Questions on Consciousness

I enjoyed reading this.

> We know that we are currently conscious, and we presume that when we are deeply asleep, under anesthesia, or otherwise incapacitated that we are not conscious.

I slightly disagree with this one statement, but only because of my own perceptual experiences. When I am asleep I am sure I am conscious, partly because I have a lot of lucid dreams, but also, weirdly, I feel more aware of the passing of time while I am sleeping, than when I am awake and engrossed in an activity that I find exciting or interesting.

Additionally, when under anaesthesia, I’m not necessarily convinced that people are unconscious. I think their ability to communicate their conscious experience is inhibited but I think it’s quite plausible that they are conscious. Anaesthesia definitely interferes with people’s ability to recall events. When I have talked to anaesthesiologists about their perception of what it means to be conscious, a lot of them say that memory and recall is an important aspect to consciousness, however as rightly pointed out in this post, having no memory of an event doesn’t mean one wasn’t conscious of the event. I have certainly seen people wake up during anaesthesia as well, but thankfully due to the amnesic properties of some anaesthetic drugs, their memory of it is wiped and they do not recall waking up. More worryingly though, some people who appear to be completely unconscious, can recall having an awareness which is distressing both for them, and the person who was responsible for ensuring they were not conscious. These events make me skeptical about anaesthesia inducing unconsciousness, and rather I think it just incapacitates people, and in almost all cases, successfully erases their recall of events. Anaesthetic awareness is a relatively rare complication of anaesthesia.

Sometimes I think of consciousness as some kind of cognitive mirage where it appears to be something, but the closer you get to really being able to examine it, the further away it appears. Despite all of science and all the technological advances made, we can’t quite describe what consciousness is and I find it really fascinating.