"So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there's no reason to think you are having any experiences at all." - No reason to think you are having experiences != Reason to believe that you are having no experiences. How would we know?
I think that is a very interesting thought experiment and I have no objections to it. The reason I am objecting to the sleep argument is that it is based upon uncertain science and an equivocation between two words.
Somehow people are able to throw covers off or burrow into them without waking up. I would say this is evidence of both having experiences and reacting to them.
This will be a short article. I've been seeing a lot of dubious reasoning about consciousness and sleep. One famous problem is the problem of personal identity with a destructive teleporter. In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed. The question asked is whether this clone is the same person as you.
One really bad argument that I've seen around this is the notion that the fact that we sleep every night means that we experience this teleporter every day.
The reason why this is a very bad argument is that it equivocates with two different meanings of consciousness: