover" axioms, ratios, etc.
If your notion was correct, only a perfect atomic ordering inside the brain would create a precise and useful thought, such as how to find the ratio of radius to diameter.
I think abstract reasoning can be done by machines (up to a point) and I have also spent enough time online to know that we humans are not always capable of exercising it, even if we seem conscious. I don’t understand why you say I mistake the two.
The invisible line can very well be a line on a map that defines where a highway gets build.
The last part about perfect atomic ordering, I didn’t understand, sorry.
Or so it seems. It's entirely possible that consciousness is just post-factum rationalization of what the body did.
Have you noticed that sometimes you make a decision but don't do it, and sometimes you make a decision and do it?
> If your notion was correct, only a perfect atomic ordering inside the brain would create a precise and useful thought, such as how to find the ratio of radius to diameter.
Does not follow.
Absolutely. Sometimes I'll notice in my meditation practice that something will arise and then I'll watch it get labeled by my brain and brought into cognition, but there is a gap between it. It's like watching the brain/body work something out and then present it to your awareness.
If that were the sole reality my case would still stand, for you then become aware of something you did, and react; ergo consciousness does effect the body, etc. This is basic physics.
Nor does your argument exclude mine. Why would you need consciousness if it was merely "post-factum rationalization" with no feedback effect? By your logic, we could live exactly the same without the consciousness.
consciousness can be a side effect, like log files. Every time you send an email you get a line in log files, but the email wasn't sent BECAUSE of log files.
> Why would you need consciousness if it was merely "post-factum rationalization" with no feedback effect?
This is a good argument. It could be like the concept of color. We needed a way to distinguish good and bad food, so we have color vision and we created the concept of colors (which are simplifications and abstractions of real world, but useful ones).
And when we have these abstractions we use them sometimes in ways that have no relation to reality, like talking about feeling "blue".
Similarly we needed a way to know where to stop when searching for root cause on cause-effect tree. When somebody hits you with a stick it's useful to attack that person and not the stick (too early termination) or their mother (too late). So our models of the world had to have the concept of agency and consciousness. It doesn't matter that the concept is correct, it just needs to be useful. Just like naive understanding of physics like "everything thrown falls down and everything slows to a halt if not pushed" is wrong, but useful so we have it built-in.
These calculations don't need to be conscious, consciousness can still be an illusion, but the distinction remains useful.
If you insist we learn from our memories that are constructed around the concept of consciousness - therefore consciousness have effect on our lives - I can grant you that, but that doesn't mean consciousness is real any more than kids behaving well to get presents prove the existence of Santa Claus.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...
So if consciousness exists in the same manner that imaginary lines you draw between stars - fine. Why does it matter?
It doesn't need to matter to you, it only needs to matter to them.
As one of the leading researchers on consciousness, I'm surprised he's not mentioned at all in this. He is extremely fascinated by how consciousness goes away under anesthesia.
" But I’m agnostic about whether at the end of this programme of trying to account in physical terms for properties of experience, there will still be some residue of mystery left, something more to explain."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/21/neuroscienti...
He doesn't believe there is a "hard problem" as described by others and dismisses that as shorthand for there being something mysterious we don't get. In a chat with Sam Harris the two argue that one out in depth.
I have heard him make the analogy to the Unifying Theory of Physics and admitting that even after all his work there could potentially be some aspect that could have weird quantum qualities, or is bound to dimensions of reality outside of perceivable 3d+t.
And while he doesn't agree with Douglas Hoffman as to there being conscience agents outside of space/time, he is fully in agreement with reality as perceived and currently observable being a whole cloth construction with our senses serving to adjust our individual construct.
The difference is purely ontological in this case. Both emergent materialism and this form of panpsychism would claim your aggregate consciousness has its origin in your brain and would stop if the parts of your brain were separated: both are compatible with physical reality. The difference is that the former would interpret this as a complete disappearance of such consciousness, while the latter would interpret it as a dis-aggregation of this consciousness into proto-conscious parts.
There are also some versions of eliminative materialism that claim consciousness doesn't exist in the first place, and myriads of other positions.
That's part of why it can be attractive to leave aside concerns about metaphysical consciousness altogether.
Panpsychists are committing a hierarchy inversion error. Horses are a kind of animal, but that doesn’t mean all animals are a kind of horse. Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious. Heck, as we are discussing here, I’m not always conscious.
If we define it to be just a human interpretation of an observed physical process, and we believe subjective experience to be an illusion, then the hard problem is not a problem at all. That's comparable to calling an animal a horse: we define "horse" to be a category of animal, but we don't expect it to have any "special" properties for being a horse, and we can relate to lower-level processes all the properties that lead us to define it as a horse. Such properties are empirically measurable and don't behave in any way that would be expected from the laws of physics.
But if we assume subjective experience to be real and to be more than just a description of the physical system, then we do have a problem: we have the burden of explaining where it comes from (which is why theories like emergentism, panpsychism, etc. were created). We can't test such theories empirically, as the only subjective experience we can perceive is that of a fully conscious (in the medical sense) human brain, and we cannot share such experience. That's why the metaphysics of consciousness is not considered science.
> Just because consciousness is a result of information processing, that doesn’t mean all information processing systems are conscious.
Indeed. But if consciousness is anything more than a label to describe a specific sort of system, and subjective experience is real, then we have to show such special "consciousness" (with subjective experience) exists in the first place, and how it can emerge from parts without any form of consciousness. As we're unable to do that in a way that can be empirically tested, such theories are not scientific. Panpsychism is of course no exception to this, as we cannot test whether lower levels of information processing are or are not conscious either.
We're pretty sure it resides in our brain and not for example your toes or other parts of your body since there are plenty of nasty accidents where people lose various parts of their body; or receive replacements for certain things without that really changing who they are or how they think. Also, doctors mess with it intentionally once in a while which definitely has all sorts of effects.
As for anesthesia, that's just using chemicals to knock you out. I once had a mild anesthesia that messed with my short term memory while some unpleasant procedure was taking place. When I asked them when they were starting they informed me it was already done. I have no memory of the whole thing and was apparently "conscious" throughout. Great stuff; would have that again if the need arises.
So, the medically correct answer is of course that a deep coma is virtually indistinguishable from being dead in the sense that there is not a lot going on in terms of brain activity. That kind of is the point of inducing such a level of unconsciousness. It frees up the doctors to mess with out bodies without creating a lot of psychological trauma that excruciating pain might otherwise cause.
"Twilight anesthesia"
Any other explanation involves a lot of hand-waving and vast unfounded assumptions that contradict the known laws of physics. My question for those cases is: how does it work? For example, if there really is a “soul” that is able to influence (and be influenced by) my brain, then what is the physical mechanism for that interaction? Can we describe it in a rigorous mathematical framework that makes testable predictions? In what way is our current description of physics incomplete or incompatible, and how do we alter them to fit this new stuff in? What observations can we make to confirm this?
If someone can answer those questions for the soul, then there’s a Nobel prize waiting for you for completely upending and rewriting our laws of physics.
For example, nutrition is a very complex thing to design proper studies for, and there is nothing like perfectly controlling for all variables. Yet, this situation does not change the basic fact that our diet affects our health.
There’s phenomena that’s beyond our math, science, and logic.
Testible prediction? Socially close people will have similar classifications as opposed to randomly chosen ones (I will leave defining metric space over possible classifications as an exercise to the reader)
No? My prediction holds even if I didn't exist.
> not anywhere near the testable physics that I was looking for.
And now you are moving the goalpost.
Apparently, something to do with brain microtubules & quantum vibrations.
When you're blackout drunk, or under anesthesia, your brain can still infer connections between sequential stimuli (e.g. you can understand words), but none of those memories stay in your brain long-term. I'd say that we were actually conscious during that period, but in the present moment we have no recollection because our memory (for some chemical reason related to alcohol/anesthesia) wasn't stored properly for long-term use.
I imagine the same would happen if we somehow managed to "remove" memories from our minds. After the removal, our current self would not have any recollection of those memories removed - as if we weren't conscious during that period whatsoever.
In conclusion: the feeling of consciousness is deeply related to continuous storage of our life-long memories.
Are you my surgeon? About six years ago I was to undergo somewhat novel surgery and the chappie asked if he could record the procedure, it being a research hospital and all). "Sure," I said, "if you can assure me I will feel no pain."
He said that he could not promise that, but they he could assure me I would not remember it even if it did.
And that's the alpha and the omega of my philosophizing. If I can't remember it happening, did it even? How does this map to criminal justice?
My simple reaction was always this: Yes it would affect the humanity of the surgeons themselves to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is also a below-conscious-memory level of trauma memory as well, so superficial amnesia might not be enough for the patient to be "unaffected".
Relevant part starts around 3:30.
Although it sounds weird the reasoning and explanation on microtubules is pretty fascinating. If you’re interested definitely check that out.
Is it the same under anaesthesia or is it more like being asleep in that when you wake up and come to your senses again you are aware of it being later? Because my overdose felt like I just didn't exist for a couple of hours, it was very disconcerting. I've always wondered what was happening in my brain during those couple of hours.
Now I know what it feels like to be dead.
I remember doing the countdown thing and also trying to see if i could notice it at all like going to sleep. but, just like an off switch, no state change, just a full stop (but without something like "blackness"). First woke up to voices of nurses chitchatting across the recovery room and knowing everything was okay.
But as another comment put it, I can only imagine death being similar (if instant/unexpected/while sleeping/etc), just without the coming back. Which is scarier.
It was pretty weird and amazing, and never happened again. I haven't heard anyone reporting something like this, but I'm almost sure it must have happened to other people too.
