18 ms·

Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

133 points by signa11 4y ago

Razengan 4y ago
Nevermind anesthesia, what about every day during sleep?
- seibelj 4y ago
  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
  - keithwhor 4y ago
    I used to be the same way — do you drink caffeine after 4PM? I was convinced I was a night owl and my most productive hours were 10PM until 2AM. That was until, at suggestion of my partner, I stopped drinking caffeine in the late afternoon and evening. As long as I do that I have no problem getting to sleep consistently and easily. May not be the case for you but for my entire 20s I simply didn’t realize how much caffeine was actually impacting me.
    - dr_ick 4y ago
      Same. I don't drink caffeine after noon and I have a much easier time maintaining a functional sleep schedule. I had a older relative who often complained about poor sleep. I asked if they drank caffeine in the afternoon and they scoffed at the idea it could be the issue. But I have noticed they are not drinking caffeine late in the day now, and the complaining about poor sleep has ceased.
    - seibelj 4y ago
      I’ve been a night owl since I was a small child. My dad is also one. No caffeine after 2pm.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  It is bit strange. Sometimes there is various levels of dreams, sometimes there is vague feeling of remembering something or waking up for moments. And then there is those times when time is simply gone. Look at clock, it is 2. Move head next time it is 6... In time that feels like an instant.
- muzani 4y ago
  They're all different brain functions. A lot of brain stuff happens during REM and deep sleep. Different brain stuff happens during concussions and anesthesia. I wish it was as easy as some planned experiment monitoring input/output but brains are complex.
- shirajg 4y ago
  Small video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_-7tsmcWWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_-7tsmcWWI
weregiraffe 4y ago
Where is my mind?
- smegsicle 4y ago
  must be a devil
  - fourseventy 4y ago
    between us
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Stand on top of the highest peak. Proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. Three heads and eight arms. An eight- or sixteen-foot body. A staff or whisk. A pillar or lantern. The sons of Zhang and Li. The earth and sky.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  "There is no place to seek the mind; it is like the footprints of birds in the sky." Zenrin
- driggs 4y ago
  Way out in the water, see it swimmin'. - Black Francis
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
cratermoon 4y ago
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.
mathieuh 4y ago
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.
- whoooooo123 4y ago
  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.
- simonh 4y ago
  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.
  - porker 4y ago
    Yes. I found it incredibly disorientating, even after the event because time has passed and I have no awareness of it.
    - avh02 4y ago
      I had my first full anesthesia experience as an adult - emergency but minor surgery, so not an extremely scary ordeal. I was very distinctly trying to pay attention to the process of going under, as in: do i feel it fade? etc. I remember doing the countdown thing and also trying to see if i could notice it at all like going to sleep. but, just like an off switch, no state change, just a full stop (but without something like "blackness"). First woke up to voices of nurses chitchatting across the recovery room and knowing everything was okay. But as another comment put it, I can only imagine death being similar (if instant/unexpected/while sleeping/etc), just without the coming back. Which is scarier.
simonh 4y ago
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.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  The Buddhist answer is that all of physical reality is also in the mind. Rather than physical and mental being separate, physical reality itself is constructed by the mind
  - 2snakes 4y ago
    Right. In Kastrup's idealism, a scalpel, for example, is actually a transpersonal mental process. So it modifies brain-consciousness much like an emotion or thought modifies other thoughts.
    - bowsamic 4y ago
      No, the scalpel doesn’t actually exist except as an idea in the mind that is attached to, thus it can’t be said to really exist in any way. It is empty of self existence (svahbhava), as is our own mind. Nothing has fundamental essence or identity
      - 2snakes 4y ago
        Sorry, I'm not a subjective idealist or a solipsist. I believe god consciousness is the final arbiter. And that we can expand our human consciousness to god consciousness. So I'm partial to objective idealism instead.
EmilyHughes 4y ago
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. It simply squeezes the missing time in there and synchronizes individual minds together again later. Also interesting: The thought "I was under anaesthesia for 12 hours" is itself an object that appears in consciousness.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  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 sleeping.
  - EmilyHughes 4y ago
    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.
bheadmaster 4y ago
I think that consciousness (or rather the feeling of consciousness) is very related to continuous long-term memory storing. When you're blackout drunk, or under anesthesia, your brain can still infer connections between sequential stimuli (e.g. you can understand words), but none of those memories stay in your brain long-term. I'd say that we were actually conscious during that period, but in the present moment we have no recollection because our memory (for some chemical reason related to alcohol/anesthesia) wasn't stored properly for long-term use. I imagine the same would happen if we somehow managed to "remove" memories from our minds. After the removal, our current self would not have any recollection of those memories removed - as if we weren't conscious during that period whatsoever. In conclusion: the feeling of consciousness is deeply related to continuous storage of our life-long memories.
- ehecatl42 4y ago
  > I think that consciousness (or rather the feeling of consciousness) is very related to continuous long-term memory storing. Are you my surgeon? About six years ago I was to undergo somewhat novel surgery and the chappie asked if he could record the procedure, it being a research hospital and all). "Sure," I said, "if you can assure me I will feel no pain." He said that he could not promise that, but they he could assure me I would not remember it even if it did. And that's the alpha and the omega of my philosophizing. If I can't remember it happening, did it even? How does this map to criminal justice?
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    In the 1980s a philosopher named Stanly Cavell was asking whether surgeons could intentionally operate on people without pain-suppressing anethesia, provided the patient would remember nothing of it. Chapter-length discussions IIRC. My simple reaction was always this: Yes it would affect the humanity of the surgeons themselves to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if there is also a below-conscious-memory level of trauma memory as well, so superficial amnesia might not be enough for the patient to be "unaffected".
