Consciousness and Anaesthesia (2009)
I had anesthesia once. Subjectively it’s about as close to being dead (or simply “not existing”) as I can imagine. One moment I was perfectly awake, and the next moment I was hearing the sounds of people talking around me and I groggily became aware of my doctor getting me to acknowledge him.<p>There is still the question though, was my subjective experience post-surgery accurate? It’s conceivable that consciousness is suppressed to varying degrees, while the <i>creation of memories</i> is more significantly impacted. I may have had some degree of consciousness but my subjective post-surgery experience has no knowledge of it.<p>And putting aside anesthesia altogether you have the phenomena of people that get blackout drunk. For some period of time they were up, senses receiving input and processing it even if their actions were high impaired, yet afterwards there is no memory. (There are of course degrees to this too, sometimes a person remembers the tiniest pieces, as if from a dream, sometimes not at all)<p>The entire topic invites the question: Is consciousness <i>required</i> for intelligent behavior? Unless you include consciousness as part of the definition of intelligent, it is not an easy question.<p>Somewhat on that topic I’d highly recommend the book <i>Being no One</i> by Thomas Metzinger