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Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

nautil.us

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Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#291

Post by ijidak »

velcrovan wrote: post #104

RadioLab 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…

Agree 100% regarding sleep-like death.

You might enjoy this video: https://www.jw.org/finder?srcid=jwlshare&wtlocale=E&lank=doc...

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#292

Post by bowsamic »

simonh wrote: post #285
bowsamic wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think consciousness is the more fundamental thing, because it’s the only thing I ever have experience of, and that everything else arises from that (including the physical world). To me that’s the simplest explanation Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)

I don’t see how that’s a simple explanation. We know we lose consciousness, totally, on a regular basis yet when we awake the world is still there. It’s always consistent and doesn’t radically change as our consciousness changes. We can set devices to record activity in the world while we are unconscious, and their recordings seem consistent. The simplest explanation seems to be that the world is real and persistent,…

Again see the Heart sutra

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#293

Post by _8j50 »

I think of it like a PC entering s3/sleep/suspend. The data is there active in memory the CPU is just no longer scheduling processes, it is only maintaining power and signaling to keep essential services online. Our consciousness is the software where our personality+subconscious is analogous to the kernel, behaviors are useland processes,our PNS+medula are drivers and memories are data.

When we make things they are reflections of us

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#294

Post by EmilyHughes »

layer8 wrote: post #269
EmilyHughes wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The radio-receiver metaphor doesn't go far enough as it still assumes a somewhat physical brain, but it helps at first untangeling yourself from materialism. If reality is nothing but a dream it would be no problem to dream up a brain that modulates the dream-content if it is manipulated. - Taking red paint and spraying it over your wall will modulate the dream in such that the wall appears red. - Taking a hammer and…

What is this adding to the physical laws though? The simplest explanation is that your dream physics is actually the same as our hard-science physics, and you’re effectively just relabeling things.

It's adding nothing to the physical laws - it's metaphysics.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#295

Post by simonh »

Hayarotle wrote: post #273
layer8 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem of panpsychism is that it doesn’t explain anything. It postulates some sort of mechanism that builds up our consciousness based on what amounts to a dual realm of psychic mechanics, but it doesn’t explain at all how this nonphysical mechanism is supposed to be able to account for consciousness in a way that the known laws of physics allegedly can’t.

That's a problem that affects all theories about the metaphysics of consciousness. All of them share the burden of explaining how a world where "consciousness" exists would be different from a world without it. The ones which claim a distinct consciousness does exist then also have to explain how this consciousness either originates from physical parts with limited or non-existent consciousness(emergent theories like…

If brains are information processing systems, and that consciousness emerges from that activity, I don’t have to worry about the parts having consciousness. They don’t, they just contain and process information.

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.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#296

Post by bowsamic »

2snakes wrote: post #281
bowsamic wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the scalpel doesn’t actually exist except as an idea in the mind that is attached to, thus it can’t be said to really exist in any way. It is empty of self existence (svahbhava), as is our own mind. Nothing has fundamental essence or identity

Sorry, I'm not a subjective idealist or a solipsist. I believe god consciousness is the final arbiter. And that we can expand our human consciousness to god consciousness. So I'm partial to objective idealism instead.

Yeah sorry, I am a subjective idealist/solipsist

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#297

Post by keonix »

galacticaactual wrote: post #290
keonix wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! It's just a classification of events that each person has. 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)

So it’s completely subjective to you, AKA not anywhere near the testable physics that I was looking for.

> So it’s completely subjective to you

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.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#298

Post by wizofaus »

e_i_pi_2 wrote: post #175
wizofaus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The word 'stuporous' is definitely ripe for going viral.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#299

Post by otikik »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #138
tmountain wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor. In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. In essence, they provide guardrails to keep discussions centered within the realm of reason when venturing to the edge of our knowledge and beyond.

Except it fails the deeper you go in understanding physical phenomena. 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…

> We should not exist per Occam.

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.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#300

Post by strogonoff »

TuringTest wrote: post #70
strogonoff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind-body dualism strikes me as possibly the least elegant and magic-leap-proof alternative to physicalism, so it’s unfortunate that people who explore this question get stuck on it. 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, b…

> the only thing we have direct access to, that physicalists nevertheless tend to treat as a magic side-effect of magically existing reality 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?

It’s probably safe to assume that consciousness exists, as it’s what carries out this line of reasoning in the first place.

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.

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