Hacker News Reader

Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Are we unconscious when we sleep or do we merely lose the capacity to remember? How could we tell the difference?

> Are we unconscious when we sleep

I don't think that is the right question to ask. Sleeping person is unconscious almost by definition. They don't respond to stimuli and they don't do much of anything besides breathing and just laying there.

> do we merely lose the capacity to remember?

That is a better question. Some people remembers their dreams. Sometimes people can remember stimuli which happened while they were asleep. (For example it happened multiple times to me that noises happening around me where incorporated into my dreams in various forms.) So if sleeping were just amnesia then these dream memories would need to be explained somehow.

I disagree that sleep is necessarily unconscious. It’s like a coma — but is the internal world still running? For instance, maybe we are conscious in different phases of sleep but not others.

Research has shown that we form memories related to things that happen around us in our sleep and are conscious in some ways. We don't form episodic memories of sleep time and it's likely that what it's like to be conscious while asleep is quite different from our waking experience even aside from dreams.

I guess it depends on how you define consciousness. I think by most definitions, we definitely are unconscious when we are asleep.

Dreaming is clearly both sleep and conscious

How can it be clear if we don't even have a good definition of conscious

Ever entered a room and immediately forgot why you came in? Dream might be much the same.

Memory could be attached to context. Change the context extremely and you lose the associated memories.

And dream is an extreme change of context.

I think there's a medical difference between unconscious and sleeping. At least I don't think being forced unconscious by something (a bonk on the head) is like sleeping

Are we sure there is a difference?

Of course there is a difference. You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register, like the movement of your chest while breathing, sounds outside of your window, etc. It's indeed the difference between consciousness and metaconsciousness, the latter being the ability to re-represent an experience to your cognition (which remembering is an instance of).

A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.

> You are probably conscious right now of more things that you don't even register

I would say this is a contradiction.

> A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were conscious just a moment before waking up.

This is begging the question. It seems possible that we were conscious of our dreams if we remember them and were not conscious of them if we don't.

It's not a contradiction, it's just precise definitions. Have you ever had the experiencing of noticing how a sound has been going on for a while, only when it becomes really obnoxious or when you point your attention to it? We are constantly _conscious_ of stuff without processing it _congnitively_.

On dreams, I explicitely left out the dream scenario from my experiment. I'm only asking whether the moment of waking up feels like "lights up" or not...

You weren't conscious of the sound before you were conscious of the sound. You can of course be conscious of things that you're not paying attention to, but in that case you know they're there.

as you prefer, but that's not the definition of conscious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com