When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.
Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.
I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.
This is fascinating to me. Your experience is so different from mine.
When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.
I’m open to correction but my understanding is everyone dreams when they have REM sleep and everyone has some REM sleep every night unless there are rare medical conditions which would be unhealthy if there is a long period of no REM sleep.
People who believe they never dream (including myself before I learned this) simply don’t remember it. If you were woken artificially during REM you might remember fragments.
The last time I dreamt was in April. I'd make a note about it in my day log txt file when it happens. It's not the same as a normal night's sleep, and I would remember it. But I assume not having REM sleep for the past 4 months would mean reduced cognitive functioning, which is obviously not the case, so maybe I simply cannot remember my dreams most of the time.
Perhaps memory and consciousness are closely related or even the same process, as there is no way to tell them apart from the inside.
Sleep is very subjectively different from anesthesia, in my personal experience. Sleep still carries a feeling of the passage of time, and in fact dreams can feel "more real than real" (I remember my dreams to varying degrees, most often when I drink alcohol, although I don't like to use that as a specific method to remember dreams on demand). Anesthesia, for me, resulted in the absolute cessation of time experience during the process. From my perspective, I went out in the OR and was immediately in the recovery room, even though it had in reality been about an hour.
> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar
Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.
Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.
Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.
Well we do know you can't feel pain, because we've actually done the MRI studies to confirm. Which makes me feel a lot better personally.
But I also have a doctor friend who tells me how removing my appendix actually worked: I go under. Then they take out the appendix. Then they wake me so that I can, with help, move from the operating table to the wheeled bed. This part is not a part of my memory, but people can talk to me and I can get down from the table and onto the bed (again, with help).