I also thought about it reading the comments here.
You can't imagine it, because it lacks time. There's nothing to imagine.
In my youth, I was put similarly under for impacted wisdom teeth. I remember becoming aware of the noises and forces on my neck mid-procedure, then opening my eyes and trying to make noises and facial expressions to get their attention. I am not sure how much time passed before I heard one person say, "he's coming out", they paused their work and then it was lights out until recovery again.
In both cases, the anesthesia was explained to me in advance as mild in that my autonomic breathing would still be there, and I could probably respond to them if they talk to me, but I wouldn't remember any of it. Apparently, there is a deeper anesthesia where you are so suppressed that you need more life support and monitoring.
My experience with general anaesthesia was exactly like that. I was talking about bikes with the surgeon. 0 nanoseconds elapse. I'm waking up in another room.
This is what I imagine death is like.
I mean don't get me wrong it feels good, but there's no way you're able to function at all
Edit: not quite true, I felt a significant chunk has passed but I could not have estimated it. The nurse who was sitting next to me waiting for me to awake told me it was 20 minutes. That was far shorter than it felt.
Other people said they dream like during the night, but had less awareness of time. So not like when I sleep and sometimes feel that this dream is stupid/frustrating/repetitive and either I should wake up now or the dream should change.
I've also fainted from blood pressure drops and that was a lot different. That was much more dreamlike, I remember lying on the floor contemplating whether I should get up or if I was just dreaming. It was all very quick, but felt much slower.
I mean we can observe finite mapping of the mathematical
world onto physical universe. Which in itself is a wonder,
because it exists. I find no reason for it to be so,
otherwise that it is related through common substance.
Even Reals are not real.
Math is mental. Math objects are infinitely larger
than physical world.
Material universe is a special case of mathematical world.
because you can construct infinite physical worlds if you
choose different relations from the infinite.
You can observe infinite worlds through consciousness.
Only one of them is physical.
If there is a hypothetical one to one mapping of
physical world onto a set of models then consciousness
is larger than the physical universe.
The question is whether that is true.
How much of the physical universe is
unknowable in principle.
If the material world > consciousness, then there
exist things that are possible to observe, but
impossible to know.
And the converse, if consciousness > material world
then there exist things that are impossible to observe,
but possible to imagine.
I mean there is physical brain, neurons, observations
and other stuff which is strongly relating self body
and consciousness. But maybe it is so by design?
The question is what is the difference
between me being a brain and me imagining
being a brain.
That is my take into it as I am approaching 30. We will
see my opinion later in life.
Our consciousness is restored when we wake up. But this consciousness can only be considered as such when we are aware of it. Can there be consciousness without self-awareness? Is a deer conscious if not self-aware of its own consciousness? Is an organism with a primitive nervous system conscious? One that purely interacts with its world through simple stimuli?
If you sleep and wake up, does it matter if it's you or not? If we think that our consciousness is purely manifested through our physical, neural connections, than are we ever different, original, born or dead? A physical phenomena such as consciousness is infinitely malleable just like matter.
Being born and then when dead, do you stop existing? Since you're physical, what prevents those same physical patterns emerging again and making you exist once again? Just like when you're asleep, or under anesthesia. Your consciousness, your awareness of time and space stops existing, and once you wake up, you can proclaim that you're still you, because your memories and sense of self are still intact. But what if they weren't? You'd believe you're somewhere else, right? What if you simply died and woke up in another body? But what does that mean? Reincarnation is possible? But wait, if reincarnation is possible, does that mean that everyone who was born and died, will exist once again? Is there a queue for this stuff? N amount of people born out of nothing, are now on a queue to be reborn as something else? Doesn't make sense. But ask, did you ever truly exist? You became out of nothing, rather we consider it "nothing", but again, it's just matter, and now you're something, and then you think you'll either go nowhere, or somewhere else? Another universe? Another body? If two clones exist, do both of them experience reality, does consciousness switch between those bodies rapidly like it's something that exists independently, or do both of them exist at the same time? If one of them dies, does the other consciousness merge into the other? Or dies it go into nonexistence, or does it get reborn? Seriously, it just does not make sense. The questions don't either. We need to approach this differently.
What prevents someone from "not existing". What shackles are there to keep your consciousness to be entirely unique and never reproducible? If we consider it's physical, there are none.
I don't know if all of these rambles made sense, but this reply may sink with the ship, so I just had to get it out.
(I am sure they will settle down, and its for a greater good, but this is one of those 'this may hurt a little' moments)
May not be the case for you but for my entire 20s I simply didn’t realize how much caffeine was actually impacting me.
I had a older relative who often complained about poor sleep. I asked if they drank caffeine in the afternoon and they scoffed at the idea it could be the issue. But I have noticed they are not drinking caffeine late in the day now, and the complaining about poor sleep has ceased.
