Quantum consciousness...

[bennyboy]

Human beings subjected to extreme sensory deprivation report, in addition to many other things, a loss of self or conscious experience.  OFC, they also report all manner of conscious experience.  It;s almost as if the brain plays itself out for as long as it can (sometimes terrifyingly) and then, at some point, deprived of stimulus it throws in the towel. In that context, it doesn;t seem binary, more a gradual loss of fidelity ultimately terminating in an interuption.  Consider, again, what is reported upon leaving a dep chamber.  A sudden "reawakening" and rush of experience.  At least in this sense, I don't know if consciousness can be accurately described as being on or off.  Is it on or off when you sleep?  At what point, in sleep - as another example, do you go from dreaming to "blank"?

On an esoteric note, this degradation, loss, and resumption of conscious experience is precisely the aim of a great many ritual forms....down to simple reps like a traditional lakota sweat lodge...but it's also a part of recreational drug use(lol).

My interest is whether there is a non-arbitrary cut-line between consciousness and non-consciousness. In a way, it seems like consciousness with no content would be something like the sound of one hand clapping-- it's a nonsense idea. If so, and I think this may be your view, the content IS the consciousness. If so, that has definite philosophical implications-- in particular, that wherever certain kinds of processing happen, there must be consciousness.

As for remembering "what it's like" to be deep asleep, that's the $64,000 question and could answer many questions and settle many of our past points of debate about consciousness. We know enough about memory to know that memory involves that processing happens in a certain way-- if it doesn't, there's no memory of something, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was no consciousness. My grandmother, for example, remembers pretty much nothing, ever, because of senile dementia. But the rest of us can see that she's experiencing: I don't get the sense that she's a p-zombie.

I often have the sense, even when awoken out of very deep sleep, that there was "something" there, like a kind of colorless light or something, and that something is very intangible. Now, that could just be a superstitious vestige, or something to do with brain activity as I wake up. But my own sense is that there's definitely something there onto which ideas and sensations are "projected," and that this is much deeper than my ideas, my world view, etc. or even anything I associate with my sense of self.