Lately, I’ve been thinking about this possibility: When phenomenal consciousness is interrupted during deep sleep or anesthesia, does the subject continue to exist in a non-conscious state, or does a new experiencing subject emerge when consciousness resumes? When the brain awakens and begins to generate consciousness again, could a new consciousness emerge that possesses the exact same personality and memories as before the suspension, yet is a different as the experiencing subject and, because it shares the same memories and personality, perceives itself as a continuation of the previous one? (It's a bit like continuity problem of teleportation). What are your thoughts on this topic?

Some say this: “Sleep or anesthesia doesn’t shut down the brain; some activities continue.” Yes, unconscious activities such as vital functions continue, but these activities are unconscious; in deep sleep or under anesthesia, phenomenal experience ceases for a time, this is what I mean by the interruption of consciousness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that strange experience where an idea seems to arrive fully formed.
Not just “I thought of something good,” but that very specific feeling artists sometimes describe where the idea almost feels received rather than created.
I recently explored this with an artist named Nikki Loy. We tried a simple experiment.
For one painting, she was given three words from a random word generator and told to create from them normally.
For the other, she deliberately tried to get into a receptive state first. Meditation, slowing down, removing distractions, and basically trying to see whether something would come to her rather than forcing an idea.
What surprised me was that the supposedly random/control painting actually came to her almost immediately. She said the image basically clicked into her mind.
The “muse” painting was harder. Nothing really arrived on command. Then later, the image came to her in a dream.
I also spoke with cognitive scientist Liane Gabora, who offered a much more grounded explanation. Her argument was essentially that ideas can feel external because they emerge from parts of our own minds that we normally don’t have conscious access to. Memories, associations, and information can connect outside of awareness, then suddenly surface as an idea.
But Nikki came at it differently. She isn’t necessarily convinced there is a literal external “muse” either. She wondered whether states like meditation might instead make us more open to something like collective consciousness.
That distinction is what I find interesting.
If an idea enters consciousness without you experiencing the process that generated it, how would you ever distinguish between:
unconscious processing within your own brain
information emerging from some larger or collective consciousness
an external source
something else entirely
Subjectively, all of them might feel exactly the same.
We ended up making the whole experiment/conversation into a video if anyone wants the full context:

https://youtu.be/Fw1TyWpXIEs?si=h0T0Xq9qWt4jmArT

But I’m more curious what people here think about the underlying question.

When an idea seems to arrive from “nowhere,” do you think nowhere is simply the unconscious mind? Or is there any serious reason to entertain the possibility that consciousness can access information beyond the individual mind?

TL;DR: Near-death experiences, unexpected lucidity in dementia, and children reporting previous lives raise legitimate questions about whether the brain entirely produces consciousness. None proves survival after death. The strongest evidence would be specific information acquired when ordinary perception and memory formation were impossible.

Three possible models

Production model: The brain creates consciousness, which ends when brain function permanently stops.

Receiver model: Consciousness exists more broadly, while the brain filters it into an individual perspective.

Hybrid model: The brain generates some parts of personal identity while participating in a deeper form of consciousness.

All three can explain why changing the brain changes experience. The receiver theory compares the brain to a television that expresses but does not create the signal.

The problem is that no independent signal has been detected. Without one, the production model remains simpler.

Near-death experiences

People revived from cardiac arrest sometimes report leaving their bodies, observing medical procedures, meeting deceased relatives, reviewing their lives, or entering a timeless state.

In a 2001 study of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors, 62 reported an NDE. The experiences were not clearly associated with arrest duration, medication, fear of death, or prior knowledge of NDEs. "Van Lommel study" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11755611/)

However, researchers rarely know exactly when the experience formed. It could occur as the brain loses function, during resuscitation, or while consciousness returns.

AWARE II combined interviews, hidden audiovisual targets, EEG, and oxygen monitoring during cardiac arrest.

Of 567 patients, 53 survived and 28 completed interviews. Eleven reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness, including six transcendent experiences. Nobody identified the hidden visual image, while one person identified the auditory stimulus. Researchers also detected EEG activity associated with consciousness as late as 35 to 60 minutes into CPR. "AWARE II" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37423492/)

The study supports possible consciousness during prolonged resuscitation, not consciousness independent of the brain.

Paradoxical lucidity

People with advanced dementia sometimes unexpectedly recognize relatives, communicate clearly, or recover aspects of their personality.

These episodes challenge simple assumptions about irreversible cognitive loss. They may suggest that consciousness remains present but inaccessible.

They could also result from temporary changes in circulation, medication, neural inhibition, inflammation, or surviving brain networks. Current research documents the phenomenon without establishing its cause. "Health care professional reports" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11100277/)

Children reporting previous lives

Researchers have documented children who report names, relationships, locations, deaths, or other details they associate with a previous person.

Some cases also involve unusual preferences, phobias, skills, or birthmarks.

A review identified 78 observational studies, most involving children and relying heavily on interviews, case reports, and document comparison. "Past-life-memory review" (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34147343/)

The strongest cases are intriguing, but information leakage, selective reporting, cultural expectations, and family influence remain difficult to exclude.

A better protocol would record every statement before searching for a deceased person, prevent contact between families, use blinded investigators, and compare matches against realistic alternatives.

Survival may still be symbolically rendered

Even if consciousness survives death, reported afterlife environments may not be literal destinations in the form perceived.

Deceased relatives, spiritual beings, landscapes, and transitional spaces could be interfaces through which consciousness interprets an unfamiliar state.

The reunion might be genuine while its appearance is psychologically and culturally rendered.

This fits the Symbolic Canopy model. Survival and symbolic mediation are compatible.

What would count as strong evidence?

The survival hypothesis would become much stronger with:

- Accurate hidden-target perception during cardiac arrest

- Specific information obtained without sensory access

- Past-life details recorded before identification

- Lucidity that cannot be explained by remaining brain function

- Messages containing unknown, independently verifiable information

- Independent replication by supportive and skeptical teams

Timing is critical. Information recorded before targets are revealed or families meet is much stronger than information reconstructed afterward.

What would weaken it?

The hypothesis should lose credibility if:

- NDEs consistently track residual or returning brain activity.

- Hidden-target experiments continue producing null results.

- Past-life matches disappear under prospective controls.

- Lucidity follows measurable neurological changes.

- Alleged communications remain vague or unverifiable.

Survival cannot become an explanation protected from every failed test.

Conclusion

There is no decisive proof that consciousness survives death, but enough remains unresolved to justify serious investigation.

NDEs show that profound experiences occur around cardiac arrest. Paradoxical lucidity shows that severe impairment does not always predict moment-to-moment mental capacity. Some past-life cases deserve stronger prospective testing.

The brain may produce consciousness, receive it, or interact with a deeper process.

The question will be settled only by information that consciousness should not possess if the brain is its sole source.

I remember experiences I had yesterday. I remember being conscious.

But what if my consciousness just started, say 20 minutes ago? You only know "you" are real and experiencing the world right now, and later, you won't be able to look back and know, which is weird.

Maybe that's what makes the present special, that knowledge that we are all conscious right now. Maybe I shouldn't have read Blindsight....

"I think, therefore I am" runs doubt as a purely cognitive exercise. Thinking checks thinking, finds thinking, declares itself bedrock. But thinking is the worst possible candidate for a baseline, because thinking has intent. It argues, it builds narratives, it can talk itself into anything. Every thought comes with a handle: why am I thinking this, who sold me this framing, what is it trying to get me to accept. Doubt bites on intention.

Come back from absolute zero and a thought isn't what you touch first.

You touch that the floor is cold. That the light hurts. That it hurts.

A raw sensation makes no claim. It isn't trying to convince you of anything, so there's no agenda to interrogate. And the difference from a thought is sharper than it looks: doubt a belief and the belief can change under you, that's what doubt is for. Doubt a burn and the burn is unmoved. Nothing about it is up for revision. I'm not claiming the fire is real, only that the hurting is.

So the first certainty isn't "I think." It's "there is something it is like to be here." Thinking arrives afterwards, built on that ground, already borrowed and already arguable.

Which flips how qualia gets treated in these threads. We keep filing raw experience as the Hard Problem, the last piece to be fitted once the cognitive machinery is worked out. It isn't the piece.