And then there is those times when time is simply gone. Look at clock, it is 2. Move head next time it is 6... In time that feels like an instant.
"How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?"
"The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions." "Certainly," I replied. "But if we are to use words and names which are not a picture of the actual fact, we shall always be in danger of falling away from the truth." "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing." "Very good," he said. "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed. "Why not?" "Because most of the soul's operations are unknown to us." "But if she does not perceive through the senses, what is the function of the senses?" "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind."
> "How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?"
Red flag 1: it's two wildly different questions in one. Red flag 2: one question makes sense, the other does not.
1. "How is the soul different from consciousness?" This makes sense.
2. "How is the soul different from sensation?" This does not make sense without further elaboration.
I've noticed this type of subtle mistake in a lot of AI drivel: compound statements where one item doesn't quite fit. Now for the real pukefest.
> "The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions."
This metaphor is completely empty. It means nothing. It provides no value.
> "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing."
When did we presume this?
> "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed.
Lol wut?
> "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind."
We've gone off topic and the original question has not been discussed.
When I had my vasectomy, the doctor told me that it was a quick procedure that really didn't need general anesthesia, that local was fine.
When the procedure started, at first I only felt some tugging, no pain at all. But after they finished the first half and started the second, the anesthetic was completely worn off. The pain was excruciating. I almost vomited and I almost passed out.
Afterwards, the doctor told me that was fairly common and that they don't tell people about it because they don't want to "scare them off".
So I definitely don't think I was given the chance to give informed consent. But maybe I am not quite so angry about it, now that I've read this article.
There might be more time passing for the people who are "awake" during this time, but this is not a problem for the universal mind. It simply squeezes the missing time in there and synchronizes individual minds together again later.
Also interesting: The thought "I was under anaesthesia for 12 hours" is itself an object that appears in consciousness.
It also requires ignoring a lot of common sense knowledge. For example, the chicken you left marinating overnight for your breakfast became quite tasty, why is that so if no time has passed?
Why does your body become lighter overnight?
The inconsistencies just keep piling on if you want to believe time doesn't pass when you're sleeping.
Imagine to let go of all stories your mind comes up with to make sense of sleep and time, what is left? In that state there is simply no sleep happening, only perception and movement.
What happens when we die? People commonly think of this as some kind of unknowable mystery. But people lose consciousness all the time and aren't entering the spirit world when they do so. If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like. Maybe a very pedestrian thought for some of you, but as a sincere fundamentalist zealot for most of my life, it was a big epiphany for me.
(Disclaimer: I understand some will disagree intensely — I would have been among you ten years ago. I’m not here to invalidate your sincerely held beliefs, only to relate a change in my understanding.)
Edit: ya'll have dirty minds. Homer refers to 'sleep as the brother of death' in the Illiad. Apparently Buddha said something similar too, though I can't find a source.
Edit2: just going to leave you with this: "each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." – Arthur Schopenhauer
To quote the recent BBC series Versailles: "A little death is good for everyone." Louise XIV isn't talking about getting his eight hours.
"Every day is just another breath, every night another little death"
1. How do you know this? It doesn’t seem obvious that it would be the same before being born as after death
2. How do you know you just don’t remember what happened then?
What's the higher importance of the impact left on the world. As per the comment you replied to, it will ultimately be multiplied to zero for each one of us. That the impact may sustain in the 'living' world feels somewhat like a propagating wave, or may be even a Ponzi scheme.
Looking from a grander scheme of things, life on earth is more like moss on a stone. If our solar system gets destroyed today, our nearest galaxy would not experience the slightest thing for over a million years, and an astronomically miniscule change even after.
What's the true importance of the impact left over the world?
That's a useless hypothetical in my book, we have no reason to believe it will be destroyed any time soon and at the rate we're going, assuming we don't destroy ourselves, in another 1000 years we'll have long escaped the potential destruction of our planet or even our solar system. And a thousand years is a very short time "in the grander scheme of things"
I believe the vast majority of people can not really influence events like nuclear wars or any such extinction events so it's pointless to fear or even take into account. So focus on what you can do better, be kinder to your fellow colleagues, neighbours etc. and find problems and try to fix them in a sustainable way. Those things might seem small but they're important too
In my understanding, it's not about the universe as a whole; only about the impact left predominantly on the lives on the earth.
The answer to a lot of these questions seems to be "we don't know". In our age, there's a cultural trend of pretending we know things, or that everything is knowable. Of course, a lot of things aren't knowable. In actual reality, we function while not knowing. Uncertainty is the nature of existence. Practically every decision and experience is loaded with uncertainty. Just as there's no absolute-reference-point (relativity), there's no absolute-knowledge-point, and that's normal.
In this thread, we are making guesses about the purpose of...well, anything. But the reality is we will never know. Or more: We don't even know whether we will ever know.