- voxl 4y ago
  I think you're right on the money, continuous storage of long term memory + cognitive feedback of those memories _is_ consciousness in my book. We already know that decisions can happen before your conscious mind is aware, that's because consciousness isn't about this moment, it's about past moments, it's a feedback loop.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kahnclusions 4y ago
As far as we can tell consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the physical processes of the brain, and when you interrupt those processes, you don’t form new memories, and when you wake up it’s as if you time travelled to that point. Any other explanation involves a lot of hand-waving and vast unfounded assumptions that contradict the known laws of physics. My question for those cases is: how does it work? For example, if there really is a “soul” that is able to influence (and be influenced by) my brain, then what is the physical mechanism for that interaction? Can we describe it in a rigorous mathematical framework that makes testable predictions? In what way is our current description of physics incomplete or incompatible, and how do we alter them to fit this new stuff in? What observations can we make to confirm this? If someone can answer those questions for the soul, then there’s a Nobel prize waiting for you for completely upending and rewriting our laws of physics.
- prmph 4y ago
  The most interesting things may not be fully describable in mathematically rigorous terms; that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or don’t have structure. For example, nutrition is a very complex thing to design proper studies for, and there is nothing like perfectly controlling for all variables. Yet, this situation does not change the basic fact that our diet affects our health. There’s phenomena that’s beyond our math, science, and logic.
- galacticaactual 4y ago
  Can you describe “good” and “evil” in a rigorously mathematical framework that makes testable predictions?
  - keonix 4y ago
    Sure! It's just a classification of events that each person has. Testible prediction? Socially close people will have similar classifications as opposed to randomly chosen ones (I will leave defining metric space over possible classifications as an exercise to the reader)
    - 4y ago
estevaoam 4y ago
I recalled immediately about the quantum vibrations hypothesis which Penrose helped create: https://youtu.be/VG8_hlnFdWM https://youtu.be/VG8_hlnFdWM Although it sounds weird the reasoning and explanation on microtubules is pretty fascinating. If you’re interested definitely check that out.
paulsutter 4y ago
Every debate about consciousness is painful to watch because consciousness is a suitcase word (so many meanings are packed into it that we can’t untangle them)
- 2snakes 4y ago
  How about: that which draws distinctions (differences) especially between the Self and Other?
- oliwarner 4y ago
  That's rather a defeatist approach to philosophy. "We might not understand each other so shouldn't bother, lest we upset Paul." I get that we're all amateurs here, but I think there's plenty of scope for meaningful conversation about consciousness, including explaining what we're talking about.
gtsnexp 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31775802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31775802
systemvoltage 4y ago
No.1 problem with conciousness discussions is the lack of precise, razor sharp definition of 'conciousness'. Without good definition, all arguments go past one another. Next time observe, how arguments appear to be going back and forth, but they're talking about two very different definitions of 'conciousness'.
mjan22640 4y ago
It is garbage collected and a new mind is constructed on wakeup.
coldblues 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks we are asking the wrong questions here? Our consciousness is restored when we wake up. But this consciousness can only be considered as such when we are aware of it. Can there be consciousness without self-awareness? Is a deer conscious if not self-aware of its own consciousness? Is an organism with a primitive nervous system conscious? One that purely interacts with its world through simple stimuli? If you sleep and wake up, does it matter if it's you or not? If we think that our consciousness is purely manifested through our physical, neural connections, than are we ever different, original, born or dead? A physical phenomena such as consciousness is infinitely malleable just like matter. Being born and then when dead, do you stop existing? Since you're physical, what prevents those same physical patterns emerging again and making you exist once again? Just like when you're asleep, or under anesthesia. Your consciousness, your awareness of time and space stops existing, and once you wake up, you can proclaim that you're still you, because your memories and sense of self are still intact. But what if they weren't? You'd believe you're somewhere else, right? What if you simply died and woke up in another body? But what does that mean? Reincarnation is possible? But wait, if reincarnation is possible, does that mean that everyone who was born and died, will exist once again? Is there a queue for this stuff? N amount of people born out of nothing, are now on a queue to be reborn as something else? Doesn't make sense. But ask, did you ever truly exist? You became out of nothing, rather we consider it "nothing", but again, it's just matter, and now you're something, and then you think you'll either go nowhere, or somewhere else? Another universe? Another body? If two clones exist, do both of them experience reality, does consciousness switch between those bodies rapidly like it's something that exists independently, or do both of them exist at the same time? If one of them dies, does the other consciousness merge into the other? Or dies it go into nonexistence, or does it get reborn? Seriously, it just does not make sense. The questions don't either. We need to approach this differently. What prevents someone from "not existing". What shackles are there to keep your consciousness to be entirely unique and never reproducible? If we consider it's physical, there are none. I don't know if all of these rambles made sense, but this reply may sink with the ship, so I just had to get it out.
pmapcat 4y ago
I mean we can observe finite mapping of the mathematical world onto physical universe. Which in itself is a wonder, because it exists. I find no reason for it to be so, otherwise that it is related through common substance. Even Reals are not real. Math is mental. Math objects are infinitely larger than physical world. Material universe is a special case of mathematical world. because you can construct infinite physical worlds if you choose different relations from the infinite. You can observe infinite worlds through consciousness. Only one of them is physical. If there is a hypothetical one to one mapping of physical world onto a set of models then consciousness is larger than the physical universe. The question is whether that is true. How much of the physical universe is unknowable in principle. If the material world > consciousness, then there exist things that are possible to observe, but impossible to know. And the converse, if consciousness > material world then there exist things that are impossible to observe, but possible to imagine. I mean there is physical brain, neurons, observations and other stuff which is strongly relating self body and consciousness. But maybe it is so by design? The question is what is the difference between me being a brain and me imagining being a brain. That is my take into it as I am approaching 30. We will see my opinion later in life. edit, formatting
