Being put under general anesthesia and falling asleep both involve a loss of conscious awareness, but they are fundamentally different processes in the brain, and anesthesia carries more risk in terms of disrupting the continuity of consciousness.
✅ Sleep:
- Sleep is natural, reversible, and cyclical.
- The brain stays active and moves through predictable stages (NREM and REM).
- Consciousness is not "off," but redirected inward (like dreaming).
- There’s a sense of temporal continuity — most people feel like they “went to sleep and woke up.”
⚠️ Anesthesia:
- Induces a pharmacological coma-like state — not sleep.
- Suppresses conscious brain activity far more deeply.
- It’s non-cyclical, and awareness is often completely absent.
- People may report an abrupt jump in time, like flipping a switch.
There is a small but real risk (especially in older adults or those with neurodegenerative conditions) of postoperative cognitive dysfunction or delirium.
🧠 Philosophical Perspective: Continuity of Consciousness
Some philosophers and neuroscientists have speculated that anesthesia poses a more profound break in the subjective experience of continuity — almost like a blackout where the "stream of consciousness" is entirely suspended.
This leads to questions like:
- "Was I still there during the blackout?"
- "Is the ‘I’ who wakes up the same subjective self who went under?"
Such questions don’t typically arise with sleep, where dreaming or even non-REM awareness seems more tethered to the conscious self.
🧠 Neuroscience of Continuity of Consciousness
1. What is Continuity of Consciousness?
In neuroscience, this refers to the unbroken stream of subjective awareness — your inner experience flowing from one moment to the next. Even in sleep, especially during dreaming, this stream often remains intact or at least feels connected upon waking.
Under anesthesia, however, this stream is typically interrupted completely — and we often have no sense of the time in between.
2. Brain Networks Involved:
The continuity of consciousness depends on coordinated activity in several key networks:
- 🧩 Default Mode Network (DMN): Self-referential thought and mind-wandering.
- 🧠 Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW): A model proposing that conscious access requires wide-scale brain connectivity (esp. prefrontal cortex, parietal lobe).
- 🔗 Thalamocortical loops: Key to sensory integration and awareness.
➤ Sleep:
- Brain connectivity reduces but is not broken.
- Dreaming activates the DMN and visual cortices — giving you a sense of “self” in the dream world.
- You often wake with memories of dreams, reinforcing continuity.
➤ Anesthesia:
- Drugs like propofol or sevoflurane disrupt global connectivity, especially fronto-parietal networks.
- Thalamocortical signaling is silenced, blocking sensory and internal awareness.
- There’s often no memory encoding, no dream reports, and no inner time—like you blinked and lost hours.
The “self” network effectively goes offline.
🧘 Metaphysical Implications
1. Is the Self Continuous or Reconstructed?
From a metaphysical perspective, this raises an eerie question: if the "I" was fully gone under anesthesia, and then reappears with no memory or continuity, is it still the same self?
- 🌀 Bundle theory (Hume, Parfit): The self is just a bundle of mental events — if the stream breaks, the self ceases and is reconstructed.
- 🪞 Substance view (Descartes, many religious traditions): The self is a persistent soul or substance, regardless of memory or consciousness.
Under bundle theory, anesthesia creates a "death-like" interruption — the self disappears and a new stream begins later, though we experience it as continuous because memory tells us it must be.
2. Anesthesia vs. Death:
Some thinkers suggest that general anesthesia is the closest non-lethal approximation to death:
- No consciousness
- No sense of time
- No memory
- No awareness of being unconscious
And yet… you come back.
Which leads to questions like:
3. Personal Identity and Memory:
Continuity of self is tightly tied to episodic memory. If anesthesia scrubs memory of time passed, is that time “gone” from the story of your life?
Compare this with:
- Sleep: Often includes dreams, continuity upon waking.
- Coma: Extreme loss of function, sometimes permanent.
- Anesthesia: Artificially controlled, reversible coma with hard reset of consciousness.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2090074016300123
I was never under general anesthesia, and topic seems to confuse the types you want to discuss. But as for people who had surgeries, it actually takes weeks to recover from them, and movements and voice remain different for up to a month or two. Now if thats due to anesthesia or something else or both is a different story.
"That's because you're an atheist materialist nihilist communist antinatalist pessimist satanist abortionist who needs Jesus."
How can you be both Satanist and atheist? Oh I get it. All atheists are secretly Satanists 😉😉
It's a hard life to live
That's because you're an atheist materialist nihilist communist antinatalist pessimist satanist abortionist who needs Jesus.
I get the feeling. Too often I end up debating for the most depression resolutions.
I hope my opponent wins. I stumbled across this fucking information hazard and now I can't get it out of my head.
Will defnietly be watching to see how this one plays out. Cool resolution.