My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
I thought about this a lot. I tried comparing going to sleep and sleeping to being put under. The only differences I have is that after waking up sometimes I have a recollection of having dreams. But if something happened and I died in my sleep I would not know any better.
I've had various forms of anaesthesia, uh, five times in the year or so.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
If you really care that much about making "every worry in the world disappear" from your mind by entirely artificial means (even to the point of remarking that you understand the POV of those who get addicted!), you might benefit from learning about how to live your life with more equanimity. It's a vastly healthier approach to coping with the challenges of a stressful life than any kind of strong narcotic. The topic is explored in great depth in both Stoicism and Buddhism - and via the latter, in more generic "mindfulness" approaches. (It can of course be useful to cross-reference all of these philosophies; they tend to have complementary perspectives.)
Needless to say, therapy can also have very similar benefits, and many people will derive even more benefit from that kind of highly structured approach.
> All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
> the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
This is just another way of saying that you don't think people (meaning you) would be moral without the threat of a bad outcome (hell, bad karma, reincarnation into suffering, etc).
Most avowed atheists would tell you that the finality of death is precisely why we have a responsibility to each other, because there's no one up above coming to fix our problems or right our wrongs. That humanity has to *be* better to become better.
Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I had quite a number of procedures starting in early childhood and through my teen years.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
When I was put under anesthesia they told me it would be like no time had passed when I woke up, but this wasn't true for me. It felt like time had passed the same way as sleeping.
Replies like these are a clear symptom of how terribly sick our culture is. Nietzsche truly saw it coming.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
Choosing to not have a mystical outlook on life is not indicative of some kind of moral sickness. Being a materialist is not wrong, either, as you clearly imply. The parent "has no way of knowing" - as you say, and I agree with you. But neither do you, so why be so strident in your denouncement?
"There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence."
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion. Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are". It's an impersonal phenomenon (as far as it goes - there's of course plenty of things, mental states, thoughts etc. that are genuinely personal about our individual lives!) not a state of being.
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time
True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do
To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.
(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion.
If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
And how is consciousness "a misconception and an illusion?"
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are".
This implies a lack of awareness of self, which is fundamental to the definition of consciousness. And if a being is aware of itself, then they "are".
> It's an impersonal phenomenon ... not a state of being.
If individual consciousness does not qualify as "a state of being", then whatever could?
I share the feeling about it being impersonal (I've started to doubt its individuality as well). I like to think of consciousness as "the universe observing itself", but that sounds a bit too new-agey.
> I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside"
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
I'd shared this article last week with the meditation group I'm part of, describing the author's state of mind on the eve of surgery as a state of samadhi. It's a great description of the state I end up in during almost every meditation session (practicing in the 'open awareness' style) and sometimes also in the middle of the day, unprompted.
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness? I feel like the daily grind would inevitably pull me back to my old self. Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
Its a constant practice, like anything. Part of you is changed forever when you go through something like this, the awareness part mostley, you can never go back to normality even when something like that wears off.
I know from experience because I survived a brain hemorrhage. I had a state where I experienced the world differently for many years. I still do. Something cracked open in me and it has stayed that way, other aspects of my physiology are returning to a baseline state, like my nervous system changes which damped my fear responses.
In Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how we all have a basic setting for these kind of things.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
Surviving something like that (a much less serious adenoma near the brain) is neat because I can mentally use the memory to alter my current state of mind.
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
Most enlightened monks aren't walking around like enlightened monks, either! Enlightenment/awakening isn't really described as a "life changing" experience, though a sudden experience of the earliest hints of 'stream entry' can sometimes feel like one. Quite on the contrary, it seems to be connoted as a kind of very practical wisdom.
> Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
A life-changing moment changes one's life by definition. Each time a person experiences one, they are changed in a way where who they were before they can remember, perhaps even look fondly upon, but know they are not that person anymore.
> Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness?
By living in the moment and remembering how you got there.
You typically don’t go back to the daily grind, as this kind of event often substantially changes your priorities.
I speak for myself, although I know I am not alone in my trajectory. About a decade ago I was ill enough for long enough with an uncertain enough prognosis that I was getting my affairs in order. At the same time a close friend died of an agressivo cancer, aged 32.
I decided to choose quality over quantity. Fuck my business, fuck my career, fuck stupid status games and absolutely fuck climbing the infinite pile of skulls.
Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.
It’s been almost a decade. I still live in the woods, start my days with a coffee and birdsong and “ein heiliges ‘ja!’”, still have zero temptation to return to my life before.
I think one of the big bummers about this kind of thing is that it’s not really something that could be planned or chosen for. We tend to change slowly and subconsciously through the things we prioritize and routinely practice, our brains and bodies adapt to our “normal”.
