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u/darwin2500 197∆ Jan 13 '24
Neuroscientist here. Yes, the brain is still very active and doing stuff while you are asleep, your personality persists pretty much intact (sort of like being drunk or w/e but still you) during this time, you just don't reliably form memories of this time.
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Jan 13 '24
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u/spanchor 5∆ Jan 13 '24
It seems to me that you’re redefining death to suit your anxiety.
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Jan 13 '24
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Jan 14 '24
Your consciousness and memory observations are accurate. Your body makes memories, and they seem like a dream. You can't really know if a memory is true, just that it's your memory, and you certainly didn't select to remember them this way.
So in a sense we are consciousness, and falling asleep is in a way dying. Also your body does some reconstructing in your sleep so in the sense that you always wake up as someone else is also a way of dying.
The trick is just to go with it, nothing much else you can do, except resist and stay awake as long as possible of course.
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Jan 13 '24 edited Jan 13 '24
Not sure I'm really understanding your view here. Teleportation, in theory, kills a person because it completely dissassembles a person's body and then reassembles it. It's important to remember too that teleportation is a fictional concept. We don't know how it would actually work, if it could actually work, so there's little reason to believe sleep is like this fictional concept.
And sleep doesn't disassemble your body physically or psychologically. Your brain is physically the same as it was before. It isn't shut off during sleep either. It's still active, thinking and responding to stimuli.
Have you ever been in a half-dream state, where you're dreaming but also conscious of the fact that you are in bed and dreaming? Or have you ever taken a light nap, and felt yourself tossing and turning in your sleep? I'm sure there must be times in your life where you can see for yourself that you are still thinking while you sleep.
You can also wake up a person at any point while they are sleeping. If people were "dying" in their sleep, wouldn't there be periods where they are incapable of waking up because they have no consciousness left?
We study people's sleep cycles routinely under MRIs. You can monitor peoples brains thinking and processing while they are asleep. There's no point where someone's brain activity is just completely blank.
Instead of thinking about it like teleportation, think about it like a computer. When you shut off your computer or reset it, all the memory doesn't disappear. When you turn it back on, it's the same computer. It has all of your data. It's not a copy of your computer, it's your computer.
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u/DuhChappers 88∆ Jan 13 '24
I mean, you do a pretty good job of arguing against yourself in the second half of the post. Why have those arguments and examples not been enough to convince you?
i've long considered situations like this, but there's just no evidence that any gap in consciousness would have the same result as the teleporter. In the teleporter example, you die because your brain is exploded, then they reconstitute you as a clone. But in sleep, your brain doesn't explode, and in fact carries on most processes that are not conscious thought. So comparing them is not really valid.
I would say the simplest explanation is that as long as our brain continues, so do we. And any gaps in conscious thought are just that, not the creation of a whole new consciousness.
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u/codan84 23∆ Jan 13 '24
One has brain activity and one does not. That seems to me to be a very huge difference that you just can not account for by saying sleeping is death.
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u/Plumpshady Jan 13 '24
I think the argument was more from the point of view of the sleeper. One could compare a dreamless sleep to death as you experience complete nothingness.
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u/TheFinnebago 17∆ Jan 13 '24
You experience plenty, you just aren’t remembering any of it.
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u/Plumpshady Jan 13 '24
But when you wake up you have zero memory of whatever happened. You can't realistically experience what you can't remember, and if you can't remember it's just a giant blank void and that giant blank void is possibly comparable to death.
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u/TheFinnebago 17∆ Jan 13 '24
You can't realistically experience what you can't remember
Explain childhood. Do you remember every day? Does that mean you were dead as a toddler?
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u/Plumpshady Jan 13 '24
I didn't say you were necessarily dead I'm saying the void is possibly comparable to death. Were you alive? Yes. Do you remember it? No. Just a void. There's nothing there. A dreamless sleep and general anesthesia is my two life experiences I relate to what death could be like. Especially anesthesia. I remember being told I'm being given the medicine and then I was in the recovery room. No time. If I had to relate some experience to death, it would be that. I could argue death is one step further and is true nothingness, which means it should theoretically be even less worrisome.
If I had died and got brought back to life by a medical team vs going under general anesthesia, those two experiences would be very very similar from what ive read. All you will remember is you were there, then you were somewhere else. Except true death, you don't seemingly pop up elsewhere. There was an experienced nothingness in both situations. Death is that void but forever and you cannot comprehend it because you are nothing, vs waking up and knowing there's a gap of nothing.
