2y ago

Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?

Art by smbc-comics

Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.

Pubmed Articles

Sciencealert Article We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists

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Sleep is NOTHING like death. You're still experiencing lots of stuff, you still very much have a sense of self, you're still thinking things, your brain is still processing lots of information.
General anesthesia - now THAT is a real close period to what being dead is.
- You sound a lot like a guy who isn't dead. Not sure if I should trust your opinion.
- I've had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
  If death is like that, then there's absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
  
  Probably is. If they gave you a little too much anesthesia so you didn't wake up, you would probably drift off the same, and then just not wake up.
  
  It's not sleeping I'm worried about, it's not waking up.
  
  I've also been dead for 13.8 billion years before I was born, and I didn't mind it then.
  
  For me when I had anesthesia I quickly closed my eyes with the surgeon talking, when I opened my eyes the surgeon was still talking so I was wondering when the surgery would start.
  Of course when I opened my eyes it was 5 hours later and after the surgery but it took me a while to realized that.
  
  Except the agonizing pain which precedes death
  
  I’ve had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.
  What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?
  
  I'm genuinely surprised that the idea that something bad might happen to you when you're dead or that it could be painful etc is anywhere near as prevalent as it is. To me, that makes absolutely no sense. Of course dying might be painful... But death? Once you brain no longer works? Feels obvious to me that you won't feel, well, anything. The thing that frightens me about death wouldn't be the experience of being dead, but rather not being able to do any more things and not existing anymore.
  
  What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.
  
  But isn't there a fear anyway? Because its forever. Also not seeing loved ones ever again. Not enjoying the nice things ever again.
  
  I think that most people aren't afraid of death itself. It's more the suffering to get there.
- Well except Ketamine and some other substances that are used in anesthesia.
  
  That's not general anesthesia, that's like twilight anesthesia or some other term like that.
- When I'm asleep I'm not experiencing shit. Close eyes, moment of black, awake again the next day.
  
  This is not the normal human experience. Check if you're a robot?
  
  You just don't remember your dreams.
- Coma?
There's still brain activity in sleep.
- Brain activity isnt nessecarily consciousness.
  
  Right? I've met so many of those people.
  
  But it is life.
Do you really have dreamless sleep or do you simply not remember the dream?
- For a long time, mine was dreamless. It wasn't until I turned off the TV before going to bed that I started to have dreams. I theorize that the external stimuli hindered my brain from creating dreams.
  It was a super weird period because my dreams started as nightmares, like my brain didn't know what the hell was going on. Then I drifted through a period of recurring dreams and then lucid dreams. They've settled down into more normal dreams, but I'm still super excited to dream each and every night. It feels like I found music after being deaf or seeing colors for the first time after being blind.
  
  It wasn't dreamless, you just weren't remembering your dreams. If your sleep was truly dreamless for a lengthy period of time you'd be dead.
  Often simply changing your sleeping habits in any significant way is enough to get you to start remembering dreams. That's because you need to wake up "unexpectedly" in the middle of a REM sleep phase to have a chance to form memories of them. Normally your brain has its memory-forming mechanism disengaged during REM sleep because there's no good reason to remember that stuff - it's just a side effect of a mental housekeeping routine.
  You can also "train" yourself to remember dreams more often, to some degree, by trying to record a dream journal or otherwise forcing your brain to lay down some memories of those dreams the moment you wake up and they're still present in your short-term memory.
  
  Weird
- The majority of sleep is dreamless, I believe it's just during REM that you dream, which I believe is usually 15-20% of normal sleep.
- Technically, if you remember a dream it's because you woke up during a REM cycle. If your sleep cycle completes fully, then you won't remember your dream and will feel more rested.
  
  I think this is false but I don't have information to refute it other than my own experience. I used to write a dream diary. When I did, I remembered my dreams almost every time I woke up. Not just half the time or 80% but more like 96% of the time. And it was very detailed with multiple dreams tied to each other.
Your brain is still very much active. It's more like running a computer with the display turned off.
Wonder how the robot feels about rebooting.
- He might not feel much if the save state doesn't get reloaded on startup!
It's pretty terrifying when you think about it, yet completely normalized.
My pet peeve regarding all these discussions is that we throw around "consciousness", but we have no good definition for it ...
- I mean to be honest I wouldn’t say that we “die” at all when you sleep… your mind is extremely active while sleeping, it’s just disconnected from motor control.
  
  it’s just disconnected from motor control.
  It's way more than just that, though. You're also disconnected from your sensory inputs, and furthermore, your conscious experience is interrupted. It's not like you're just in a sensory deprivation tank, because there you'd still experience conscious thought, and the passage of time. It just seems to turn off for a while.
  