Not knowing, for me, is comforting. I like the mystery of the universe. There are so many unknowns; many unimaginable, even magical, things are possible. That's the experience a child has. It carries a sense of wonder.
>> Uncertainty is the nature of existence.
This should be seen as an observation about our universe, not as some kind of law. Existence could have been without uncertainty also. Some of the debates during the older times were like that, as the laws of classical physics have been deterministic. Some people still argue that volition / consciousness links to the non-determinism of Quantum Mechanics.
Isn't the reason why we live just steering through the unknown and finding what will happen next. Some do more and some do less to affect it, but people usually just wonder what will happen tommorow, what will be in a year, some what will be in 50 years.
We only want to do something impactful when we want to experience the consequences in the future.
I think the not-knowing is what drives us to live. The same thing why we await death so peacefully. It's really the gate we don't know anything about and we just await to sail in.
That's the question the comment I replied to asked. What will (ultimately) happen next is that it will (may) all get multiplied by zero. What's exactly the point of steering through the unknown and finding what will happen next, when we know what's ultimately the next.
About the nihilism that in the end everything will be destroyed... Well, there is a part in the bible where someone says that there are never something new under the sun. Our struggles are equal the struggles that someone before had. Our problems are equal the problems that someone already had in the past. And everything that we do is irrelevant in the end. Which is false, and for us that have access to studies in history, we can easily see that is false. We have new problems in modern times. Our development also turned us less irrelevant. While still astronomically minuscule, we are not anymore worldly minuscule. We have power to change the climate in the entire planet, we can even destroy most life and even ourselves with our technology, we are beginning to explore other worlds. What is the limit? It is unknown. If in the antique world it was easy to be mistaken thinking that the limits that they had were the definitive human limits, why wouldn't be also easy for us being wrong thinking that the limits that we currently have are definitive? Yes, now we have limits on how could we deal with the destruction of our solar system. But we could in the future learn how to survive this. We do not know and never will know what is the limit for what we can achieve. Therefore, believing that all is senseless because our limits will trap us in a dead end is a not very useful unbased claim. This is a case where Pascal's wager makes sense: if indeed we will be unavoidably trapped in a dead end, you lose nothing thinking that there is a way to avoid this, but if we are able to escape the dead end and extinction, it is deleterious to believe that the extinction is unavoidable.
I found the first para specifically reassuring.
you exist as a entity in other's minds: which is arguably a larger pool of 'you' than the you in your mind.
which explains the drive to influence others: when someone does something out of 'remembrance' or a tribute, metaphorically they are 'running your code'. extorting influence through these proxy 'you' in other's minds is the goal of some people...
if you solidify yourself in other's minds you might survive as an idea throughout the years - that's the part of you that lives forever... so update and modify your image in other's minds while you still can.
This means what exactly in the grand scheme of things. Hormones circulating in the body, creating some perceptions for the mind, where both may cease when the finite existence ends?
Life means nothing in the "grand scheme of things". It just is. You exist because of a long sequence of random events and then it just sort of ends. There's no deeper meaning, it's just how our universe works. In this brief moment when you get to exist, you can choose to do things which make you feel good.
Good point.
Not about me though, many people derive meaning out of life being infinite, which is what I guess underlies even the conceptualization of reincarnation.
I personally am more inclined towards it being finite, like you said. Under that scenario, the question comes, what do "enjoyment", "happiness", etc. really mean?
>> Life means nothing in the "grand scheme of things". It just is. You exist because of a long sequence of random events and then it just sort of ends. There's no deeper meaning, it's just how our universe works. In this brief moment when you get to exist, you can choose to do things which make you feel good.
I agree in general.
And then I disagree with people viewing suicide negatively. If it just is, just ends, has no deeper meaning, and all the more so is about 'feeling good', then there is (a) nothing negative about someone not feeling good choosing to end it, and (b) nothing negative about choosing to end with a realization that even feeling good ultimately remains meaningless only.
IMO it's like saying "exception handlers are proof that Unix processes can't be terminated."
The default assumption should be that NDEs are hallucinations in a brain moving towards dysfunction.
1. Current life is clearly possible (cogito ergo sum etc).
2. When this one ends, statistically it's inevitable there will be another one. See e.g. Boltzmann brain [1].
The pickle is that the timespan between 1 and 2 could be very long. But since you're not aware of it that doesn't matter. Also, the other pickle is you won't remember it, and that one really burns.
There's an SF story where someone invents a teleporter, and it becomes very popular, but then one of them goes wrong and doesn't destroy the original body.
Sorry, I added the example of the SF story while you were replying to my post. In that story now there's two of the same person walking about, both of whom think they are 'him'.
The really disturbing this is, this might be what our lives are actually like. After all, our brains frequently stop being conscious and then summon consciousness back into being. Is it really the same consciousness though? Or is it a fresh newly synthesised process that just has memories from the last time your were conscious?