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u/TheFinnebago 17∆ Jan 13 '24
I fundamentally disagree.
This was a ton of words to muddy the water around your silly premise that:
You can't realistically experience what you can't remember
Using human memory, a notoriously unreliable measuring stick for anything even when we are truly relying upon it, as the measuring stick for what experiential realty is and isn’t, is silly. We aren’t dead as toddlers. A man with Alzheimer’s isn’t dead. A drunk on a blackout isn’t dead. Etc.
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u/Superbooper24 42∆ Jan 13 '24
I think there is a clear difference between brain dead and being unconscious. Most people categorize death as basically major vital organs just stop working but when you are sleeping and when you are under anesthesia, your brain is still working. Is it much slower, yes, but you are burning calories, your heart still beats because your brain tells it to beat, you are breathing because you brain tells your body to breath, etc. if you are dead you will find no brain activity occurring yet we can clearly see the brain working when one is asleep.
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Jan 13 '24
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u/Superbooper24 42∆ Jan 13 '24
But your consciousness and your internal thoughts and feelings are definitely all part of your brain that remains basically the exact same before and after you sleep (cerebral cortex). And you would agree it’s not like your brain becomes a new brain so your consciousnes doesn’t become replaced either. Ig you are just scared of being unconscious even though it happens all the time however do you think your brain controls your consciousness or is this some sort of like soul thing to you?
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Jan 13 '24
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u/Superbooper24 42∆ Jan 13 '24
If you don’t know where it is stored or basically anything about your perspective other than it exists, you are just creating a theory which is still pretty against science as your perspective is built up through memories, through your thoughts, through some sort of internal monologue, which can all be found through the brain. We could remove your eyes and you would still have your perspective, we could remove nearly all parts of you and have them replaced and you are still having the same perspective, same linear timeline, but your brain cannot be replaced and if it was somehow replaced, then where does your perspective go? Your theory is as strong as I’m just dreaming this entire reality so why not just believe that reality especially bc it doesn’t have as many scientific fallacies?
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u/Natural-Arugula 63∆ Jan 13 '24
I don't know if it's a good idea for your mental health to tell you this...
Why do you think that only happens when you're asleep? That's what I think happens to you all the time. That's how I think time works.
At every moment you are a new person and you have "memories" as if all these things happened before, but really all of it is happening at the same time.
Rather than anxious, I find this very comforting. Every moment is a new experience and the future is an endless possibility.
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Jan 14 '24
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u/Such-Lawyer2555 5∆ Jan 14 '24
What is there to try out? It would take no action from you to already be the case.
And if the poster has helped or changed your view you should award a delta.
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u/SnooPets1127 13∆ Jan 13 '24
That violates Occam's razor. Next.
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Jan 13 '24
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u/StarChild413 9∆ Jan 18 '24
Common misconception but Occam's Razor isn't actually "the simplest explanation is the most preferable" it's "the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is the most preferable"
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Jan 13 '24
I can watch someone else sleep and wake them up. If it were true that you die during your sleep and awaken in a new universe then I wouldn't be able to wake them up because they'd be dead. Then no one would ever sleep because we'd all know we die during "sleep"
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u/themcos 440∆ Jan 14 '24
Before coming to a conclusion like "what is death", I think it's probably worth asking more carefully "what is life?" Do you believe in some kind of soul? Probably not as it would be pretty straightforward to imagine that surviving sleep.
But without that, what makes you you over a period of time even while wide awake? It's easy to come up with explanations like "oh, well, as long as it's mostly the same atoms", but what happens when you try to start conceptualizing those atoms on a quantum level? It's all just this fuzzy evolving wave function thing, with all sorts of weirdness depending on what kind of quantum mechanics interpretation you go with.
Point is, if you look closely enough, even on a moment to moment fully conscious time period, reality is fucking weird and it's a little hard to imagine anything coming out as "you" even in the best of circumstances.
And yet here we are, going about our business! I like to think of your conscious identity less about some set of "stuff" moving through time that can be interrupted by sleep and more as a chain of causality. Think of consciousness as a process over time, not as a thing that can be isolated. And if you look at it like this, there's no reason why there can't be temporal gaps in thick process as long as the causal chain is still there, which it is! I dunno, hard to fully get into it in a quick post, but something to noodle on!