aamargulies 4y ago
Roger Penrose talked about this with Lex Fridman. The anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff is looking into how anesthesia affects microtubules and the implications for consciousness. Penrose is intrigued by the symmetry of microtubules and the possibility for this symmetry to enable quantum coherence to be accessible biologically. His larger point is that consciousness is not a computation. https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0 https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0 Relevant part starts around 3:30.
a4isms 4y ago
Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA22_1wnj9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA22_1wnj9w
causi 4y ago
Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go? The article itself is good but that title, wow. Our minds don't "go" anywhere any more than the illumination goes somewhere when you snuff a candle. Just as the flame isn't high enough to produce significant light your brain activity isn't high enough to produce coherent thought.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I find "twilight" drugs way more disturbing. Its clear that people on them are clearly themselves, though less inhibited. But none of what occurs becomes part of their experience. At least consciously.
  - causi 4y ago
    I don't understand why that's disturbing. It's the consequence of interfering with your brain's ability to form memories. That could be disturbing, but only if you ignore the fact your brain is always in a state of constant memory pruning anyway. Being blackout drunk or drugged is only changing your percent of discarded memory from something like 95% to 100%.
- draw_down 4y ago
lycos 4y ago
A tiny subset of patients (about 1 or 2 in 1,000, although estimates vary) have reported “accidental awareness,” That's just what I wanted to read having my first ever surgery planned for next week, another thing to be afraid of happening!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kradeelav 4y ago
  If it helps -- it's still quite rare, and orders of magnitude less likely that you'd feel or remember anything other than a general haziness after three days. They put a whole cocktail of drugs in you so there's more overlap and less likely for one failure point. Yes there can be things that go wrong, but that's true with daily life (car crash, etc). You're far more likely to get hit with a case of comparatively mild post-op nausea as any kind of complication, and there's so many more ways to immediately fix that painlessly than even 20 years ago. You should be able to talk to your doc and anesthesiologist in the preparation process 30 minutes before if there's any private questions, concerns, or fears. Best of luck, and I hope for your swift recovery. Happy to answer any questions if there's any about the process. (Have had ~17 surgeries, some for life threatening issues, and one last week for complicated eye stuff so it's fairly fresh. Just wanted to send words of encouragement.)
  - alsaffar 4y ago
    Hello, I’m not the person you replied to, and I hope its not against the rules, but: I’ve had a terrible couple of years with debilitating anxiety and fear of physical illnesses after a panic attack one year into covid (diagnosed OCD, and talking to a therapist, and orders of magnitude better now w/o medication thankfully). One of the triggers that I still have is this (fear of anesthesia wearing of, and feeling painful procedures) so thank you for the post. (Sorry for the elongated ty note xD)
    - kradeelav 4y ago
      No worries, been exactly there on a real emotional level. Wishing you personally the best of luck too, and proud of you for meeting the anxiety-head on with therapy. :)
ggm 4y ago
Anyone who has had vestibular disturbances will tell you it's a living hell. I think the mechanism is pretty good, but I also suspect it's not far removed from asking the ethics committee to let them attatch nipple clamps with low voltage shocks: It will elucidate a signal, but my goodness... (I am sure they will settle down, and its for a greater good, but this is one of those 'this may hurt a little' moments)
velcrovan 4y ago
RadioLab did an episode on this topic “Decoding the Void” in 2014 (https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia) that, for me, pretty much deconstructed the whole idea of an afterlife in 20 minutes. What happens when we die? People commonly think of this as some kind of unknowable mystery. But people lose consciousness all the time and aren't entering the spirit world when they do so. If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like. Maybe a very pedestrian thought for some of you, but as a sincere fundamentalist zealot for most of my life, it was a big epiphany for me. (Disclaimer: I understand some will disagree intensely — I would have been among you ten years ago. I’m not here to invalidate your sincerely held beliefs, only to relate a change in my understanding.)
- ColanR 4y ago
  I think that's why sleep has been called the 'little death' since ancient times. In a sense, you die every time you sleep, and wake up a slightly different person. Edit: ya'll have dirty minds. Homer refers to 'sleep as the brother of death' in the Illiad. Apparently Buddha said something similar too, though I can't find a source. Edit2: just going to leave you with this: "each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." – Arthur Schopenhauer
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    I wonder if there was some evolutionary advantage to sleep in making death less scary. If you didn't go to sleep every night, then the idea of suddenly becoming unconscious would be absolutely terrifying.
  - wing-_-nuts 4y ago
    Ehem, it's not sleep that's called 'the little death', although it tends to happen in the same place :^)
  - pnut 4y ago
    I understand that expression to have a slightly different meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort
bondarchuk 4y ago
https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation Just a friendly reminder.
- Cd00d 4y ago
  What are you trying to communicate?
moron4hire 4y ago
Okay, this makes me feel better about having opted for local anesthetic for my vasectomy. When I had my vasectomy, the doctor told me that it was a quick procedure that really didn't need general anesthesia, that local was fine. When the procedure started, at first I only felt some tugging, no pain at all. But after they finished the first half and started the second, the anesthetic was completely worn off. The pain was excruciating. I almost vomited and I almost passed out. Afterwards, the doctor told me that was fairly common and that they don't tell people about it because they don't want to "scare them off". So I definitely don't think I was given the chance to give informed consent. But maybe I am not quite so angry about it, now that I've read this article.
LBJsPNS 4y ago
Cleveland. It's always Cleveland.
aj7 4y ago
