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
It’s pretty terrifying when you think about it, yet completely normalized.
My pet peeve regarding all these discussions is that we throw around “consciousness”, but we have no good definition for it …
I mean to be honest I wouldn’t say that we “die” at all when you sleep… your mind is extremely active while sleeping, it’s just disconnected from motor control.
It’s 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.
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.
I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it’s difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn’t require brain activity either. There’s a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of “death” is oversimplifying things.
Not even that sometimes. I’m told I can do some pretty mean kicks while I sleep.
It’s terrifying at first, but if you reflect over it further it becomes natural. Sure, we can’t guarantee that we are the same continuous individual, but “not sleeping” would only see us have a more profound and permanent discontinuity. It’s not a possibility for us. Still, we do carry something of the people we used to be regardless. Consciousness vanishes and recreates itself, as do most of our cells. We are evolving entities, as is everyone around us.
This existential fear is rooted on a desire for permanence that we never had to begin with. There was never a fixed self that we could possibly know.
What sort of definition of consciousness are you looking for? I’m sure there are dozens of “good” definitions of consciousness.