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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?

#61

Post by EmilyHughes »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #36
EmilyHughes wrote: post #21

From a purely empirical standpoint our minds go nowhere. Your whole life is nothing but an unbroken stream of consciousness, you never slept a day in your life. Just because you can wake up, point at a clock and create a story that so-and-so many hours have passed doesn't mean anything. There might be more time passing for the people who are "awake" during this time, but this is not a problem for the universal mind.…

This theory requires you to distrust a lot of people who saw you sleeping for a long time. It also requires ignoring a lot of common sense knowledge. For example, the chicken you left marinating overnight for your breakfast became quite tasty, why is that so if no time has passed? Why does your body become lighter overnight? The inconsistencies just keep piling on if you want to believe time doesn't pass when you're…

I am not denying that the chicken became tasty over night. Time in a practical sense has "passed" but what really happened empirically was just a stream of perceptions, one of these perceptions is the story that hours have passed while you were sleeping. There is a subtle distinction, but I get it, its not easy to grok. I struggle with this myself, it's more of an intuition at this point.

Imagine to let go of all stories your mind comes up with to make sense of sleep and time, what is left? In that state there is simply no sleep happening, only perception and movement.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#62

Post by saiya-jin »

simonh wrote: post #8

How 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…

I can't grok why do people have so much issue with accepting the simplest explanation - physical laws still apply and our minds exist within them, as part of that grey goo inside of our skulls. Isn't it already amazing enough that something like that is possible?

I mean we don't believe in fairies and santa claus anymore since we know how and why they were made up, but sure there is some utterly inexplainable magic that breaks all physical laws that we know... just to feel more special? Give our immortality a chance?

I do believe a lot of weird, illogical and sometimes completely fucked up beliefs simply come from common utter dismay of most folks when confronted with their mortality and the very real and perfectly fine chance that once we die that's it, our version of this universe and all of our experiences, loves and fears will simply vanish, forever. Every single religion primarily address this fear, the rest are mostly rituals folks made up early enough for them to stick around and management political structures just like in any other office.

For people brought up in religion this is simply unacceptable, whole world falling apart. Why any parent still does this to their children is completely beyond me, but I guess road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

I may be wrong and most logical solution may not be the right one, and that would make me in fact very happy. But religious people are mentally cornered, they can't accept any other option without their world breaking apart in the seams. That's a position of weakness and fear on the most important topic in life.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#63

Post by marcher »

mathieuh wrote: post #7

I've overdosed on heroin before and when I woke up in hospital I had no feeling that time had passed, it was like I time travelled to a point in the future without experiencing the intervening points. Is it the same under anaesthesia or is it more like being asleep in that when you wake up and come to your senses again you are aware of it being later? Because my overdose felt like I just didn't exist for a couple of…

I've had both experiences: anesthesia, nothingness, waking up; and anesthesia, dreams, waking up. Usually it's the former though.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#64

Post by downboots »

pas wrote: post #23
downboots wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing the brain to a more complicated version of a pocket calculator doesn't change the platonic ideal of number.

Sure, but isn't the question that which one do we actually have for a mind?

I'm not sure I understand your question. Disclaimer: not an expert. Trying to unravel a thought.

I tried to make the analogy simpler. For thought experiment assume the brain is essentially a pocket calculator. Its lcd screen output is conscious state. It's a state, anyways. Just because you can alter the state you get after "1+2=" (pressing buttons, throwing acid onto the circuit board, etc) doesn't invalidate the number 3. We can agree on the concept of 3 and point to instances of 3. We can output 3 in different instances of calculators, even the human brain (in this experiment, at least, but I've heard even ants can count). The kicker for me is with a big enough lcd screen like one of those fancy graphing calculators you can output not just 3, but a picture of any such ideal, including a picture of the idea of a pocket calculator! Self reference. So what's up with that 3 and always running out of batteries?

Hard to say anything else at this point. Curious about what people may suggest. I'm sure it's not new.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#65

Post by wizofaus »

simonh wrote: post #57
zelphirkalt wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know there is a "loss" of consciousness? I had some dreams when I was anesthesized once. I do no longer clearly remember them, but I do remember telling the medical people there, that I did dream something. How could I dream without consciousness?

