As a compliment to the thread about near death experiences I’d really like hearing people’s experiences of losing consciousness under general anesthesia and what’s it like coming back.
Also interested of things anesthetists may have noticed about this during their career.
Life just stops. It’s like there was a portion deleted from your living record. No thoughts. No dreams. No fuzzy memories at the edge of thought that you can’t quite recall. None of that stuff you get even when blackout drunk. One moment you’re alive, counting or talking to the nurse, then suddenly you’re back and someone’s removed a piece of your body and apparently a piece of your timeline.
This is the correct answer. It’s a complete lack of experiencing anything. Not black, not darkness, but simply nothing. Before the general anesthesia you’ll feel high, and when you’re coming out of the general anesthesia you’ll be groggier than you’ve ever been in your life, but the time during general anesthesia simply won’t exist for you.
It’s the experience of death. Life is going on, time is passing, but your consciousness is not part of it.
I just talked about this on other thread but I find the non-experience of general anesthesia to be quite comforting in two ways.
Assuming that from the first person perspective it’s indistinguishable from death then it confirms that death is not just some kind of positive non-existence. You’re not left floating in a black void. It’s not that there’s a gap in the movie that’s just a blank screen. That entire section is removed. You go from one moment to another entirely skipping what happened inbetween. From first person perspective that gap doesn’t exist. You never really went unconsciouss. You went from experiencing the drugs starting to take effect to waking up. Death is probably just like this except that there’s no jump from experience to another but experience just stops.
The another thing about this is that maybe death doesn’t stop experience. Since you cannot experience not existing then maybe death is no different from general anesthesia; you die here and then in an instant you’re (what ever that is) transported having some other experience somewhere else in a different body or into whatever that can have experiences. Perhaps this is what people mean by rebirth.
I like this perspective, I think I will adopt it.
A slightly related thought. I personally find experience/perspective/consciousness itself to be of utmost absurdity. I don’t find indefinite consciousness via some method I don’t understand to be any more absurd.
“What is consciousness?” That is the one question I want to know the answer to the most. I’m sorry cancer patients but if I get to meet an oracle and get to ask one thing that’s what I’m going to ask.
I don’t even so much care about how it emerges or what are the requirements needed for it to emerge. That is the “easy” problem. What I’m truly curious about is what it is. How can it be that materia gives rise to subjective experience. It’s weird! It’s something so fundamental yet if you weren’t experiencing it yourself you’d have no idea it’s even a thing. There’s zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Also as Sam Harris says it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
Just a random thought, this reminds me of light. Kinda weird to think about but light is invisible unless it goes directly into your eyes.
Very very strange.
This and time too. You ask the oracle about consciousness, I’ll ask about time lol.
“I think therefore I am” … does that also mean “I thought therefore I was”? or something like that?
No, theoretically your whole memory could be an illusion.
Ah right, there’s a theory, like “Last Thursdayism” or something.
Now assume I’m the oracle.
Time is the passage of the story that you are/exist in.
In some more general sense, the universe doesn’t so much exist as a physical, real world, but as a story, dream or thought. In that story, you move forward like water flows in a river. That way you experience the passage of time. The landscape already exists, only you get to see it bit by bit. You’re welcome.
I believe that the universe is not all “materia”, but that an important part of it is pure movement, that can also take the shape of moving material. If we perceive something through our eyes, then movement (train passing by) acts on itself (the eyes), and that gives rise to the structure of the story, which is consciousness.
This seems to fit well with one of the explanations for what the brain actually is doing or atleast one of the processes running which is trying to guess what happens next.
That seems plausible in my mind.
So like am I the only one[tm] who felt like time did pass, actually, while I was under? It was like being deeply asleep.
Oh god the grogginess. One of the worst feelings
IMO it’s not a big deal as long as you know to expect it. If you know about it then you won’t be fighting crazy hard against it and thinking that something is wrong with you that you can’t make yourself fully awake. If you know about it before it happens then you know to not fight it, just relax and wait for the drugs to wear out of your system. They really should tell patients to expect the grogginess right before they’re put under.
Great description. It’s exactly like being dead. Absolutely nothing at all. It actually helped me get over my fear of death.
Except it’s fucking terrifying
This is where im at. I’ve been under twice and I dont want nothing I want something, I want existence and awareness of it.
You don’t even get the awareness of your life up until that point. It makes me think of René Descartes’ validation of it existence. “I think, therefore I am”. The problem is that, when you’re under, you cease to think, therefore you cease to be. Also, if the meaning or value of life is the collection of memories we gather along the way, and the moment you cease you not only lose further thought but also all memories and experiences you collected up until that point, then what the fuck are we doing here?
Spreading and sharing those thoughts and memories, fragments of our selves, so that they can live on in everyone we ever interact with. People who will, in turn, spread those fragments on even further.
A therapist recommended the book A Mans Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl when i mentioned something similar and it may help answer that question for you if you can snag a copy or pdf
Great book. Eh, maybe great isn’t the right word but it’s a good book to read. I was also recommended this book to deal with PTSD
Just trying to be
It’s not. If you don’t wake up from it you’ll never even know or care. So who cares?
So instead of being scared of dying, the terror comes from being dead.
I’m not scared of being dead, it’s like before you were born, you wouldn’t even know.
I’m scared of dying a slow death. Like buried alive, or with a broken body in a hospital bed. Instant death? I don’t care.
Ya, I’m scared of suffocation.
Exactly. I wanted to sing a song and finish it when waking up. I wasted my time for asking if that’s the gas putting me down. Brain fuzzing and boom. Darkness and singing the song. Can barely remember. A nurse one day later asked me what song I sang.
It’s really like a piece is missing, you are aware but the feeling is like nothing happened.