I still wouldn't use the teleporter though.
But if consciousness is based on what is percieved from physical world, then the consciousness can really take different forms, be parallel, be one single consciousness, and even not be dependant on time at all.
I think more interesting concept, than comparing death with being partially unconscious, is losing your complete memory. If consciousness is related on having past memories and experiences, how can we say a person can be conscious and function without having any single recollection of anything that ever happened.
And to push it further, in what sense is each moment's consciousness the same as the previous?
(I think there is a beaten up copy buried in my old closet at my mother's house, from when I was a boy.)
In other words, assert 1. and 2., therefore the human race does not die out when I die.
But, assert 1. and 2., therefore my life will continue seems like a pretty big leap to me.
The not-knowing factor (of what happens in your life) is what drives most people to live, so why wouldn't give one a positive drive to actually live life and find out the same thing about death. You just don't skip high school to find out things what life in 40s will be like. :)
Edit: I hope I did't invoke illusion of being religious in any way. It's a purely philosophical way of questioning something you cannot possibly know.
Edit2: Also, other repliers (that obviously read more books than me) explain some really great theories
I prefer to think that there is something beyond a specific configuration of molecules that creates consciousness, but I am unable to understand how that would be able to exist within an individual.
However, I can envision a 'plane' - not a plane of individual consciousnesses, but a field, similar to gravity and electromagnetism etc., and where it is concentrated densely, it creates an individual 'well' of consciousness. When an individual dies, it is my belief that the 'well' ceases to exist, and whatever made up that individual continues to exist as part of the field.
I've got absolutely nothing to support this idea beyond speculation, but it brings me comfort to think that just as though the matter and energy that formed myself and my loved ones exists only as part of a much larger ecosystem of matter and energy, and once our bodies are nothing more than cold soil, our consciousness also becomes part of a much larger ecosystem.
They say that a million atoms that are currently in my body today were also part of Jesus' body. Similarly, I imagine that in 2000 years, parts of my consciousness will also be part of others' consciousnesses.
Consciousness is just the trapping of a pocket of some otherworldly field by certain configurations of matter and energy (i.e. a living human brain).
Dying liberates our pocket of consciousness, allowing it to recombine with the free floating consciousness in the universe.
That's circular logic no?
In any case, a good counterpoint would be blackout drunk people. They are somewhat conscious, and can interact with their environment, but if you ask them after the fact when sober what happened, it would appear to them as if they were entirely unconscious.
Anesthesia proves the brain is (at least mostly) unable to access experiences that take place when it isn't recording, and that, while our mind is present in the brain, we rely on it for recall. That might be enough to draw the line for some, but obviously not everyone.
People who believe in reincarnation must have accepted this long ago, because they can't remember their past lives, or anything that happens in between.
The experience of general anesthesia is: you go under, and then suddenly you are awake (hopefully) after your operation, with no intervening memories.
I don't see how this tells you what death is like. Death is like the stuff in between when you go to sleep and wake up, which you have no memory of (because there is nothing to remember). Nor is going under general anesthesia like going into death, because you believe with high probability that you are going to wake up, whereas if you are going to die you know you won't wake up.
How? Death is obviously very different from your body being alive an unconscious. You are just assuming they must be the same thing. Why make that assumption? The only reason I can think of is that the feeling of “time just skipped” conforms to your pre existing presumption that death will also be like that, but I don’t have that presumption. You would need to argue that death is like losing consciousness, but you haven’t tried to do so, and it’s not obvious at all to me that it is true
Since it is a question I don't think can possibly be ever known, all options may be completely possible.
(For the record: I'm totally with you that there is no life after death. All I'm saying is it's not a slam-dunk, and it is particularly not a slam-dunk on the phenomenology. You need to know a lot about how the brain works in order to conclude that there is no afterlife.)
The sense of identity should by default be associated with the brain, not with consciousness, etc.
I don't know the low level details about how the brain works but...
When you're sleeping and are under anesthesia your brain is still an organ that's alive. Your body as a whole exists and is functioning.
I don't think this can applied to death if our definition of death is that your skin, organs and cells decompose into nothingness relatively quickly. Over time you'll reduce into a pile of bones. Your brain, heart, lungs and everything else is long gone.
Your identity can only be restored at this point if you believe your identity is fully detached from your brain, in which case then you may believe your identity will continue to exist in an unknown state that as far as I know has never been measured or confirmed in human history. That is of course where lots of folks have different opinions.
I'm not here to sell anyone on my opinion but I have been under IV based anesthesia before. It's a legit pause button on what we perceive as our memory or consciousness. You drift into sleep within seconds and wake up as if nothing ever happened, then feel a little groggy along with deal with whatever side effects you were put under for and your doctor will tell you what you were responding to requests during the surgery which means you were able to do things like rest your arm in this position or look to the left, etc..