I’ve woken up twice during simpler procedures. The clarity of my cognition was remarkable. The first time, in my late 30’s I was having an endoscopy of my esophagus. I woke up to find a complex, metallic, uncomfortable apparatus having taken over my head like that fast-moving creature in Alien. I thought,”Shit. I’m gonna have to hold my head still, keep this together, and persevere.” And so I did. The second time, I was getting a stent in the cath lab. I woke up just in time to see the cardiologist instructing a resident, who was holding what looked like a staple gun, (but which of course was trailing at least a 5 meter long cable, the end of which was in my coronary artery.) The cardiologist commanded, “Now do it.” The resident made a weird, semi-violent motion with the staple gun, and I believed implanted the stent at that moment.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
I finetuned GPT3 with the complete works of Plato and posed the question: "How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?" "The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions." "Certainly," I replied. "But if we are to use words and names which are not a picture of the actual fact, we shall always be in danger of falling away from the truth." "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing." "Very good," he said. "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed. "Why not?" "Because most of the soul's operations are unknown to us." "But if she does not perceive through the senses, what is the function of the senses?" "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind."
- fny 4y ago
  This reads like nonsense.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Care to say which part specifically? And, is this more nonsense than most discussions of soul?
    - fny 4y ago
      Ugh, you're going to make me analyze AI drivel. Yes. It reads like nonsense. > "How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?" Red flag 1: it's two wildly different questions in one. Red flag 2: one question makes sense, the other does not. 1. "How is the soul different from consciousness?" This makes sense. 2. "How is the soul different from sensation?" This does not make sense without further elaboration. I've noticed this type of subtle mistake in a lot of AI drivel: compound statements where one item doesn't quite fit. Now for the real pukefest. > "The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions." This metaphor is completely empty. It means nothing. It provides no value. > "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing." When did we presume this? > "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed. Lol wut? > "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind." We've gone off topic and the original question has not been discussed.
wintorez 4y ago
When we shutdown our computers, where do the applications go?
PanosJee 4y ago
/dev/null
chadlavi 4y ago
When a wave washes it away, where does a sand castle go?
prometheus76 4y ago
The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Ian McGilchrist is a good place to catch up to the state of the art in consciousness research that goes beyond materialism.
borroka 4y ago
One of my long-standing interests is hypnosis, and specifically hypnosis for anesthesia. I have been studying the “art of hypnosis” for more than 15 years, and I believe it is criminally understudied as a discipline and undervalued as a tool. Unfortunately, as has happened in other fields (think of electromedicine, for example), the discipline has been swamped by charlatans and people who think a ponytail can work like an antenna receiving signals from outer space. But the potential is there. It is said that the Scottish surgeon James Esdaile performed tremendously invasive surgeries, for instance for testicular cancer, using no chemical anesthesia, and making use only of what is now called "deep hypnosis"-—that particular state of hypnosis is called "Esdaile state" among practitioners, and it was popularized by the late Gerry Klein. I formally studied hypnosis years ago with a former student of Klein’s. Although when reading Esdaile's biography he gives a certain “charlatanesque” vibe, "It is an objective matter of record that [...] James Esdaile, an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon employed by the East India Company [..] performed 'pain-free' major surgery on more than 300 cases (amputations, removal of cataracts, removal of massive tumours)" [0]. Dave Elman, one of the most famous practitioners and popularizers of the medical approach to hypnosis, wrote a seminal book in the 1960s titled "Hypnotherapy". In it, he also talks about a very simple but apparently very effective approach to self-hypnosis, which is especially useful for anesthesia. Elman wrote (page 33 of his book) and could be heard saying the same in his medical tapes: “I usually help myself establish autosuggestion by a cue word. I choose the word "green" because green, in my mind, is God's color. It connotes the pleasantest visions in the minds of the most people. Here are your instructions: Say the word green and close your eyes. Test for eye-closure. When you are sure you have eye-closure, use the symbol word "green" again, knowing that the instant you say it your suggestion will take full and complete effect. Then test to make sure that the suggestion has taken full effect. To release the eye muscles, say the word "green" once again, and your eyes will open. It takes about four seconds to anesthetize yourself. But you must practice. Autosuggestion is a priceless possession.” In his tape recordings, he instructed the audience on the use of anesthesia through self-hypnosis and encouraged them to test anesthesia, not analgesia, using Allis clamps at the most painful settings: everyone who tried it felt no pain. Isn’t that amazing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Esdaile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Esdaile
LeonTheremin 4y ago
Zero tries to use silent speech interfaces for these investigations. Are they even trying?
jprd 4y ago
Radiolab, consciousness and the state of being. All with informed individuals who are looking to encourage the discussion and discovery without just dunking on people. HN is special, and this thread is a great example. Thank you to everyone who's posted!
Splognosticus 4y ago
I was under anesthesia a few years back and it really opened my eyes to what death actually is. You don't dream. You don't experience anything. It's not scary. You just... stop being. I went under and then next thing I knew they were wheeling me back to my room. No pain. No fear. I was simply transported from one instant to another.
Merrill 4y ago
The mind application is terminated, and the autonomic OS continues until the mind is restarted from memory. It's like a good night's sleep. Why is this so complicated?
EMM_386 4y ago
If anyone is curious about these topics I'd strongly suggest the Closer to Truth series. Thousands of episodes covering all aspects of topics about existence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAVbX3K5Q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAVbX3K5Q4
_8j50 4y ago
I think of it like a PC entering s3/sleep/suspend. The data is there active in memory the CPU is just no longer scheduling processes, it is only maintaining power and signaling to keep essential services online. Our consciousness is the software where our personality+subconscious is analogous to the kernel, behaviors are useland processes,our PNS+medula are drivers and memories are data. When we make things they are reflections of us

133 points by signa11 4y ago

Razengan 4y ago

Nevermind anesthesia, what about every day during sleep?

seibelj 4y ago
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
- keithwhor 4y ago
  I used to be the same way — do you drink caffeine after 4PM? I was convinced I was a night owl and my most productive hours were 10PM until 2AM. That was until, at suggestion of my partner, I stopped drinking caffeine in the late afternoon and evening. As long as I do that I have no problem getting to sleep consistently and easily. May not be the case for you but for my entire 20s I simply didn’t realize how much caffeine was actually impacting me.
  - dr_ick 4y ago
    Same. I don't drink caffeine after noon and I have a much easier time maintaining a functional sleep schedule. I had a older relative who often complained about poor sleep. I asked if they drank caffeine in the afternoon and they scoffed at the idea it could be the issue. But I have noticed they are not drinking caffeine late in the day now, and the complaining about poor sleep has ceased.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    I’ve been a night owl since I was a small child. My dad is also one. No caffeine after 2pm.
Ekaros 4y ago
It is bit strange. Sometimes there is various levels of dreams, sometimes there is vague feeling of remembering something or waking up for moments. And then there is those times when time is simply gone. Look at clock, it is 2. Move head next time it is 6... In time that feels like an instant.
muzani 4y ago
They're all different brain functions. A lot of brain stuff happens during REM and deep sleep. Different brain stuff happens during concussions and anesthesia. I wish it was as easy as some planned experiment monitoring input/output but brains are complex.
shirajg 4y ago
Small video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_-7tsmcWWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_-7tsmcWWI

weregiraffe 4y ago

Where is my mind?

smegsicle 4y ago
must be a devil
- fourseventy 4y ago
  between us
bowsamic 4y ago
Stand on top of the highest peak. Proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean. Three heads and eight arms. An eight- or sixteen-foot body. A staff or whisk. A pillar or lantern. The sons of Zhang and Li. The earth and sky.
photochemsyn 4y ago
"There is no place to seek the mind; it is like the footprints of birds in the sky." Zenrin
driggs 4y ago
Way out in the water, see it swimmin'. - Black Francis
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cratermoon 4y ago

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.

mathieuh 4y ago

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.

whoooooo123 4y ago
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.
simonh 4y ago
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.
- porker 4y ago
  Yes. I found it incredibly disorientating, even after the event because time has passed and I have no awareness of it.
  - avh02 4y ago
    I had my first full anesthesia experience as an adult - emergency but minor surgery, so not an extremely scary ordeal. I was very distinctly trying to pay attention to the process of going under, as in: do i feel it fade? etc. I remember doing the countdown thing and also trying to see if i could notice it at all like going to sleep. but, just like an off switch, no state change, just a full stop (but without something like "blackness"). First woke up to voices of nurses chitchatting across the recovery room and knowing everything was okay. But as another comment put it, I can only imagine death being similar (if instant/unexpected/while sleeping/etc), just without the coming back. Which is scarier.

simonh 4y ago

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.

bowsamic 4y ago
The Buddhist answer is that all of physical reality is also in the mind. Rather than physical and mental being separate, physical reality itself is constructed by the mind
- 2snakes 4y ago
  Right. In Kastrup's idealism, a scalpel, for example, is actually a transpersonal mental process. So it modifies brain-consciousness much like an emotion or thought modifies other thoughts.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    No, the scalpel doesn’t actually exist except as an idea in the mind that is attached to, thus it can’t be said to really exist in any way. It is empty of self existence (svahbhava), as is our own mind. Nothing has fundamental essence or identity
    - 2snakes 4y ago
      Sorry, I'm not a subjective idealist or a solipsist. I believe god consciousness is the final arbiter. And that we can expand our human consciousness to god consciousness. So I'm partial to objective idealism instead.

EmilyHughes 4y ago

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. It simply squeezes the missing time in there and synchronizes individual minds together again later. Also interesting: The thought "I was under anaesthesia for 12 hours" is itself an object that appears in consciousness.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
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 sleeping.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  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.

bheadmaster 4y ago

I think that consciousness (or rather the feeling of consciousness) is very related to continuous long-term memory storing. When you're blackout drunk, or under anesthesia, your brain can still infer connections between sequential stimuli (e.g. you can understand words), but none of those memories stay in your brain long-term. I'd say that we were actually conscious during that period, but in the present moment we have no recollection because our memory (for some chemical reason related to alcohol/anesthesia) wasn't stored properly for long-term use. I imagine the same would happen if we somehow managed to "remove" memories from our minds. After the removal, our current self would not have any recollection of those memories removed - as if we weren't conscious during that period whatsoever. In conclusion: the feeling of consciousness is deeply related to continuous storage of our life-long memories.

ehecatl42 4y ago
> I think that consciousness (or rather the feeling of consciousness) is very related to continuous long-term memory storing. Are you my surgeon? About six years ago I was to undergo somewhat novel surgery and the chappie asked if he could record the procedure, it being a research hospital and all). "Sure," I said, "if you can assure me I will feel no pain." He said that he could not promise that, but they he could assure me I would not remember it even if it did. And that's the alpha and the omega of my philosophizing. If I can't remember it happening, did it even? How does this map to criminal justice?
- a9h74j 4y ago
  In the 1980s a philosopher named Stanly Cavell was asking whether surgeons could intentionally operate on people without pain-suppressing anethesia, provided the patient would remember nothing of it. Chapter-length discussions IIRC. My simple reaction was always this: Yes it would affect the humanity of the surgeons themselves to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if there is also a below-conscious-memory level of trauma memory as well, so superficial amnesia might not be enough for the patient to be "unaffected".
voxl 4y ago
I think you're right on the money, continuous storage of long term memory + cognitive feedback of those memories _is_ consciousness in my book. We already know that decisions can happen before your conscious mind is aware, that's because consciousness isn't about this moment, it's about past moments, it's a feedback loop.

