During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there's no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.
Your brain keeps doing stuff however. Your lungs keep breathing, and your heart keeps beating. There is no normal phase of sleep where someone shaking you and yelling in your ear won't wake you up, but normal noises and the hum of machinery or cool breeze does not. So something is processing and filtering inputs for relevance.
imagine that there's some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before?
The only honest answer I can give to this is "I don't know."
imagine that there's some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
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: