Sleep and what it may mean
In sleep we experience a break in our consciousness as evidenced by a lack of, let's call it, information about the happenings during the period we're asleep.
The following are true of sleep:
1. All thinking ceases
2. The impression of a self/I is lost
How do we know because when we wake up we don't recall anything that contradicts both 1 and 2 (we don't remember thinking and being aware of a self) and recall is a widely accepted necessary property to conclude thinking was ongoing and self-awareness was present.
The physical phenomenon that corresponds to sleep (1 and 2) is the shut down of the brain and sensori-motor apparatus- basically, in computer speak, all input/output devices are turned off and the CPU itself turns off. What are the primary functions of our senses (input devices) and our brain (CPU)? Together the senses and our brain provide information and process information respectively, which is nothing other than thinking; it is understandable then that when we sleep and the brain + senses shut down, thinking should cease.
However, what about the sense of self/I? Why is it also absent when all that's happened is thinking/information processing of the external world has stopped? Doesn't this mean that the notion and sense of a self is intimately tied to thinking/information processing? No thinking, no self/I..
Thinking ltself may not require physical sensory input; it can be done without it. However, how does the idea of a self/I form in our minds? In my opinion, the self/I forms in two ways:
1. As contrasted with others which requires sensory data of others
and
2. If engaged in thinking not dependent on sensory data, the awareness of thinking itself: Something is thinking and that's me, the self/I.
Thus, the explanation for the loss of self/I is explained by the absence of sensory input which prevents perception of others and losing that the self/I too vanishes as a concept and the absence of thinking itself which blockades the inference that something is thinking and that something is me, the self/I.
Even if it's theoretically possible for the self/I to exist in the absence of a foil, the other, if thinking ceases, then the self/I simply can't exist.
What implications may we draw from this?
1. If the self/I vanishes in what is only a temporary and partial shut down of the brain while sleeping, is there any hope that the self/I can survive death?
2. If the self/I is ultimately nothing more than awareness of information processing/thinking then is this sufficient warrant to infer the existence of a self/I distinct from the information processor/brain? After all awareness in and of itself doesn't have existential import does it? I can be aware of the presence of, say, a cat but this doesn't automatically add anything to the cat does it? Similarly I may become self-aware, recognize I am [I]thinking[/i] but the mere fact of this awareness doesn't imply the existence of such a thing as a soul or does it?
The following are true of sleep:
1. All thinking ceases
2. The impression of a self/I is lost
How do we know because when we wake up we don't recall anything that contradicts both 1 and 2 (we don't remember thinking and being aware of a self) and recall is a widely accepted necessary property to conclude thinking was ongoing and self-awareness was present.
The physical phenomenon that corresponds to sleep (1 and 2) is the shut down of the brain and sensori-motor apparatus- basically, in computer speak, all input/output devices are turned off and the CPU itself turns off. What are the primary functions of our senses (input devices) and our brain (CPU)? Together the senses and our brain provide information and process information respectively, which is nothing other than thinking; it is understandable then that when we sleep and the brain + senses shut down, thinking should cease.
However, what about the sense of self/I? Why is it also absent when all that's happened is thinking/information processing of the external world has stopped? Doesn't this mean that the notion and sense of a self is intimately tied to thinking/information processing? No thinking, no self/I..
Thinking ltself may not require physical sensory input; it can be done without it. However, how does the idea of a self/I form in our minds? In my opinion, the self/I forms in two ways:
1. As contrasted with others which requires sensory data of others
and
2. If engaged in thinking not dependent on sensory data, the awareness of thinking itself: Something is thinking and that's me, the self/I.
Thus, the explanation for the loss of self/I is explained by the absence of sensory input which prevents perception of others and losing that the self/I too vanishes as a concept and the absence of thinking itself which blockades the inference that something is thinking and that something is me, the self/I.
Even if it's theoretically possible for the self/I to exist in the absence of a foil, the other, if thinking ceases, then the self/I simply can't exist.
What implications may we draw from this?
1. If the self/I vanishes in what is only a temporary and partial shut down of the brain while sleeping, is there any hope that the self/I can survive death?
2. If the self/I is ultimately nothing more than awareness of information processing/thinking then is this sufficient warrant to infer the existence of a self/I distinct from the information processor/brain? After all awareness in and of itself doesn't have existential import does it? I can be aware of the presence of, say, a cat but this doesn't automatically add anything to the cat does it? Similarly I may become self-aware, recognize I am [I]thinking[/i] but the mere fact of this awareness doesn't imply the existence of such a thing as a soul or does it?