The times we tend to adopt changes quickly and consciously are most often with circumstance and external pressures, and the shortcomings implicit with such rapid adaptations can manifest as neuroses/complexes. In traumatic scenarios this might be something like PTSD, but it isn’t necessarily all downsides, either. People taking therapeutic amounts of MDMA or psilocybin (as in, occasionally, not “micro dosing” or whatever Elon Musk seems to be doing) might experience a durable improvement in subjective happiness and optimism.
Disclaimer: this is my own intuitive and wholly unqualified understanding of this, which was arrived at via discussions with behavioral therapists, but I’m an IT consultant, wtf do I really know about it?
I will say that I’ve found mindful meditation highly effective for treating mild to moderate PTSD. It isn’t fast to get started, but after a few weeks of training, you can deploy your own chemical Xanax directly within your own brain using breathing patterns. It really worked for me. I used the app “Headspace” to start out.
They really only took a tiny piece of brain out, I guess. They didn't show me, sadly. :(
It was all occipital lobe so vision would have been the only thing affected. I had terrible vision in the lower-left quadrant of both of my eyes anyways, based on a medical field-of-vision test, along with my own tendency to bump into people and things on my left side (still the case).
Based on many electroencephalographs (EEGs), they decided my epileptic seizures stemmed from the lower right occipital lobe of my brain. It is kind of neat proof to me that the opposite side of your brain has effects on the other side of your body; right occipital lobe affecting left visual field.
So, they removed some brain, which actually did not affect my epilepsy at all, positively or negatively. I went into the hospital, got surgery, and was out maybe a week later - when that photo was taken. I had to go back a week or two later to have the staples taken out.
My lower left peripheral vision is worse than it used to be. I have about eight visual seizures that each last maybe a minute or two per day, but I can carry on a conversation and nobody even knows. I take seven pills every morning, and another four each night. I do not have a drivers license, car, or really ever plan to drive again, but that is kind of why I moved to live in a city where I can walk, take public transit, and get deliveries quickly/reliably.
On the nerd side, I track my seizures with my own homemade Python Django (w/ REST Framework) application, PostgreSQL, and an Apple Shortcut, usually from my iPhone or watch. Datasette and Highcharts make visualizing all my seizures tracked since December 2021 pretty cool.
I learned a new term: Survivor's Euphoria. Only having had relatively minor procedures, I have only had relatively minor instances. But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia. As if the interrupted mental processes carry some flow state forward, which I re-attach to.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
>> But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia.
> These sound like anaesthetic side effects.
General anesthesia[0] used in surgeries are effectively artificially induced comas. The pre-op discussion with the anesthesiologist includes them describing this and that there is a very real risk that you will die from its usage.
Regaining consciousness after having it applied most certainly invokes a feeling of "I came back" and has nothing to do with side effects.
Source: I have had two general anesthesia[0] and one epidural[1] surgeries.
What a beautiful, thought provoking article! When I saw the title , I thought it was a book summary of “My stroke of insight” [0]. This book is by a neuro-anatomist who had a rare stroke resulting in the left hemisphere of her brain being incapacitated. That led her to experiences similar to that of the article’s author. Do check out the book and pair it with the article
This is a great article. I've been in for surgery a few times, and I always cry before it because I never know what could happen. I could wind up dead, paralyzed, in chronic pain, a vegetable. Then I think to myself how unspecial I am. Millions of people die every day and yet we deny death, and lose sight of the stuff that actually matters that much. The billionaire and the homeless person still just fertilize worms after they die. That reality keeps me humble and in daily gratitude to the miracle of life, though my confidence does waver during the periods of ill health I've had.
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In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
edit: paragraphs
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
I thought about this a lot. I tried comparing going to sleep and sleeping to being put under. The only differences I have is that after waking up sometimes I have a recollection of having dreams. But if something happened and I died in my sleep I would not know any better.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
I understand how people can get addicted to it.
That was my exact thought the moment it was injected as a painkiller after a surgery. World went from pain to bliss with frightening speed and ease.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
If you really care that much about making "every worry in the world disappear" from your mind by entirely artificial means (even to the point of remarking that you understand the POV of those who get addicted!), you might benefit from learning about how to live your life with more equanimity. It's a vastly healthier approach to coping with the challenges of a stressful life than any kind of strong narcotic. The topic is explored in great depth in both Stoicism and Buddhism - and via the latter, in more generic "mindfulness" approaches. (It can of course be useful to cross-reference all of these philosophies; they tend to have complementary perspectives.)
