Comment on Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?
kevinbacon@lemmy.world 1 year agoThats exactly what some do, depends on the anesthetic, but it doesn’t matter because if a memory never forms it may as well not have happened.
There was a case of a guy, where they botched the anesthesia, and he was just paralyzed but conscious the whole time during some invasive surgery. They realized their mistake, and tried to fix it by giving him some amnesic so he wouldn’t retain the memories.
After getting discharged, he wouldn’t remember anything… but kept having nightmares, and a few weeks later took his own life.
So it seems like memories don’t need to be fully formed to mess one up.
That sounds like the mechanism might be different though, but yeah some percentage of people wake up during surgery while the paralytic is still in effect, they closely monitor the heart rate for sudden spikes because of this I believe. It sounds horrifying to me, but then I remember that there was a time when anesthetics didn’t exist.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 year ago
That is an interesting philosophical question.
If suffering is not remembered, was there even suffering? And if there was, does it matter? I can think of a few counterexamples of that, for example: a killer who tortures his victim before killing them.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Uhh, yes and yes? What’s stopping a rapist from anesthesizing their victims before the act and using the fact that they did as an excuse to get off charges under your logic?
jarfil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Physical abuse tends to leave some physical consequences. You’d have to come up with an example where there would be neither physical not psychological consequences… but even getting anesthesized against one’s will is already a consequence.
pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
No it doesn’t, not always. Actually it’s routine for medical students to be brought in to give anesthesitized women pelvic exams without their knowledge and consent, and no one was the wiser until universities that did this announced it… nytimes.com/…/pelvic-medical-exam-unconscious.htm…
That is textbook rape right there, and it doesn’t often have physical consequences. Most women didn’t even know but doctors fucking did it anyway.
How you people have any faith in any aspect of this society is beyond me.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Presumably in your scenario the victim remembers the torture though.
In the case of general anaesthetic the memory is effectively considered to be deleted in real time. On its way through the brain it ceases to exist so it never reaches the conscious mind.