I agree completely. Anyone who spends even a cursory amount of time with a companion animal such as a dog or cat can see that they are emotional beings, and the notion that you can be emotional without also being conscious seems to strain credulity.
As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
I was driving back home after spending night at friend's place. It was around 4am, the whole family sleeping in the car. I didn't have any alcohol in my system because I always kept a 0 alcohol policy if I have to drive. I knew the trip well because I was driving it several times a months. A few km before reaching home I realized I had no recollection of having driven past a number of the usual landmarks. Yet I couldn't have possibly been completely asleep as the highway had a number of curves and I would have smashed the guardrails had I been totally unconscious.
So my theory was that I was so tired that my brain wasn't recording anything but I had been conscious enough to actually follow the road.
That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.
Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.
Nevermind the fact that even if it is forgotten, an awake mind will suffer greatly in the moment - pretending that suffering did not occur because it was forgotten is some next level self-deception.
I don't think most surgical patients are concerned with the kind of trauma their cells or gut microbiome sustain during surgery. In fact, if these systems recollected zero trauma it's doubtful the surgical outcome would be positive. When most people discuss suffering they are usually discussing the suffering of their selves. The self requires coordinated effort from the brain. When surgery occurs, it could be well argued you would want to use the least anesthesia necessary to avoid the kind of suffering the patient wants to avoid.
What are you actually on about? Why be purposefully insulting?
If there's no suffering in the now, then how can one remember that one suffered?
One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.
Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.
Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.
After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.
Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.
(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)
(* - Not to be confused with the 'fast p-zombies' which were briefly popular in 90's existentialist cinema.)
The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact.
Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to cling to the idea of a soul and some still do.
Like the soul, if you just get rid of the idea and word, nothing changes other than clarity in the language of what we are actually talking about instead of this ill-defined nonsense.
Do animals have a soul? It is the same question.
To come at it a different way. We can't be free of superstition and nonsense in 2024. There must be things we believe are true that simply aren't true and will look silly 300 years from now. What else do people believe in so admittedly in 2024 even though there is not just zero evidence for but we can't even define what we are talking about? It is prime suspect #1 to me when it comes to this category.
The question "is this animal conscious" is quite close to a question "does this person have aphantasia", and both seem to be perfectly valid and answerable.
Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?