But the takeaway there is your memory has a gap that can't be accounted for. If your identity is composed of your memory and anesthesia is a combination of drugs that affects chemicals in your body to alter your brain into not remembering things then we've scientifically proven your memory is directly tied into your body (brain included), otherwise if it weren't then "you" wouldn't have been paused right?
Right.
> in which case then you may believe your identity will continue to exist in an unknown state that as far as I know has never been measured or confirmed in human history.
Right again, but note that this conclusion turns on the absence of observation. It's possible that dualism is true and we just have not yet invented the right instruments to measure it. The germ theory of disease, and even atoms themselves, were once treated with the same skepticism for the same reason.
Yes, dualism is false. But ruling it out is not easy.
> your memory has a gap that can't be accounted for
So? My memory has gaps that can't be accounted for while I was awake.
Yeah, I can't tell you what I was doing at any specific minute of time 15 years ago but I can say I was alive back then, at least to a degree of what we generally accept as alive (ie. I'm ignoring any ideas of living in a simulation and not being alive, etc.).
I don't think memory alone is your identity but I personally think your brain needs to exist and be functioning in its normal state to be able to record and recall memories to a reasonable degree and if your brain decomposed to nothingness I don't think you can still have a brain driven memory.
It's also kind of interesting that we have this idea of your "mind's eye". We have a brain, we know a brain exists and we know where it exists within our body. One could say your inner voice is your consciousness right? It's your ability to understand your own self and world around you. To have an inner dialog and then dictate actions based on a combination of reason and impulses.
What's interesting to me is if you don't think about it, this dialog always happens behind your eyes. It feels like it's projected from where your brain physically exists. I think you can throw this inner voice to make it feel like it's coming from other parts of your body but that's only when you purposely try to do this.
To me this makes me highly think that your brain controls this inner voice and if your brain decomposes to nothingness then this goes with it.
Am I wrong? Maybe but I cannot accept that because something hasn't been proven then it may exist on nothing but faith alone.
But that's an inference, not a direct observation. It's possible you turned into a philosophical zombie temporarily without realizing it. How would you know?
> I personally think your brain needs to exist and be functioning in its normal state
Sure, but that still leaves open the possibility that the brain is just a transceiver and the actual locus of your self is somewhere else. That hypothesis is consistent with all observations.
> It feels like it's projected from where your brain physically exists.
Are you sure? Or is this just a reflection of your prejudices? How could you tell?
I never thought of that but I don't know. This sounds like you're remote controlling yourself from a different location or plane of existence? I think I default to Occam's razor here in that we evolved into a meat bag with a surface level understanding that we can talk ourselves into thinking we exist. Basically we know just enough to be dangerous.
> Are you sure? Or is this just a reflection of your prejudices? How could you tell?
Is this not the same for you? Unless I purposely project it in a different location internal dialogs are visualized or felt as coming from behind your eyes, or more generally in your head region. I feel like this has been a thing for as long as I can remember. No one taught us how to do this, we just do it.
[citation needed]
I used to have a severe drug and alcohol problem. I once drank a bunch of beers and took 3 or 4 times the recommended dose of Ativan. I woke up 24 hours later from a blackout and discovered in that time I had walked to the store and bought more beer and some snacks. I had absolutely no memory of it.
So I'm going to say anesthesia is not like being dead. It's more like switching the memory recorder off.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. My point was I was anesthetized but managed to go to the store, buy things and make it back, something dead people aren't able to manage last time I checked.
Like Nicola Tesla, I believe my brain is a receiver like a radio and I actually exist in a cloud of consciousness that we all exist in, so I don't have as many negative feelings about dying that a lot of people seem to have (people who believe they cease to exist)
What I am asking is about your comparison below. You have experienced anesthesia but not death, then how do you say the following?
>> So I'm going to say anesthesia is not like being dead. ...
I walked to the store and purchased things
Dead people don't walk to the store and purchase things
Therefore being anesthetized is not like being dead
We are intending to compare only the first part, i.e., going into the period of blackout. The original commentator's [1] is claiming that the experience of death is similar to the experience of going into blackout with anesthesia. And then, for the latter, the person comes back with partial memories of that going-into phase. Hence the original commentator claims that the experience of death has already been witnessed by many alive people.
I am trying to understand your claim that these these two situations are different.
I'm not getting your point. I am going to assume that like a lot of people you have a fixed conception of being dead and that is you cease to exist. If you believe that, then I can see how you can compare being dead to being anesthetized.
I'm saying being dead may be far different than being anesthetized:
- You die and cease to exist
- You die and wake up from this computer simulation into an alien world
- You die and wake up in Heaven with the God that you've believed in all your life
- You die and are one with the universal consciousness. You return to the ocean of consciousness like a wave crashing on the shore returns to the sea
- You die and wake up in Nirvana or the body of a pig depending on your Karma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana)
And so on. No one can say being anesthetized is like being dead
The current discussion is under the thread of the original commenter, which says:
"... pretty much deconstructed the whole idea of an afterlife in 20 minutes."
