BothAndBlog Forum

Does personal identity/"the self" persist through periods of unconsciousness such as dreamless sleep

Is unconsciousness during sleep something that a person should realistically fear? — AJ88

I have been losing consciousness nightly for 75 years, and yet my Self is still living. That's because Consciousness is not the same thing as Self or Life. All of those are ongoing processes, not material substances that evaporate. I was also non-conscious for billions of years before my birth, and suffered no serious complications from that prolonged non-life. Death is merely the end of the process of Living, and incidentally the end of all other related processes such a Consciousness. After death you are not likely to be conscious of anything. So why lose sleep over it?

The philosophical cartoon raises a hypothetical question, that has no effect on the real world -- only on the minds of those who take them too seriously.

Consciousness : Conscious-ness is an immaterial quality like red-ness : it doesn't exist in the molecular or atomic level of neurons, but on the metaphysical level of whole systems.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page32.html

Self/Soul :
The brain can create the image of a fictional person (the Self) to represent its own perspective in dealings with other things and persons.
1. This imaginary Me is a low-resolution construct abstracted from the complex web of inter-relationships that actually form the human body, brain, mind, DNA, and social networks in the context of a vast universe.
2. In the Enformationism worldview, only G*D could know yourself objectively in complete detail as the mathematical definition of You. That formula is equivalent to your Self/Soul.
3. Because of the fanciful & magical connotations of the traditional definition for "Soul" (e.g. ghosts), Enformationism prefers the more practical term "Self".
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page18.html

Our identity is constituted by all those processes, and when they stop, we no longer have a unitary identity, or at least much less of one. — bert1

The OP was asking if, when Consciousness stops during sleep, we are in-effect dead for the duration. But that notion is based on a poor understanding of Consciousness. By far, the majority of brain functions are Sub-Conscious, and awareness is a small percentage of our total mental operations.

Long before our modern neuroscience could detect brain processes during sleep, some people were afraid that sleep or any other form of un-consciousness was a step toward the totality of death. But Sleep and Death are related only by analogy. The Little Death myth was due to taking a metaphor literally. To the contrary, sleep is an essential aspect of living. Cheers!

The Little Death : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_petite_mort

So the claim that the brain is "constituted" of processes is actually the much larger claim that the process itself has a holistic unity of its parts. — apokrisis

The current dominant model of the brain says that it consists of an array of "modules" with specialized functions. But no-one has come up with a plausible theory of how those independent modules work together to produce the unique singular perspective we call the Self. Perhaps the best hypothesis comes from Holism, that integrated collections of parts naturally unite into a whole system with new functions & properties that are not found in the components. One physical example of that phenomenon is Phase Transition. Another hypothetical example, that is not accepted by reductionist scientists, is the notion of Panpsychism, in which all minds in the universe work together as a Global Mind. Unfortunately, there is currently no means to communicate with such a god-like mind, other than those of Mysticism.

Modular Mind : One example of modularity in the mind is 'binding.' When one perceives an object, they take in not only the features of an object, but the integrated features that create a whole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind

Holism : the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology. ___Wiki

That is what makes any panpsychic talk flawed. Panpsychism is an argument that piggybacks on conventional materialistic reductionism. And neurobiology has already moved on from that with its holistic notions of "process". — apokrisis

I agree that most notions of Panpsychism are Mystical rather than Empirical. Yet, modern concepts of Process Philosophy, sound panpsychic, but try to incorporate the latest findings of Neuro-Science into a realistic theory. Ironically, their blend of Physical and Meta-physical (mental, rational) evidence typically concludes with some notions of Panpsychism and a god-like Mind.

Process Philosophy : Process philosophy is characterized by an attempt to reconcile the diverse intuitions found in human experience (such as religious, scientific, and aesthetic) into a coherent holistic scheme. Process philosophy seeks a return to a neo-classical realism that avoids subjectivism. . . . . Most process philosophers speculate that God is also an actual entity
https://iep.utm.edu/processp/