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Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep.
Pubmed Articles
Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
Sciencealert Article We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep, Say Scientists
I mean to be honest I wouldn’t say that we “die” at all when you sleep… your mind is extremely active while sleeping, it’s just disconnected from motor control.
It’s way more than just that, though. You’re also disconnected from your sensory inputs, and furthermore, your conscious experience is interrupted. It’s not like you’re just in a sensory deprivation tank, because there you’d still experience conscious thought, and the passage of time. It just seems to turn off for a while.
Plus there are periods of deep sleep when your brain does shut down quite thoroughly. People just don’t remember those, obviously, so they put a lot more weight on the dreaming bits that slip through sometimes.
I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it’s difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn’t require brain activity either. There’s a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of “death” is oversimplifying things.
We have a good definition of “death”, it’s the irreversible stop of some activity. For a brain, that’s neuronal depolarization; for a body organ or cell, it’s destruction past its ability to regenerate.
The self, is a snapshot of a brain state at a certain moment, which is technically irreversibly disappearing 30 times a second, but we like to think of it as just “changing” and forming a causal sequence we call “consciousness”.
This threshold has changed over time. So I don’t think it’s a good definition of it hasn’t always been the same point.
And the rest of your comment is just philosophy. You’re neither wrong nor right. Definition of self is not a concept there’s really any consensus over.
Threshold has changed, the definition is still the same, we’re just getting better at reverting the stop of some activities, like breathing or heartbeat. If we someday could revert neuronal depolarization, that would be great, but it seems difficult to achieve.
The other part is not just philosophy, it’s the best we can do to define a “self”. The philosophical part is only whether we can consider them a continuum, or whether we have to see them as usually similar but separate (there are reasons to support both versions).
If the threshold changed, the actual definition changed. The same words to describe a different point. If the definition described two different things, its changed. That’s basic and simple reasoning. If a definition no longer describes the same thing, it’s because it’s actual meaning has changed.