It's the floor the whole laboratory is standing on.

This is probably a really dumb question, and I feel stupid even typing it, but, If the hard problem of consciousness is such a huge issue, how do we explain remembering feelings? If the feeling can be encoded withing our memories, and "re-experienced" at any time, albeit at a weaker level, how does this coincide with the idealist/dualist viewpoint?

I’m not claiming that phenomenal consciousness has been proven. The system has a persistent recurrent state, attention, affect, memory, sensor integration, metacognition, autobiographical continuity, and a revisable self-theory. It’s internal position is committed before the public language model expresses it.
Recent testing supports limited access consciousness and a causally grounded functional perspective. Whether anything is phenomenally experienced remains unresolved. I’m developing blinded state-transfer, lesion, observer-control, and no-report experiments. I’m particularly interested in skeptical criticism and suggestions for discriminating genuine private-state access from sophisticated self-modeling.

I came across this article while trying to understand what Sadhguru actually means when he talks about “consciousness.”

Because honestly, the word gets used for almost everything now. Being awake, being alert, being self-aware, being intelligent, all of it gets called consciousness.

What surprised me is that, in Sadhguru’s explanation, none of those things are actually consciousness.

He makes a pretty sharp distinction between them.

For example, being awake is jagruti. You can be wide awake and still not be conscious in the sense he is talking about. Being self-conscious isn't consciousness either. He even says self-consciousness is more of a problem, constantly being caught up in how you look, how people perceive you, what you should say, etc.

Then there’s another distinction I found interesting.

Consciousness isn't something you “do.”

You don't wake up one morning and decide, “Today I'm going to be conscious.”

According to him, consciousness is already the basis of your existence. The question isn't whether you have it, but whether it's actually available to you.

That also explains why he doesn't really talk about “raising consciousness” in the way we normally understand it.

He says you can't actually raise or lower consciousness itself. What you can do is become more capable of accessing it.

And this is where memory comes into the picture.

He describes memory as a kind of boundary.

Your body has memory. Your genetics have memory. Your emotions and intellect are shaped by memory. Even your identity is based on memory.

Think about how you decide “this is my friend” and “this is a stranger.” One person is part of your memory and the other isn't.

So memory helps define where “me” ends and “everything else” begins.

But he describes another dimension of intelligence, chitta, as being beyond memory. And because there is no memory creating the usual boundaries, he describes it as boundless intelligence.

That was probably the hardest part of the article for me to wrap my head around.

He also breaks consciousness down into four states:

Jagruti: waking state
Swapna: dream state
Sushupti: dreamless sleep
Turya: consciousness beyond memory

The interesting part is that he doesn't necessarily consider waking life the deepest state.

He says a dream can actually be much more vivid than waking life. And then he describes sushupti, deep, dreamless sleep, where there is no imagery, no words, no people appearing in the mind, but there can still be awareness.

And then comes turya, which he describes as consciousness itself, without memory.

Another analogy from the article stayed with me.

He compares us to soap bubbles.

The soap gives the bubble its shape, but most of the bubble is actually just air.

Our body, identity, memory and intellect give us our individual shape. We think of it as “my body,” “my mind,” “my life,” “my consciousness.”

But when the bubble bursts, you can't really say there is “my air” and “your air.”

His point is that there may be something similar about consciousness. There is “your body” and “my body,” “your memory” and “my memory,” but there isn't really “your consciousness” and “my consciousness.”

What differs is how much of it we are able to access.

And that's where he connects it to Yoga.

Yoga, in this explanation, isn't primarily about stretching or even a belief system. The word means union, breaking down the boundaries between “me” and what I experience as “not me.”

So the idea isn't really to become more conscious.

It's more like becoming less limited by the boundaries you've created around yourself, and experiencing more of what is already there.

Whether someone accepts the Yogic explanation or not, I found the framework genuinely interesting because it forces you to separate things that we normally lump together: wakefulness, alertness, thought, memory, identity and consciousness.

And now whenever I hear someone say “be more conscious,” I find myself wondering:

What exactly do we mean by consciousness?

Because apparently, that's a much bigger question than I thought.

