Are we really unconscious when we sleep?
I don't just mean the sort of sleep that we have when we dream. Clearly we are conscious in those cases. I'm talking about deep sleep, the usual situation where we find ourselves in our beds at night one moment and then seem to wake up the next. People say that during such a state there is no consciousness going on whatsoever. Some people would say that death is just like a sleep that you never wake up from (that is being unconscious forever). It is not merely that we have experiences but are not aware of it but that there is no experience going on whatsoever. To be honest, I never really understood it that way.
Our brains are always functioning even when we are asleep. There is still electrical activity going on in some form and to me that seems to be enough to facilitate a consciousness of some sort. Of course that consciousness isn't all that deep like the kind we have when we are awake and all that. We are conscious in the sense that we have experiences but we do not have the awareness to actually reflect upon it. In addition our sense of time may also be distorted as well, similar to how our perception of duration in our waking life can often vary depending upon the situation. Finally our memories of such experiences are nonexistent so that it doesn't really feel like anything once we've been through it. To me, the act of falling asleep (or going into a coma, getting "knocked unconscious", etc.) doesn't mean the cessation of the consciousness, but just going to a lower level of consciousness.
Our brains are always functioning even when we are asleep. There is still electrical activity going on in some form and to me that seems to be enough to facilitate a consciousness of some sort. Of course that consciousness isn't all that deep like the kind we have when we are awake and all that. We are conscious in the sense that we have experiences but we do not have the awareness to actually reflect upon it. In addition our sense of time may also be distorted as well, similar to how our perception of duration in our waking life can often vary depending upon the situation. Finally our memories of such experiences are nonexistent so that it doesn't really feel like anything once we've been through it. To me, the act of falling asleep (or going into a coma, getting "knocked unconscious", etc.) doesn't mean the cessation of the consciousness, but just going to a lower level of consciousness.
Comments (3)
Good point. The fact that we don't remember experience doesn't mean that it wasn't there.
So we should be cautious what we assume.
Anyway, hypothetically, suppose that there really isn't any experience during deep sleep, just as there isn't after complete shutdown at death
Well, just before that complete shutdown and absence of awareness (in deep-sleep or afterdeath-shutdown. ), you, by definition, have awareness. But most likely, when you're that nearly shut-down, you don't know about waking-life. Or identity, events, time. ...that there are or ever were such things. ...or that there even could be such things. At that point, you've reached timelessness.
Sure, shutdown occurs soon, but you don't know that, because you've reached timelessness. So the temporariness of your experience just before that shutdown is meaningless.
But, as you pointed out no one can say that there isn't any experience during deep sleep, just because we don't remember it.
There are things that your survival requires you to know. What it was like in deep sleep isn't one if them, so it isn't surprising that the body doesn't provide you a memory of that time. Aside from that, most likely it's so close to what the "awake" person would call "nothing" that there usually doesn't seem to be anything to remember. Maybe there isn't any of what waking consciousness would call something. But, from your point of view when you were in deep sleep?
Of course, after death, when the body and awareness have completely shut down, there's no experience. So you'll never experience a time without experience. Only your survivors will experience the time after your complete death-shutdown.
Michael Ossipoff
NYT wrote about this a while back. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesia-can-teach-us-about-consciousness.html