When a wave washes it away, where does a sand castle go?
Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
171–180 of 311 posts
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul searching and basically came to the conclusion that there's nothing after death. It was mentally destructive for me and sent me into a bout of depression. I'd hate to think that we're going through all this just to have your entire life multiplied by 0 at the end…
You might enjoy reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It changed my opinion on almost exactly this topic.
Thank you for the recommendation! Seems like this is the exact problem I'm dealing with.
Curious as to how it changed your perspective?
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#173RadioLab did an episode on this topic “Decoding the Void” in 2014 ( https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia ) that, for me, pretty much deconstructed the whole idea of an afterlife in 20 minutes. 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 gen…
> If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like
[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.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just a copy of you though. It's not you. If I offered to teleport you to work every morning, super convenient and free, but the teleporter destroys your body and creates a new identical copy at the other end every time, would you use it? 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.
If I get to keep the qualia yes absolutely.
The copy would keep all your memories and would experience qualia, the question is, is it you? After all, your body was torn apart to extract the information to build the new one. Bear in mind qualia are instantaneous, you don't keep them, only memories of them.
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.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article discusses this. Some people who are given low doses of anaesthetic, usually due to potential risks, do report some awareness. On the flip side, even though during normal sleep we experience some semi-conscious dream states, there are other phases of sleep that are a complete blank. So conciseness seems to exist on a continuum from full alertness all the way down to nothing.
Consciousness is definitely not an all-or-nothing thing, though I suspect we only typically have access to very narrow band of potential levels of awareness (and can't control it "at will" anyway). But obviously there are some thresholds over which memories are simply not preserved in a sufficiently cohesive form for us to have any sense of maintaining consciousness, and in fact the point at which our brain stops bei…
I was a first responder for a while and we would record a metric called "Level of consciousness" often abbreviated as LOC - it was rated "times 0" to "times 4" based on how aware of your environment and able to respond to stimulus that you are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_level_of_consciousness Here's a better source with more levels
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul searching and basically came to the conclusion that there's nothing after death. It was mentally destructive for me and sent me into a bout of depression. I'd hate to think that we're going through all this just to have your entire life multiplied by 0 at the end…
What's important is what we do with the time we have, the ripples we send out into the world. That I think is the true value of our lives
I would like to hear more on this. Am somewhat playing a devil's advocate, but am genuinely unclear too.
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?
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul searching and basically came to the conclusion that there's nothing after death. It was mentally destructive for me and sent me into a bout of depression. I'd hate to think that we're going through all this just to have your entire life multiplied by 0 at the end…
Memories are retained. If not in your brain, then in the history, in other people's minds, in the humanity's development, and in the legacies that you created. Which is better, your memory can be destroyed by Alzheimer, but these other memories can be more resistant and could survive for a longer time. :-)
I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pick 3 random stones and arrange them so that they form a straight line. Does the line "exist"? 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 bi…
You are conflating abstract reasoning with consciousness. Your invisible line has no effect on the substrate, because the line does not exists. Consciousness effects the mind/brain/body complex. 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 order…
Thank you for your comment.
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.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul searching and basically came to the conclusion that there's nothing after death. It was mentally destructive for me and sent me into a bout of depression. I'd hate to think that we're going through all this just to have your entire life multiplied by 0 at the end…
endeavor to create somthing beyond your mortality, something that persists in peoples minds and exists in reality, something that proves you were more than just a story.
I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#180RadioLab did an episode on this topic “Decoding the Void” in 2014 ( https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia ) that, for me, pretty much deconstructed the whole idea of an afterlife in 20 minutes. 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 gen…
> If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like 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 presum…
I agree. The idea of relating unconsciousness with death is by making the assumption that physical world is what is driving life and consciousness. But since you are the conscious one just perceiving the physical world, physical world really doesn't need to be related to consciousness or doesn't even need to exist.
Since it is a question I don't think can possibly be ever known, all options may be completely possible.