  I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it's difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn't require brain activity either. There's a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of "death" is oversimplifying things.
  
  Not even that sometimes. I'm told I can do some pretty mean kicks while I sleep.
- It's terrifying at first, but if you reflect over it further it becomes natural. Sure, we can't guarantee that we are the same continuous individual, but "not sleeping" would only see us have a more profound and permanent discontinuity. It's not a possibility for us. Still, we do carry something of the people we used to be regardless. Consciousness vanishes and recreates itself, as do most of our cells. We are evolving entities, as is everyone around us.
  This existential fear is rooted on a desire for permanence that we never had to begin with. There was never a fixed self that we could possibly know.
- What sort of definition of consciousness are you looking for? I’m sure there are dozens of “good” definitions of consciousness.
  
  That there are more than one definition is kind of the problem. And that you'd characterize any of them as "good" sounds more like a euphemism for "good enough for a particular scenario."
- Relevant xkcd
A human being is a process of computation. Ending the computation is death. Pausing the computation is, well, simply pausing the computation. It has no profound significance.
(This is also my answer to the "teleporter problem." As long as the computation continues, a change in the substrate on which it takes place also has no profound significance.)
- And if the teleportation process doesn't terminate the original, but creates a copy on the other end, are they both the same person?
  
  Creating and destroying perfectly identical copies of the information that corresponds to a person neither creates nor destroys people unless the very last copy of that information is destroyed, in which case the person is killed.
  Small divergences aren't a big deal. For example, if a person spends an hour under the effect of an anesthetic (or alcohol) which prevents the formation of new long-term memories, this person isn't dying when he goes to sleep and wakes up without any memories of that last hour.
  Larger divergences are a big deal - losing a year of memories is pretty bad, losing a decade is even worse, and having one's mind returned to the blank slate of an infant is very close to the same thing as dying.
  So what I'm saying is that the two copies start out as the same person and then gradually become different people.
  
  If it creates a copy, then it isn't teleportation, it's copying. Two copies will diverge from the moment they're no longer a single copy.
- a change in the substrate on which it takes place also has no profound significance.
  It does to the person being "deleted".
- Have you played SOMA? Fun game, gets into this exact type of thing
  
  SOMA is one of my favorite gaming experiences and probably one of the best sci-fi stories in this medium.
  Saddly some monster bits were a bit weaker and I think Amnesia fans felt it didn't match their expectations..
- It feels like dreaming is the "training from a batch of sample memories" tactic from deep learning.
Death is 'Long Death', Sleep is 'Short Death', and Naps are 'Power Death'.
what a suspicious comic
To die
To sleep
To sleep, perchance to dream...
- Aye, there's the rub.
I mean, I lucid dream every night. So my consciousness is rarely off.
I've been practicing for almost 20 years to be able to switch it on and off so its kinda nice that I get to be a god 6 to 8 hours a day
- Why don't you join !LucidDreaming@kbin.social, you could be helpful to build that community
- Do you find it an enjoyable or useful experience?
  
  I love it. Things can go from psychedelic to me flying in the air, changing the landscape like I'm some sort of God.
  I can even make food and banquets appear, and I can eat whatever I want at full flavor
  I can even make any sexual fantasy I want come true instantly. I don't do this often, though. As I think it would destroy me in the waking world.
  For the most part, it was worth the years of work it took to learn the meditation needed for all of this.
- Are you one of those people who needs an authority figure to tell you what you are experiencing?
  
  Try it, and dont give up
  
  I have a doctorate in philosophy, if that counts.
  I'm sorry that you're so closed-minded to things like this.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/-mu780uB7mI?si=mKSO3SiGfkqIXnWq
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/-mu780uB7mI?si=mKSO3SiGfkqIXnWq
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
  
  Good to know. Sometimes i use Invidious but the more alternative, the better.
- Nice one👍 I love the channel.
What is the door looking thing with legs supposed to represent?
- a thumb with legs, arms, and a yellow eye
When people ask me what happens when you die, I say:
"Remember what it was like before you were born? Well it's a lot like that."
Me: Sleep, how I loathe those little slices of death.
Also me: watches 2 hours of unnarrated sleeper train travel videos on YouTube
zZzZzZzZz
And blocked

132 comments