this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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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

Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?

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

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[–] [email protected] 204 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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.

[–] Manifish_Destiny 117 points 1 year ago

You sound a lot like a guy who isn't dead. Not sure if I should trust your opinion.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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.

[–] Vigge93 30 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

It's not sleeping I'm worried about, it's not waking up.

[–] Ultraviolet 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've also been dead for 13.8 billion years before I was born, and I didn't mind it then.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Except the agonizing pain which precedes death

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Agent641 20 points 1 year ago

Saying "you too" to the waiter after he says "enjoy your meal sir"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If it's death from too much anaesthesia (or, apparently, freezing), there is none.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (11 children)

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?

[–] CeeBee 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?

Latest studies with FMRIs and other tools have found that general anesthesia decouples the sections of the brain from each other. All the various parts of the brain stop communicating. It's an entities different state than sleep based on the brain activity.

Normally when we have various stimuli or are asleep, neural activity "flows" around from one section to the other. When under general anesthesia those flows are isolated and don't connect to other sections of the brain.

This has actually given us a huge clue as to where consciousness comes from and what makes it a thing.

It also helps explain why going under is just lights out and no drama or anything. It's like an off switch for the "person".

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[–] PixxlMan 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (8 children)

But isn't there a fear anyway? Because its forever. Also not seeing loved ones ever again. Not enjoying the nice things ever again.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think that most people aren't afraid of death itself. It's more the suffering to get there.

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[–] zeppo 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.

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[–] hark 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's still brain activity in sleep.

[–] Agent641 35 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Brain activity isnt nessecarily consciousness.

[–] CeeBee 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right? I've met so many of those people.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Do you really have dreamless sleep or do you simply not remember the dream?

[–] brygphilomena 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Well usually you wake up after each dream circle. You just don't remember it because you fall asleep almost instantly. That really was a problem when my father would wake me up in the morning and I couldn't remember him waking me up and slept for another half an hour)

Then I started with a dream journal. I don't do it anymore because I'm lazy, but I still remember waking up multiple times a night and remembering exactly what I just dreamed and notice the memory fading away.

When I journaled my dreams were extremely vivid. It isn't like this anymore but I still sometimes have lucid dreams even though I can't really stabilize and control them.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

Your brain is still very much active. It's more like running a computer with the display turned off.

[–] Alexstarfire 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wonder how the robot feels about rebooting.

[–] nucleative 9 points 1 year ago

He might not feel much if the save state doesn't get reloaded on startup!

[–] severien 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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 ...

[–] duckington 35 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Plus there are periods of deep sleep when your brain does shut down quite thoroughly. People just don't remember those, obviously, so they put a lot more weight on the dreaming bits that slip through sometimes.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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.

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[–] nevemsenki 7 points 1 year ago

Not even that sometimes. I'm told I can do some pretty mean kicks while I sleep.

[–] TwilightVulpine 14 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.)

[–] query 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And if the teleportation process doesn't terminate the original, but creates a copy on the other end, are they both the same person?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

a change in the substrate on which it takes place also has no profound significance.

It does to the person being "deleted".

[–] Carnelian 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you played SOMA? Fun game, gets into this exact type of thing

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[–] paddirn 12 points 1 year ago

Death is 'Long Death', Sleep is 'Short Death', and Naps are 'Power Death'.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

what a suspicious comic

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To die

To sleep

To sleep, perchance to dream...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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

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