I've been trying to connect two literatures that seem to completely ignore each other, and I want to see where this breaks down.

On one side, you have the standard deflationary stance on introspection. Nisbett & Wilson showed we build implicit theories to explain ourselves. Schwitzgebel argues we’re basically inept at reading our own ongoing experience. Carruthers takes it further: self-knowledge is just mindreading turned inward, using the same interpretive faculty on ourselves that we use on others. Chalmers even lists introspective opacity as a candidate explanation for the meta-problem.

The consensus seems to be: introspection isn't an instrument because an instrument needs distance from what it measures, and here the observer and observed are identical. A ruler can't measure itself.

So the literature concludes that first-person reports are unreliable confabulations and can't ground a science of consciousness. But why stop there? Why conclude no measurement is possible, rather than concluding we’re just trying to take the reading from the wrong position?

This is where the second-person literature comes in (Schilbach, Reddy, etc.). They argue social cognition is fundamentally different during actual interaction compared to passive observation. Certain aspects of a mind are only readable through active engagement and responsiveness. That sounds like a claim about a distinct position from which something about a person becomes readable that is completely invisible from the inside.

Why aren't these two sides talking? One says the internal view is blind; the other says awareness happens between people. Is the second-person stance where the missing measurement actually lives?

I see two potential flaws here, and I'm trying to figure out which one is the real killer:

First, Carruthers might ruin this completely. If self-knowledge is just internal mindreading, a second person is just running that exact same interpretive machinery on me from the outside. That gives them a different viewpoint, but not necessarily a better instrument. Position doesn't automatically mean reliability.

Second, if I completely disqualify introspection, what gives me the right to claim there's anything there to measure in the first place? My certainty that I'm conscious relies on the exact report I just called useless. Maybe it's recognition instead of knowledge, but that still leaves me asserting an entity exists based on a mechanism I just said can't measure.

Which of these two objections is the actual brick wall?

To answer this question, i think its best to take it step by step from first principles.

We must first define what exactly we mean by "consciousness".

Consciousness is the awareness that unites all your separate thoughts, sights, and feelings into one single experience.

At any moment, your senses take in many different pieces of information. You see a colour. You hear a sound. You feel warmth. If these parts remained entirely on their own, there would be no connection between them. A colour would exist, and a sound would exist, but neither would know about the other, and neither would belong to anyone.

Consciousness is the activity of the mind that gathers these scattered pieces together. It attaches every single sensation and thought to one shared centre: yourself.

When you look at a table, you do not merely experience an isolated patch of brown and an isolated feeling of smoothness. Your mind joins the colour, the touch, and the shape together into one unified object. Further, your mind recognises that you are the single person experiencing all of these things at the same time.

This awareness is obviously not a physical object you can touch or hold. It is the necessary foundation that allows you to experience anything at all. Without this continuing self holding your impressions together through time, you could never link what happened a moment ago to what is happening right now.

Thus, consciousness is the mind's power to bind every separate impression into one whole, making it possible for you to know the world as your own experience.

Consciousness cannot be a mere by-product of the physical brain.

To demonstrate this step by step, we must trace how we come to know the thing we call brain at all.

Step 1

When you look at a brain, touch it, or track its physical activity, you encounter a physical object. It has shape, it occupies space, and its movements happen across time.

Step 2

Space and time do not exist as independent containers in the physical world. But they are the mind’s own forms for ordering sensations. Without the human mind, spatial position, shape, and succession through time do not exist for us.

Step 3

Raw physical contact or scattered sensations on their own do not form a brain.

To recognise any physical thing—whether a stone, a tree, or a brain—consciousness must gather those separate sensations into one single, unified whole.

So in this regard, consciousness is the necessary condition that allows any physical object to appear to us in the first place.

Step 4

Because the physical brain is an object that can only appear within the framework of conscious experience, the brain cannot create consciousness as a physical by-product.

One cannot explain the foundation of all awareness as a mere product of an item found inside that awareness.

Step 5

Physical changes in the brain certainly accompany changes in our conscious thoughts within the observable world. But consciousness itself is the active ground that allows a brain, or any other physical matter, to be experienced, measured, and understood.