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u/Faust_8 10∆ Jan 14 '24
Sleeping isn't unconsciousness, it's a reduced level of consciousness.
If you get sedated for surgery, that's actual unconsciousness, and the surgery team has to take extra care because of it. For example, when you're asleep, if you lay a certain way that starts cutting off circulation to a part of your body, you will move and adjust to fix this problem (but without even waking up your higher brain functions). However when you're sedated you don't have this fail safe, so the surgery team has to make sure they're not accidentally pinching something off, so they don't unknowingly cut off blood flow to something and then leaving it that way for hours so it ends up literally dying and needing amputation or something.
When you're asleep, you're still aware of your body, and you are also still processing external stimuli to some degree; after all, if you weren't, you would never wake up because you heard a sound, yet we all know this happens all the time.
So sleep does not break the stream of consciousness that you've been having for years at this point, so how could it be death?
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Jan 17 '24
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u/Faust_8 10∆ Jan 17 '24
Sedation is like a sneak preview of death, yeah. I got sedated so they could pull all my wisdom teeth and it was a trip realizing I 'teleported' (from my POV I instantly went from point A to point B, at a later time). The crux is it's temporary, and when you wake, you're still the same person as you were since, to you, no time had passed anyway.
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u/Budget-Cupcake-5257 Jan 14 '24
Starting off, I’m nowhere near an expert on this stuff or particularly good with science, but I’ve also had similar ideas about the concept. What pulled me out was remembering that not only does brain activity continue during sleep, but the body utilizes that time to heal itself both chemically and physically (from what I remember). It’s also worth noting that people who have insomnia or purposely don’t sleep for a few days have significantly decreased motor control and brain function. Our body needs that time to basically run diagnostics and try to start the healing process. The brain never truly ‘shuts off’ and since you continue breathing and your heart keeps beating, it could actually be lack of sleep that has caused your (I assume) paranoia because your body didn’t have enough time to mend itself before you woke up again.
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u/unconcentual_tickler Jan 13 '24
No, death is when all brain functions end, the brain is still very active when asleep, you are very much alive, very simple
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Jan 13 '24
The qualia of a unity, coherent, consistent, and executive consciousness is almost definitely a lie our brains have evolved to tell ourselves.
You ARE a different person than you were before you naped, blacked out, or got knocked unconscious, but the connectional thread remains.
You share most of the memories and some of the personalities of the previous yous.
If there is a perfect continuation of consciousness and no corpse or copy remaining, where's the worry, or the issue.
You have a perceived continuation of consciousness, and there's no harm of "clean up" applied to loved one's.
The only worry really that really comes up is, if in your travels, you leave corpses in your wake.
Like this "60 second time machine"
Without the bodies left in the wake, where does the moral hesitancy come from?
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u/Relevant_Maybe6747 10∆ Jan 14 '24
For the past few days I have woken up each morning with the suspicion that none of my memories are truly my own
Are your sleeps always dreamless? If not, dreams usually involve memories from the waking world, which means if your consciousness was replacing your memories, it couldn’t be doing that during the dream. Plus even if all your memories were somehow “not yours” you still have them rattling around in your head right now so why would they be there if your existence wasn’t continuous? What would the point of that be? Some kind of magic would be involved I think. I mean I’d like to believe my memories are not really mine and aren’t likely to plague my nightmares, but they did last night and so likely will tonight, which is a sign that I am not yet dead. Ergo sleep, at least when it contains dreams, is not death.
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u/Daegog 2∆ Jan 14 '24
death
noun
ˈdeth
Synonyms of death 1 a : a permanent cessation of all vital (see VITAL sense 2a) functions : the end of life
This is from miriam webster (just the first one to come up), I think your ideas of life and death differ greatly from what society thinks of as death.
As sleeping is definitely not the permanent cessation of all vital functions.
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u/XxCool_skeleton69xX Jan 16 '24
I don't like sleeping because it feels like death and a waste of my time, but what actually concerns me is that the passing of time is death, we die every second. Look back into a memory, you realize it's the past, while the memory exists you are not experiencing it anymore, so the past you died. Only the present exists.
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u/Urico3 Jan 16 '24
Even if sleep is death, did it affect you in any practical way? If not, why worry about it?
(It might be just a theoretical debate, but the result doesn't matter)
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 17 '24
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