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Comment by xmonkee | Hacker News Reader

This will always fail because the premise is wrong. Consciousness does not arise in the brain. Brain activity correlates to impressions in consciousness, but consciousness is not a “thing”. Consciousness is equivalent to identity. You are that which sees all this that you see. Consciousness IS you. You don’t arise in your own brain.

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This is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have.

A brain can exist without it being conscious.

You don't lose your consciousness when you fall asleep. You time travel to the point where you wake up.

That's a distinction without a difference.

That’s not true though. If that were the case you wouldn’t be able to sleep off an argument.

Sleep clears the system and reboots it. That’s why all your short term memory gets wiped too if it wasn’t written to disk.

As someone who has some oddities around sleep and consciousness (sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, self-awareness during the process of falling asleep, and a couple of other similar experiences that are extremely difficult to describe), which I suspect may caused by undiagnosed narcolepsy, it is clear to me that sleep is a much more complex process than that and does not necessarily involve loss of consciousness.

Indeed, even people with normal, healthy sleep patterns still dream during the REM portion of sleep, even if they do not remember it later. Consciousness is not an on/off thing.

Have you ever met someone who recently had a severe stroke or suffers dementia? Their sense of self can be completely lost by such trauma. Sure they still have identity in the memories of others. But I'd say one must distinguish identity from Self.

You don't "lose" consciousness when you fall asleep. Sleep is not the absence of consciousness, but the consciousness of absence. What's missing is what you think of as your "mind". If that's not the case, then ask yourself who is it that is sleeping? What registers the coming and going of the mind? That's you, the consciousness. If consciousness was going away, you would never know that you slept.

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