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kahnclusions 4y ago

As far as we can tell consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the physical processes of the brain, and when you interrupt those processes, you don’t form new memories, and when you wake up it’s as if you time travelled to that point. Any other explanation involves a lot of hand-waving and vast unfounded assumptions that contradict the known laws of physics. My question for those cases is: how does it work? For example, if there really is a “soul” that is able to influence (and be influenced by) my brain, then what is the physical mechanism for that interaction? Can we describe it in a rigorous mathematical framework that makes testable predictions? In what way is our current description of physics incomplete or incompatible, and how do we alter them to fit this new stuff in? What observations can we make to confirm this? If someone can answer those questions for the soul, then there’s a Nobel prize waiting for you for completely upending and rewriting our laws of physics.

prmph 4y ago
The most interesting things may not be fully describable in mathematically rigorous terms; that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or don’t have structure. For example, nutrition is a very complex thing to design proper studies for, and there is nothing like perfectly controlling for all variables. Yet, this situation does not change the basic fact that our diet affects our health. There’s phenomena that’s beyond our math, science, and logic.
galacticaactual 4y ago
Can you describe “good” and “evil” in a rigorously mathematical framework that makes testable predictions?
- keonix 4y ago
  Sure! It's just a classification of events that each person has. Testible prediction? Socially close people will have similar classifications as opposed to randomly chosen ones (I will leave defining metric space over possible classifications as an exercise to the reader)
  - 4y ago

estevaoam 4y ago

I recalled immediately about the quantum vibrations hypothesis which Penrose helped create: https://youtu.be/VG8_hlnFdWM https://youtu.be/VG8_hlnFdWM Although it sounds weird the reasoning and explanation on microtubules is pretty fascinating. If you’re interested definitely check that out.

paulsutter 4y ago

Every debate about consciousness is painful to watch because consciousness is a suitcase word (so many meanings are packed into it that we can’t untangle them)

2snakes 4y ago
How about: that which draws distinctions (differences) especially between the Self and Other?
oliwarner 4y ago
That's rather a defeatist approach to philosophy. "We might not understand each other so shouldn't bother, lest we upset Paul." I get that we're all amateurs here, but I think there's plenty of scope for meaningful conversation about consciousness, including explaining what we're talking about.

gtsnexp 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31775802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31775802

systemvoltage 4y ago

No.1 problem with conciousness discussions is the lack of precise, razor sharp definition of 'conciousness'. Without good definition, all arguments go past one another. Next time observe, how arguments appear to be going back and forth, but they're talking about two very different definitions of 'conciousness'.

mjan22640 4y ago

It is garbage collected and a new mind is constructed on wakeup.

coldblues 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks we are asking the wrong questions here? Our consciousness is restored when we wake up. But this consciousness can only be considered as such when we are aware of it. Can there be consciousness without self-awareness? Is a deer conscious if not self-aware of its own consciousness? Is an organism with a primitive nervous system conscious? One that purely interacts with its world through simple stimuli? If you sleep and wake up, does it matter if it's you or not? If we think that our consciousness is purely manifested through our physical, neural connections, than are we ever different, original, born or dead? A physical phenomena such as consciousness is infinitely malleable just like matter. Being born and then when dead, do you stop existing? Since you're physical, what prevents those same physical patterns emerging again and making you exist once again? Just like when you're asleep, or under anesthesia. Your consciousness, your awareness of time and space stops existing, and once you wake up, you can proclaim that you're still you, because your memories and sense of self are still intact. But what if they weren't? You'd believe you're somewhere else, right? What if you simply died and woke up in another body? But what does that mean? Reincarnation is possible? But wait, if reincarnation is possible, does that mean that everyone who was born and died, will exist once again? Is there a queue for this stuff? N amount of people born out of nothing, are now on a queue to be reborn as something else? Doesn't make sense. But ask, did you ever truly exist? You became out of nothing, rather we consider it "nothing", but again, it's just matter, and now you're something, and then you think you'll either go nowhere, or somewhere else? Another universe? Another body? If two clones exist, do both of them experience reality, does consciousness switch between those bodies rapidly like it's something that exists independently, or do both of them exist at the same time? If one of them dies, does the other consciousness merge into the other? Or dies it go into nonexistence, or does it get reborn? Seriously, it just does not make sense. The questions don't either. We need to approach this differently. What prevents someone from "not existing". What shackles are there to keep your consciousness to be entirely unique and never reproducible? If we consider it's physical, there are none. I don't know if all of these rambles made sense, but this reply may sink with the ship, so I just had to get it out.

pmapcat 4y ago

I mean we can observe finite mapping of the mathematical world onto physical universe. Which in itself is a wonder, because it exists. I find no reason for it to be so, otherwise that it is related through common substance. Even Reals are not real. Math is mental. Math objects are infinitely larger than physical world. Material universe is a special case of mathematical world. because you can construct infinite physical worlds if you choose different relations from the infinite. You can observe infinite worlds through consciousness. Only one of them is physical. If there is a hypothetical one to one mapping of physical world onto a set of models then consciousness is larger than the physical universe. The question is whether that is true. How much of the physical universe is unknowable in principle. If the material world > consciousness, then there exist things that are possible to observe, but impossible to know. And the converse, if consciousness > material world then there exist things that are impossible to observe, but possible to imagine. I mean there is physical brain, neurons, observations and other stuff which is strongly relating self body and consciousness. But maybe it is so by design? The question is what is the difference between me being a brain and me imagining being a brain. That is my take into it as I am approaching 30. We will see my opinion later in life. edit, formatting

aamargulies 4y ago

Roger Penrose talked about this with Lex Fridman. The anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff is looking into how anesthesia affects microtubules and the implications for consciousness. Penrose is intrigued by the symmetry of microtubules and the possibility for this symmetry to enable quantum coherence to be accessible biologically. His larger point is that consciousness is not a computation. https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0 https://youtu.be/hXgqik6HXc0 Relevant part starts around 3:30.

a4isms 4y ago

Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA22_1wnj9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA22_1wnj9w

causi 4y ago

Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go? The article itself is good but that title, wow. Our minds don't "go" anywhere any more than the illumination goes somewhere when you snuff a candle. Just as the flame isn't high enough to produce significant light your brain activity isn't high enough to produce coherent thought.

galangalalgol 4y ago
I find "twilight" drugs way more disturbing. Its clear that people on them are clearly themselves, though less inhibited. But none of what occurs becomes part of their experience. At least consciously.
- causi 4y ago
  I don't understand why that's disturbing. It's the consequence of interfering with your brain's ability to form memories. That could be disturbing, but only if you ignore the fact your brain is always in a state of constant memory pruning anyway. Being blackout drunk or drugged is only changing your percent of discarded memory from something like 95% to 100%.
draw_down 4y ago

lycos 4y ago

A tiny subset of patients (about 1 or 2 in 1,000, although estimates vary) have reported “accidental awareness,” That's just what I wanted to read having my first ever surgery planned for next week, another thing to be afraid of happening!