That is, we are under "if (there's no afterlife)" branch.
I am not personally settled on which possibility is the reality. So I think we are in alignment.
You hope you go under fully.
[1] https://www.thewrap.com/zappos-founder-tony-hsieh-surrounded...
It's like asking "Where does the car engine's 'brrrrrrrr' sound go when it runs out of petrol?" or "Where does the plane go when it spontaneously disassembles at full speed into a mountain?".
Death will be like waking up somewhere else with no sense of time having passed?
The idea of this kinda scares me? I have never been under anesthesia, but I have kinda accepted that at some point in the not too distant future I will likely need to be for my knees and/or carpal tunnel.
But something about being under it basically being like experiencing death just, it reinforces those fears even more of not waking up.
Like you know it's a possibility, but the connection is a bit of a jarring one.
It is times like this that I understand why religion is so strong. Having the belief that when you do die that you will live on... would be one hell of a comforting one.
I have tried talking to a therapist about this many times and ultimately it comes down to. Fear of missing certain experiences, scientific discoveries, etc. But then logically I tell myself... I won't be alive to fear that?
But then that thought sends me down a spiral on its own.
Like its an illogical fear, the very nature of death you would not have any regrets... since you can't. But... yeah.
It is all kinda of weird.
It's usually the pain before dying people are scared of. That is an understandable fear, one that is commonly exploited by humans (e.g. torture).
Logically I know that I would not be alive to fear it. But it's the illogical side still afraid of that... fear.
You might enjoy this video: https://www.jw.org/finder?srcid=jwlshare&wtlocale=E&lank=doc...
When we make things they are reflections of us
I get that we're all amateurs here, but I think there's plenty of scope for meaningful conversation about consciousness, including explaining what we're talking about.
I went under and then next thing I knew they were wheeling me back to my room. No pain. No fear. I was simply transported from one instant to another.
Thousands of episodes covering all aspects of topics about existence.
That's just what I wanted to read having my first ever surgery planned for next week, another thing to be afraid of happening!
Yes there can be things that go wrong, but that's true with daily life (car crash, etc). You're far more likely to get hit with a case of comparatively mild post-op nausea as any kind of complication, and there's so many more ways to immediately fix that painlessly than even 20 years ago. You should be able to talk to your doc and anesthesiologist in the preparation process 30 minutes before if there's any private questions, concerns, or fears.
Best of luck, and I hope for your swift recovery. Happy to answer any questions if there's any about the process. (Have had ~17 surgeries, some for life threatening issues, and one last week for complicated eye stuff so it's fairly fresh. Just wanted to send words of encouragement.)
HN is special, and this thread is a great example.
Thank you to everyone who's posted!
Why is this so complicated?
The article itself is good but that title, wow. Our minds don't "go" anywhere any more than the illumination goes somewhere when you snuff a candle. Just as the flame isn't high enough to produce significant light your brain activity isn't high enough to produce coherent thought.
It's always Cleveland.
It is said that the Scottish surgeon James Esdaile performed tremendously invasive surgeries, for instance for testicular cancer, using no chemical anesthesia, and making use only of what is now called "deep hypnosis"-—that particular state of hypnosis is called "Esdaile state" among practitioners, and it was popularized by the late Gerry Klein. I formally studied hypnosis years ago with a former student of Klein’s. Although when reading Esdaile's biography he gives a certain “charlatanesque” vibe, "It is an objective matter of record that [...] James Esdaile, an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon employed by the East India Company [..] performed 'pain-free' major surgery on more than 300 cases (amputations, removal of cataracts, removal of massive tumours)" [0].
Dave Elman, one of the most famous practitioners and popularizers of the medical approach to hypnosis, wrote a seminal book in the 1960s titled "Hypnotherapy". In it, he also talks about a very simple but apparently very effective approach to self-hypnosis, which is especially useful for anesthesia. Elman wrote (page 33 of his book) and could be heard saying the same in his medical tapes:
“I usually help myself establish autosuggestion by a cue word. I choose the word "green" because green, in my mind, is God's color. It connotes the pleasantest visions in the minds of the most people. Here are your instructions: Say the word green and close your eyes. Test for eye-closure. When you are sure you have eye-closure, use the symbol word "green" again, knowing that the instant you say it your suggestion will take full and complete effect. Then test to make sure that the suggestion has taken full effect. To release the eye muscles, say the word "green" once again, and your eyes will open. It takes about four seconds to anesthetize yourself. But you must practice. Autosuggestion is a priceless possession.”
In his tape recordings, he instructed the audience on the use of anesthesia through self-hypnosis and encouraged them to test anesthesia, not analgesia, using Allis clamps at the most painful settings: everyone who tried it felt no pain.
Isn’t that amazing?
Zenrin
- Black Francis