Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of why many humans drink alcohol.

> Easy example.

As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.

I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up? My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.

There is an event that made me reconsider driving by night when sleep deprived.

I was driving back home after spending night at friend's place. It was around 4am, the whole family sleeping in the car. I didn't have any alcohol in my system because I always kept a 0 alcohol policy if I have to drive. I knew the trip well because I was driving it several times a months. A few km before reaching home I realized I had no recollection of having driven past a number of the usual landmarks. Yet I couldn't have possibly been completely asleep as the highway had a number of curves and I would have smashed the guardrails had I been totally unconscious.

So my theory was that I was so tired that my brain wasn't recording anything but I had been conscious enough to actually follow the road.

That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

> That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.

There are flow states that seem like this. It can be pleasant and it can also be unnerving. Something about memory and the sense of self fall away and it leaves you with a discontinuity despite some part of you obviously carrying on the show while the self was away.

Did your friend actually wake up or did they start forming memories again?

Great question. I would guess he woke up and that this was subsequent to him forming memories again. Memory seems to be a requirement for the kind of self-referential conscious experience that appears to be basically unique to humans. An anesthetic that acts entirely on memory formation and paralyzes the body is in many ways the ideal anesthetic. It's not super unlikely this is how many anesthetics work to at least some degree. If you were administered such a perfect anesthetic it's likely that subjectively you'd experience a distrinct discontinuity in time. Even if you received surgery during that discontinuity, you wouldn't ever suffer from it - not even on some deep non-conscious level. There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

You are so stunningly Dunning-Kruger wrong here. Neurotransmitters, cortisol and other stress hormones, protein expression, epigenetics, the gut microbiome, all of these and more can lastingly be affected by trauma which is not committed to long term memory.

Nevermind the fact that even if it is forgotten, an awake mind will suffer greatly in the moment - pretending that suffering did not occur because it was forgotten is some next level self-deception.

What about what I said implied anything about various other systems like stress hormones not being lastingly be affected by trauma?

I don't think most surgical patients are concerned with the kind of trauma their cells or gut microbiome sustain during surgery. In fact, if these systems recollected zero trauma it's doubtful the surgical outcome would be positive. When most people discuss suffering they are usually discussing the suffering of their selves. The self requires coordinated effort from the brain. When surgery occurs, it could be well argued you would want to use the least anesthesia necessary to avoid the kind of suffering the patient wants to avoid.

What are you actually on about? Why be purposefully insulting?

ah I see what I wrote. "not even on some deep non-conscious level" yeah that was sloppy nm.

>There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

If there's no suffering in the now, then how can one remember that one suffered?

I don't think there's a way define suffering without invoking contextualized pain and an entity that suffers (a self). A self is a complex phenomenon that has a bunch of additional requirements not least of which is the capacity for bridging multiple moments of sensory input that happen in the now.

One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.

It’s not that your friend “woke up” it’s that his BAC dropped enough for his brain to start correctly forming memories again not that his consciousness “came back online”. It never went away just that no memories were formed during that time

I was trying to explain the relayed subjective experience there. The relayed subjective experience is a discontinuity occurring that's similar to waking up. The self is the thing that relays the experience to other people. You're probably right that consciousness in some expansive sense didn't go away, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to what it was like to be the part of my friend that relayed the story to me.

"Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense."

Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.

Huh? You can absolutely have long in-depth discussions with a blackout drunk person about their current experiences. Are you claiming there’s some level of inebriation where you become a p-zombie?

Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.

They're conflating episodic memory retainment with consciousness. Consciousness process may result in things to store in memory, but, not being able to store those things long term doesn't necessarily mean consciousness was missing in that moment.

After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.

I think the self can be disrupted by significant alterations in memory storage among other things. I think memory is one of many key ingredients in having a self. When your memory is adequately disrupted your self is disrupted. Without a self subjective experience is radically different than with a self. It's radically different in that it's often described by the self (who stops being blackout drunk at some point) as being a discontinuity similar to sleep. The interesting thing here is that people who are blackout drunk continue to do things that a clinically-conscious person does (eat, talk, stumble around). Your experience is really interesting too - you seemed to still have an intact self, just not extended memory beyond 30 seconds. I think maybe we are talking about different things or my view is wrong.

I think there are levels of inebriation disable your ability to contextualize sensory experience within a self. I think it basically amounts to becoming a p-zombie with some caveats.

I think I'll title my memoir: "Drunk people are p-zombies, and other facts I learned on the Internet."

Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?

A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.

I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there, but it's radically different from what is normally considered subjective experience. The person can have consciousness clinically (as in they show external signs of consciousness) - but their self is not there and their subjective sense is in discontinuity.

The definition of blackout drunk is not remembering what happened. This /could/ simply be a failure to form lasting memories, rather than a loss of 'self-ness.' If we imagine a switch which put a person's long-term memory in read-only mode, would flipping that switch necessarily remove consciousness?

Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.

(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)

When my friend found himself walking around in a new place after a complete discontinuity in experience. Was this discontinuity entirely driven by the impairment of lasting memory formation? Seems possible to me. Problem is, I've never experienced this myself - only heard his story from a close friend (repeatedly) and similar stories from others. The stories could be unreliable - but they suggest that the self was offline and came back while the body was still performing complex externally awake actions. Seems p-zombie-like to me.

Traditional* p-zombies presumably form and act on memories, as well - another strike against the 'drunk people are p-zombies' argument.

(* - Not to be confused with the 'fast p-zombies' which were briefly popular in 90's existentialist cinema.)

That's fair. Being blackout drunk is more than just memory impairment though - significant parts of the brain unrelated to memory also have impaired function during drunkenness. I would also suggest that there is a level of impairment where the impaired person lacks a sense of self while still being animated and seemingly conscious. This is what makes me think a blackout drunk person seems like a p-zombie (albeit temporarily).

Not if they're super drunk. ;) But yes.

This is why the concept of consciousness is largely nonsense.

The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact.

Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to cling to the idea of a soul and some still do.

Like the soul, if you just get rid of the idea and word, nothing changes other than clarity in the language of what we are actually talking about instead of this ill-defined nonsense.

Do animals have a soul? It is the same question.

To come at it a different way. We can't be free of superstition and nonsense in 2024. There must be things we believe are true that simply aren't true and will look silly 300 years from now. What else do people believe in so admittedly in 2024 even though there is not just zero evidence for but we can't even define what we are talking about? It is prime suspect #1 to me when it comes to this category.

There is a condition called aphantasia, in which people are unable to visualise things, but are perfectly capable of doing visual tasks, such as art.

The question "is this animal conscious" is quite close to a question "does this person have aphantasia", and both seem to be perfectly valid and answerable.

I'm not fully grasping the experiment your proposing here

You still have to explain why you "see out of your eyes", cause if consciousness doesn't exist, then why the universe doesn't happen silently without an "observer" somehow connected to every complex enough area. Soul is just the closest, religiously crippled interpretation of this idea.

Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?

I somewhat agree with you. The concept of consciousness needs rethinking. A better definition I think is to say an entity or system is conscious to the extent it’s world model is encompassing / “complete” and self-conscious when its world model includes itself and its own internal states. By this definition there are many continuous levels of consciousness and self-consciousness and these attributes are not binary all vs nothing. As for the soul a better definition for the soul of something is the information required to recreate it. If due to lossy compression or information corruption you can only recreate an approximation then some fraction of the original soul has been lost.

I think the self can come and go. I don't think a blacked out person is always unconscious, but they do seem to lack a subjective self while sometimes still being clinically awake and engaging in complex behavior. When the subjective self comes back online later, it makes understanding the self easier for them by creating contrast.