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kradeelav 4y ago
If it helps -- it's still quite rare, and orders of magnitude less likely that you'd feel or remember anything other than a general haziness after three days. They put a whole cocktail of drugs in you so there's more overlap and less likely for one failure point. Yes there can be things that go wrong, but that's true with daily life (car crash, etc). You're far more likely to get hit with a case of comparatively mild post-op nausea as any kind of complication, and there's so many more ways to immediately fix that painlessly than even 20 years ago. You should be able to talk to your doc and anesthesiologist in the preparation process 30 minutes before if there's any private questions, concerns, or fears. Best of luck, and I hope for your swift recovery. Happy to answer any questions if there's any about the process. (Have had ~17 surgeries, some for life threatening issues, and one last week for complicated eye stuff so it's fairly fresh. Just wanted to send words of encouragement.)
- alsaffar 4y ago
  Hello, I’m not the person you replied to, and I hope its not against the rules, but: I’ve had a terrible couple of years with debilitating anxiety and fear of physical illnesses after a panic attack one year into covid (diagnosed OCD, and talking to a therapist, and orders of magnitude better now w/o medication thankfully). One of the triggers that I still have is this (fear of anesthesia wearing of, and feeling painful procedures) so thank you for the post. (Sorry for the elongated ty note xD)
  - kradeelav 4y ago
    No worries, been exactly there on a real emotional level. Wishing you personally the best of luck too, and proud of you for meeting the anxiety-head on with therapy. :)

ggm 4y ago

Anyone who has had vestibular disturbances will tell you it's a living hell. I think the mechanism is pretty good, but I also suspect it's not far removed from asking the ethics committee to let them attatch nipple clamps with low voltage shocks: It will elucidate a signal, but my goodness... (I am sure they will settle down, and its for a greater good, but this is one of those 'this may hurt a little' moments)

velcrovan 4y ago

RadioLab did an episode on this topic “Decoding the Void” in 2014 (https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia https://www.radiolab.org/episodes/anesthesia) that, for me, pretty much deconstructed the whole idea of an afterlife in 20 minutes. What happens when we die? People commonly think of this as some kind of unknowable mystery. But people lose consciousness all the time and aren't entering the spirit world when they do so. If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like. Maybe a very pedestrian thought for some of you, but as a sincere fundamentalist zealot for most of my life, it was a big epiphany for me. (Disclaimer: I understand some will disagree intensely — I would have been among you ten years ago. I’m not here to invalidate your sincerely held beliefs, only to relate a change in my understanding.)

ColanR 4y ago
I think that's why sleep has been called the 'little death' since ancient times. In a sense, you die every time you sleep, and wake up a slightly different person. Edit: ya'll have dirty minds. Homer refers to 'sleep as the brother of death' in the Illiad. Apparently Buddha said something similar too, though I can't find a source. Edit2: just going to leave you with this: "each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death." – Arthur Schopenhauer
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  I wonder if there was some evolutionary advantage to sleep in making death less scary. If you didn't go to sleep every night, then the idea of suddenly becoming unconscious would be absolutely terrifying.
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Ehem, it's not sleep that's called 'the little death', although it tends to happen in the same place :^)
- pnut 4y ago
  I understand that expression to have a slightly different meaning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort

bondarchuk 4y ago

https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine https://www.templeton.org/grant/nautilus-magazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation Just a friendly reminder.

Cd00d 4y ago
What are you trying to communicate?

moron4hire 4y ago

Okay, this makes me feel better about having opted for local anesthetic for my vasectomy. When I had my vasectomy, the doctor told me that it was a quick procedure that really didn't need general anesthesia, that local was fine. When the procedure started, at first I only felt some tugging, no pain at all. But after they finished the first half and started the second, the anesthetic was completely worn off. The pain was excruciating. I almost vomited and I almost passed out. Afterwards, the doctor told me that was fairly common and that they don't tell people about it because they don't want to "scare them off". So I definitely don't think I was given the chance to give informed consent. But maybe I am not quite so angry about it, now that I've read this article.

LBJsPNS 4y ago

Cleveland. It's always Cleveland.

aj7 4y ago

I’ve woken up twice during simpler procedures. The clarity of my cognition was remarkable. The first time, in my late 30’s I was having an endoscopy of my esophagus. I woke up to find a complex, metallic, uncomfortable apparatus having taken over my head like that fast-moving creature in Alien. I thought,”Shit. I’m gonna have to hold my head still, keep this together, and persevere.” And so I did. The second time, I was getting a stent in the cath lab. I woke up just in time to see the cardiologist instructing a resident, who was holding what looked like a staple gun, (but which of course was trailing at least a 5 meter long cable, the end of which was in my coronary artery.) The cardiologist commanded, “Now do it.” The resident made a weird, semi-violent motion with the staple gun, and I believed implanted the stent at that moment.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