Needless to say, therapy can also have very similar benefits, and many people will derive even more benefit from that kind of highly structured approach.
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
This is just another way of saying that you don't think people (meaning you) would be moral without the threat of a bad outcome (hell, bad karma, reincarnation into suffering, etc).
Most avowed atheists would tell you that the finality of death is precisely why we have a responsibility to each other, because there's no one up above coming to fix our problems or right our wrongs. That humanity has to *be* better to become better.
Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
I'm not sure what distinction you're making
True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do
To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.
(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)
If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
And how is consciousness "a misconception and an illusion?"
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are".
This implies a lack of awareness of self, which is fundamental to the definition of consciousness. And if a being is aware of itself, then they "are".
> It's an impersonal phenomenon ... not a state of being.
If individual consciousness does not qualify as "a state of being", then whatever could?
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
We're not simply observing "from the outside".
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
I know from experience because I survived a brain hemorrhage. I had a state where I experienced the world differently for many years. I still do. Something cracked open in me and it has stayed that way, other aspects of my physiology are returning to a baseline state, like my nervous system changes which damped my fear responses.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
A life-changing moment changes one's life by definition. Each time a person experiences one, they are changed in a way where who they were before they can remember, perhaps even look fondly upon, but know they are not that person anymore.
> Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness?
By living in the moment and remembering how you got there.
I speak for myself, although I know I am not alone in my trajectory. About a decade ago I was ill enough for long enough with an uncertain enough prognosis that I was getting my affairs in order. At the same time a close friend died of an agressivo cancer, aged 32.
I decided to choose quality over quantity. Fuck my business, fuck my career, fuck stupid status games and absolutely fuck climbing the infinite pile of skulls.
Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.
It’s been almost a decade. I still live in the woods, start my days with a coffee and birdsong and “ein heiliges ‘ja!’”, still have zero temptation to return to my life before.
The times we tend to adopt changes quickly and consciously are most often with circumstance and external pressures, and the shortcomings implicit with such rapid adaptations can manifest as neuroses/complexes. In traumatic scenarios this might be something like PTSD, but it isn’t necessarily all downsides, either. People taking therapeutic amounts of MDMA or psilocybin (as in, occasionally, not “micro dosing” or whatever Elon Musk seems to be doing) might experience a durable improvement in subjective happiness and optimism.
Disclaimer: this is my own intuitive and wholly unqualified understanding of this, which was arrived at via discussions with behavioral therapists, but I’m an IT consultant, wtf do I really know about it?
I will say that I’ve found mindful meditation highly effective for treating mild to moderate PTSD. It isn’t fast to get started, but after a few weeks of training, you can deploy your own chemical Xanax directly within your own brain using breathing patterns. It really worked for me. I used the app “Headspace” to start out.
How much did it help? Did you notice a change in your personality? How long did it take to recover? Did you lose vision in one eye?
It was all occipital lobe so vision would have been the only thing affected. I had terrible vision in the lower-left quadrant of both of my eyes anyways, based on a medical field-of-vision test, along with my own tendency to bump into people and things on my left side (still the case).
Based on many electroencephalographs (EEGs), they decided my epileptic seizures stemmed from the lower right occipital lobe of my brain. It is kind of neat proof to me that the opposite side of your brain has effects on the other side of your body; right occipital lobe affecting left visual field.
So, they removed some brain, which actually did not affect my epilepsy at all, positively or negatively. I went into the hospital, got surgery, and was out maybe a week later - when that photo was taken. I had to go back a week or two later to have the staples taken out.
My lower left peripheral vision is worse than it used to be. I have about eight visual seizures that each last maybe a minute or two per day, but I can carry on a conversation and nobody even knows. I take seven pills every morning, and another four each night. I do not have a drivers license, car, or really ever plan to drive again, but that is kind of why I moved to live in a city where I can walk, take public transit, and get deliveries quickly/reliably.
On the nerd side, I track my seizures with my own homemade Python Django (w/ REST Framework) application, PostgreSQL, and an Apple Shortcut, usually from my iPhone or watch. Datasette and Highcharts make visualizing all my seizures tracked since December 2021 pretty cool.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
> These sound like anaesthetic side effects.
General anesthesia[0] used in surgeries are effectively artificially induced comas. The pre-op discussion with the anesthesiologist includes them describing this and that there is a very real risk that you will die from its usage.
Regaining consciousness after having it applied most certainly invokes a feeling of "I came back" and has nothing to do with side effects.
Source: I have had two general anesthesia[0] and one epidural[1] surgeries.
0 - https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/anesthesia/about...
1 - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21896-epidu...
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142292.My_Stroke_of_Insi...