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 being able to store recallable memories is surely the point at which our consciousness "stops". Having said that, clearly even in a dream state our brains have some ability to store memories, it's just that they're not memories guided by our normal capacity to process external stimuli, as are waking memories.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#66

Post by amyjess »

mathieuh wrote: post #7

I've overdosed on heroin before and when I woke up in hospital I had no feeling that time had passed, it was like I time travelled to a point in the future without experiencing the intervening points. Is it the same under anaesthesia or is it more like being asleep in that when you wake up and come to your senses again you are aware of it being later? Because my overdose felt like I just didn't exist for a couple of…

The last time I was under anaesthesia was in 2004, so my memories are definitely hazy here, but from what I remember, they started wheeling me into the OR while giving me something potent. It felt good, like in the morning when your alarm goes off but sleep feels so wonderful and pleasant that you just want to shut your alarm off and go back to sleep. Years later, I heard an addiction to whatever drug they used here was what killed Michael Jackson, and I don't blame him one iota for being addicted to that stuff. And as I was being given that stuff, the doctor was saying some things to me about... something (I remembered what he was saying back in 2004, but it's been almost two decades since so that memory is gone), maybe it was the "count backwards from 100" thing I heard about in fiction. And the next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery room, my mouth was super dry, and I was out of it and loopy for an hour or two. It was like my brain just... turned off for the entire surgery. This was before the first time I ever got really drunk (I wasn't old enough to drink at the time), but in hindsight the "loopy" feeling for the first hour or two after waking up felt no different from all the times I've been drunk off my ass since.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#67

Post by otikik »

simonh wrote: post #8

How 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…

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 bit). The line is a "mathematical abstraction", layered on top of the "real" world.

Now consider that you measure and define exactly where that line is, according to the system of coordinates that you prefer.

Now imagine that you remove the three stones. Now there's no atoms "sustaining" that the line any more. But in a sense the line is "still there", it's defined by the coordinates you wrote. It can be argued that it has always "existed" - before you put the stones there, before Earth existed, that particular line in space already "was", in the same sense that numbers "are" - that the line has existed in some way or another since Space itself started existing.

You now pick 3 bottle caps and put them on top of the line again. Now the line is again defined by 3 clumps of matter. Does it "exist" any more than it existed in the previous two cases?

It all comes down to how we use the verb "exist" - it means several things depending on the context. "Exist" in the atoms world, or "exist" as information.

I believe that mind and consciousness is a bit of the same thing, just many orders of magnitude bigger. Instead of 3 stones what defines a mind is trillions of neurons arranged in a certain way. I am materialistic, but I believe in the be encoding of information. To me this means that each mind, at some point in time, can absolutely be "encoded" into a big enough number (huge, billions of trillions of digits). So in that sense minds are "defined by atoms" but also "exist independently of atoms, and are eternal".

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#68

Post by Ekaros »

wizofaus wrote: post #65
simonh wrote: post #57

Earlier 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'm not actually sure I would agree on not being able to store recallable memories being end of consciousness. Alzheimer and other medical conditions might very well result being unable to make new memories, but processing and reacting to stimuli based on old memories is still possible.

Reasonably I think stop of consciousness is both not storing and not reacting to.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#69

Post by bowsamic »

kubanczyk wrote: post #59
bowsamic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory. Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so I think you speak from an already materialist perspective, in that you accept the physical world as something that really exists out there, and that…

> Occam's razor = the theory with the fewest parameters should be preferred, or often interpreted as the simplest theory. > Do you think that humans universally or even have historically interpreted physicalism as a simpler theory than a non-materialist one? I don't think so Backtracking a bit from that little word "theory", it's foremost about being able to formulate predictions about the real world. So, designing a…

I think you are getting confused between the word theory and the word model, which are often interchanged in physics unfortunately.

A "model" is predictive, but a "theory" explains. A theory of consciousness has no need to predict the future. A model of consciousness would. This word has just been mixed up a lot in science. The reason is that theories in physics are almost always also predictive models. However, this is not usually explicitly the case in philosophy.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#70

Post by TuringTest »

strogonoff wrote: post #52
simonh wrote: post #8

How 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…

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?

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