I finetuned GPT3 with the complete works of Plato and posed the question: "How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?" "The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions." "Certainly," I replied. "But if we are to use words and names which are not a picture of the actual fact, we shall always be in danger of falling away from the truth." "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing." "Very good," he said. "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed. "Why not?" "Because most of the soul's operations are unknown to us." "But if she does not perceive through the senses, what is the function of the senses?" "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind."

fny 4y ago
This reads like nonsense.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Care to say which part specifically? And, is this more nonsense than most discussions of soul?
  - fny 4y ago
    Ugh, you're going to make me analyze AI drivel. Yes. It reads like nonsense. > "How is the soul different from consciousness or sensation?" Red flag 1: it's two wildly different questions in one. Red flag 2: one question makes sense, the other does not. 1. "How is the soul different from consciousness?" This makes sense. 2. "How is the soul different from sensation?" This does not make sense without further elaboration. I've noticed this type of subtle mistake in a lot of AI drivel: compound statements where one item doesn't quite fit. Now for the real pukefest. > "The soul, I think, is like a sphere, and consciousness or sensation are like circles which move round another centre which moves round yet another centre, and so on in endless cycles." "And the definitions of the soul which you were mentioning," I said, "like that of the circle, were only half-truths?" "Quite so," he answered. "Such a figure as that of the circle is infinitely more like the soul than the said definitions." This metaphor is completely empty. It means nothing. It provides no value. > "That is true," he said. "Then let us not presume to say that the soul is the same as consciousness, but let us say rather that the soul is that which becomes aware of any thing." When did we presume this? > "But does the soul perceive through the eyes or any other sense?" "Presumably through the senses." "Not through the ears, however," he interposed. Lol wut? > "They prepare the soul to perceive after she is prepared through the true philosophy." "How do they do that?" "The alliance of the simple and pure with the pure is a sort of attunement which gives the soul rhythm and beauty, and makes her aware of the true nature of the senses." "You have certainly explained the matter for me," I said. "Not at all," he said. "Yet I admire the natural ability of your mind." We've gone off topic and the original question has not been discussed.

wintorez 4y ago

When we shutdown our computers, where do the applications go?

PanosJee 4y ago

/dev/null

chadlavi 4y ago

When a wave washes it away, where does a sand castle go?

prometheus76 4y ago

The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by Ian McGilchrist is a good place to catch up to the state of the art in consciousness research that goes beyond materialism.

borroka 4y ago

One of my long-standing interests is hypnosis, and specifically hypnosis for anesthesia. I have been studying the “art of hypnosis” for more than 15 years, and I believe it is criminally understudied as a discipline and undervalued as a tool. Unfortunately, as has happened in other fields (think of electromedicine, for example), the discipline has been swamped by charlatans and people who think a ponytail can work like an antenna receiving signals from outer space. But the potential is there. It is said that the Scottish surgeon James Esdaile performed tremendously invasive surgeries, for instance for testicular cancer, using no chemical anesthesia, and making use only of what is now called "deep hypnosis"-—that particular state of hypnosis is called "Esdaile state" among practitioners, and it was popularized by the late Gerry Klein. I formally studied hypnosis years ago with a former student of Klein’s. Although when reading Esdaile's biography he gives a certain “charlatanesque” vibe, "It is an objective matter of record that [...] James Esdaile, an Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon employed by the East India Company [..] performed 'pain-free' major surgery on more than 300 cases (amputations, removal of cataracts, removal of massive tumours)" [0]. Dave Elman, one of the most famous practitioners and popularizers of the medical approach to hypnosis, wrote a seminal book in the 1960s titled "Hypnotherapy". In it, he also talks about a very simple but apparently very effective approach to self-hypnosis, which is especially useful for anesthesia. Elman wrote (page 33 of his book) and could be heard saying the same in his medical tapes: “I usually help myself establish autosuggestion by a cue word. I choose the word "green" because green, in my mind, is God's color. It connotes the pleasantest visions in the minds of the most people. Here are your instructions: Say the word green and close your eyes. Test for eye-closure. When you are sure you have eye-closure, use the symbol word "green" again, knowing that the instant you say it your suggestion will take full and complete effect. Then test to make sure that the suggestion has taken full effect. To release the eye muscles, say the word "green" once again, and your eyes will open. It takes about four seconds to anesthetize yourself. But you must practice. Autosuggestion is a priceless possession.” In his tape recordings, he instructed the audience on the use of anesthesia through self-hypnosis and encouraged them to test anesthesia, not analgesia, using Allis clamps at the most painful settings: everyone who tried it felt no pain. Isn’t that amazing? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Esdaile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Esdaile

LeonTheremin 4y ago

Zero tries to use silent speech interfaces for these investigations. Are they even trying?

jprd 4y ago

Radiolab, consciousness and the state of being. All with informed individuals who are looking to encourage the discussion and discovery without just dunking on people. HN is special, and this thread is a great example. Thank you to everyone who's posted!

Splognosticus 4y ago

I was under anesthesia a few years back and it really opened my eyes to what death actually is. You don't dream. You don't experience anything. It's not scary. You just... stop being. I went under and then next thing I knew they were wheeling me back to my room. No pain. No fear. I was simply transported from one instant to another.

Merrill 4y ago

The mind application is terminated, and the autonomic OS continues until the mind is restarted from memory. It's like a good night's sleep. Why is this so complicated?

EMM_386 4y ago

If anyone is curious about these topics I'd strongly suggest the Closer to Truth series. Thousands of episodes covering all aspects of topics about existence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAVbX3K5Q4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhAVbX3K5Q4

_8j50 4y ago

I think of it like a PC entering s3/sleep/suspend. The data is there active in memory the CPU is just no longer scheduling processes, it is only maintaining power and signaling to keep essential services online. Our consciousness is the software where our personality+subconscious is analogous to the kernel, behaviors are useland processes,our PNS+medula are drivers and memories are data. When we make things they are reflections of us