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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?

#3
post #2

Nevermind anesthesia, what about every day during sleep?

I’m a night owl… sleeping can be hard. If I’m lying in bed with my eyes closed and start wondering about what happens when you sleep, what dreams are, what happens if you die in your sleep… makes you not able to sleep

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#6
A personal experience example: I was awake and back in my hospital room after being in surgical ICU for the typical 24 hours or so. I remember picking up the phone in my room to call someone at a number I knew by heart. I think I tried 6 times before giving up. I don't really remember who or why I wanted to call them, but I vividly recall the misdials and retries. To date it's the weirdest post-op memory I have.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#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 hours, it was very disconcerting. I've always wondered what was happening in my brain during those couple of hours.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#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 happening in the recording studio. Why does the state of my brain affect my conscious state at all? If consciousness is fundamental, how can it ever stop?

It just seems that the brain is a physical system, and consciousness is a result of its physical processes. If you change the operation of those processes then you change states of consciousness. All the attempts to explain it otherwise seem inconsistent with the behaviour we observe.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#9
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…

My experience under anaesthesia was exactly like you described. One second I was lying in the hospital bed, with a doctor sticking a needle into me. Then the next second I was waking up in another hospital room. Time travel - absolutely no sense that I'd been asleep or dreaming. It's exactly like you said, like I felt like I simply hadn't existed during the intervening time.

Now I know what it feels like to be dead.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#10
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…

It’s the same. I had surgery last year and it seemed like it was over in an instant. When you’re asleep your mind drifts in an out of different levels of awareness and consciousness from time to time so you have some experience of time passing. With anaesthesia in my experience there’s just nothing. Trying to remember what it was like, you might as well be trying to remember what it was like before you were born.
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