Comments (6)
I think in sleeping we enter different states of consiousness which are, perhaps, no less real than the waking consiousness. In deep, non REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, when dreaming has been found to not occur maybe you are correct. There could indeed be loss of self awareness and verbal thinking in this deep sleep state. Note that the left side of the brain is predominantly involved with the processing of language, logic and verbal thought. However the right side of the brain responds to music, emotion, creativity, art and a whole of host of other traits which aren't easily communicated through words. In meditation it can be found that by limiting the power of words and thoughts over your consciousness you can indeed escape the concept of self and simply have pure awareness. Further, it becomes apparent that pure selfless consciousness/ awareness is a fundamental property of the universe and the waking reality is actually just a secondary illusion!
It maybe tempting to say that the self/I is distinct from the brain, currently the main protagonist in this tale of thought & thinking, but this is not logically entailed by the facts at hand viz. thinking and the awareness of it. Self-awareness, the critical phenomenon here, could simply be the brain perceiving itself through the medium of thought.
Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind,and Consciousness The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science
Quoting Coben
Quoting Coben
There are two parts to lucid dreaming: (1)the dream and (2) awareness (of the self/I dreaming).
Ordinary dreaming is simply (1) the dream and (3) variable recall of the dream if awakened at the appropriate time or if the dreams were exceptional in some way, etc.
Neurobiologically, dreams are a sleep phase called REM sleep and in this sleep stage brain activity purportedly resembles an awakened state of mind. Insofar as it concerns me, the most crucial aspect of dreams is that there is thinking going on.
Here I'd like to distinguish the self/I from the sense of self/I. The self/I is simply the thinker but the sense of self/I is an inference: thinking is occuring; ergo something is thinking and that something is me. Since dreams are thoughts, there is a thinker, the self/I, but only in lucid dreams does the inference to a sense of self/I develop. How is this relevant? Well, it shows that dreams evidence the existence of a self/I even without a sense of self/I: dreams = thoughts; thoughts -> thinker (self/I). Nevertheless this conclusion is restricted to the dream/REM phase of sleep.
What about non-REM sleep where there is a complete cessation of all thought, including dreams. From a materialistic perspective, if the thinker (self/I) is equated to the physical brain, then it's possible to say, since nothing happens to the brain except a change in its level of activity, that the self/I, considered as the brain, continues throughout all phases of sleep and waking. However, this is unsatisfactory because I sense a general disposition in people, everyone in fact, towards a belief that the self/I is more about the function of the brain than the material form of the brain i.e. they'll probably reject the claim that the self/I = brain. If so, then the only other place for the self/I to exist is in the domain of brain function (thought) and that would lead us to the conclusion that the self/I would perish along with the death of the brain. After all no brain, no brain function; no brain function, no self/I
As for the question of the relevance of memory to the self/I (the thinker) it may appear that, since we don't remember many waking activities and dreams despite having experienced them, memory isn't relevant to the self/I as the one that experiences them. However, how does one distinguish between what the self/I experienced and didn't experience? Memory right? There's no other method, apart from memory, to make this distinction. Granted that memory isn't perfect and even what was experienced may become something never experienced (memory failure) but as it stands, memory remains the only tool in our bag to know what experience we were part of and what experience we weren't a part of. Basically the experiences recalled by the self/I are categorically those in which the, pertinent herein, self/I existed and those experiences not recalled maybe either experiences in which the self/I didn't exist or an instance of memory failure. As you can see, the only information on experience the self/I can be sure of is when it remembers that experience. Instances of the self/I failing to remember can be due to either memory failure or, as it concerns this discussion, nonexistence of the self/I during that time.
Well, let's look closely at the problem: if the self/I doesn't recall an experience than either the self/I didn't exist or the self/I existed but fails to remember. Let's begin by asking how we come to realize that these two are possibilities that we have to consider? That a failure to remember is due to the nonexistence of the self/I is easily understandable for if the self/I didn't exist then the question of experience of anything at all doesn't arise: nothing that experiences; ergo no question of experience or the memory of it.
The next possibility, that the self/I did experience but fails to recall, is interesting to say the least. Surely, it is a position inferred to from some evidence. What is this evidence? If you ask me there are two pieces of information required for this: 1) no recall of an event by the self/I and 2) evidence that the self/I did experience that event. Take a person X and a week in faers life to help us understand this. X decides on Sunday 2:00 PM to remember the week that went by. If fae is anything like me then fae will not actually fail completely in remembering the the week that's gone by: fae may forget what fae ate, who fae talked to, what the talk was about, where fae went, what time fae did that, etc. BUT fae will remember that fae was awake and asleep, maybe even dreamed when fae was asleep and it's this memory of being awake and intermittently asleep, that serves as evidence for X believing that sometimes X doesn't recall experiences that the X had. In other words the knowledge that sometimes we don't remember what we experience is based on memory of being awake/asleep and present during that experience. Ergo, memory is necessary to infer that thinking occurred or that there was a self/I.
Quoting Joshs
Thanks for the link.