Where is my mind?
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Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
111–120 of 311 posts
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I found it incredibly disorientating, even after the event because time has passed and I have no awareness of it.
I had my first full anesthesia experience as an adult - emergency but minor surgery, so not an extremely scary ordeal. I was very distinctly trying to pay attention to the process of going under, as in: do i feel it fade? etc. I remember doing the countdown thing and also trying to see if i could notice it at all like going to sleep. but, just like an off switch, no state change, just a full stop (but without somethi…
I also had anesthesia for the first time as an adult, but I did kind of feel something as I was going under. It felt like my mind was melting away, and at the same time my hearing was fading out. It was kind of a pleasant feeling to be honest.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#113RadioLab 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…
I think that's why sleep has been called the 'little death' since ancient times. In a sense, you die every time you sleep, and wake up a slightly different person.
Edit: ya'll have dirty minds. Homer refers to 'sleep as the brother of death' in the Illiad. Apparently Buddha said something similar too, though I can't find a source.
Edit2: just going to leave you with this: "each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." – Arthur Schopenhauer
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#114Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#115RadioLab 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…
It’s also the same as what it was like before you were born. I “remember” nothing from that time period, I felt nothing, I was not somewhere else. I simply did not exist, and nor did my consciousness.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#116Every debate about consciousness is painful to watch because consciousness is a suitcase word (so many meanings are packed into it that we can’t untangle them)
That's rather a defeatist approach to philosophy. "We might not understand each other so shouldn't bother, lest we upset Paul."
I get that we're all amateurs here, but I think there's plenty of scope for meaningful conversation about consciousness, including explaining what we're talking about.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#117How to approach loss of consciousness is one of the problems I have with non-materialist theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism. If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s…
Isn't panpsychism orthogonal to materialism? Isn't the trivial solution in the non-material case just regular mumbo jumbo? Ie. the connection between the consciousness and the body is severed by propofol while it's active, and so memories are not formed to keep you sane, or whatever? It stops when it gets to Nirvana, etc? All the attempts to explain it with non-materialism seems to very bluntly fail Ockham's razor. S…
Occam's razor specifies that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity. Therefore one must multiply the entities until one can arrive at a true, simple explanation with the fewest number of extant entities.
The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, because consciousness is not physical and thus no separation can take place. Consciousness 'winks out' when the mind is anesthetized. This is not possible for a physical object but eminently possible for an non-physical (abstract) one. Physical objects are subject to state change, while abstract entities exist, well, differently. It may involve state change, but it also may simply be there/not there.
Abstract things can still exist, when you learn things, it is an abstract thing, the mind, interacting with other abstract things, learnings. These abstract things interact with the physical world through the instrument that evolved to allow them to do so, the human body and mind.
There's another example I can use. When we model a system using state machines, the diagrams of those machines provide a representation of the workings of the model. We can point, on the state diagram, what the underlying system running the state machine is doing. But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.
Did you catch the invocation of the law of parsimony in the last paragraph? The very existence and usefulness of Ockham's Razor invalidates materialism. Entities are not physical objects.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#118Okay, this makes me feel better about having opted for local anesthetic for my vasectomy.
When I had my vasectomy, the doctor told me that it was a quick procedure that really didn't need general anesthesia, that local was fine.
When the procedure started, at first I only felt some tugging, no pain at all. But after they finished the first half and started the second, the anesthetic was completely worn off. The pain was excruciating. I almost vomited and I almost passed out.
Afterwards, the doctor told me that was fairly common and that they don't tell people about it because they don't want to "scare them off".
So I definitely don't think I was given the chance to give informed consent. But maybe I am not quite so angry about it, now that I've read this article.
Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#119A tiny subset of patients (about 1 or 2 in 1,000, although estimates vary) have reported “accidental awareness,” That's just what I wanted to read having my first ever surgery planned for next week, another thing to be afraid of happening!
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Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?
#120As far as we can tell consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the physical processes of the brain, and when you interrupt those processes, you don’t form new memories, and when you wake up it’s as if you time travelled to that point. Any other explanation involves a lot of hand-waving and vast unfounded assumptions that contradict the known laws of physics. My question for those cases is: how does it work? For exa…
Can you describe “good” and “evil” in a rigorously mathematical framework that makes testable predictions?