My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
I thought about this a lot. I tried comparing going to sleep and sleeping to being put under. The only differences I have is that after waking up sometimes I have a recollection of having dreams. But if something happened and I died in my sleep I would not know any better.
Depends on the anesthesia. General anesthesia actually does knock you out for real -- literally shuts down the parts of the brain where we believe consciousness resides.
I've had various forms of anaesthesia, uh, five times in the year or so.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
If you really care that much about making "every worry in the world disappear" from your mind by entirely artificial means (even to the point of remarking that you understand the POV of those who get addicted!), you might benefit from learning about how to live your life with more equanimity. It's a vastly healthier approach to coping with the challenges of a stressful life than any kind of strong narcotic. The topic is explored in great depth in both Stoicism and Buddhism - and via the latter, in more generic "mindfulness" approaches. (It can of course be useful to cross-reference all of these philosophies; they tend to have complementary perspectives.)
Needless to say, therapy can also have very similar benefits, and many people will derive even more benefit from that kind of highly structured approach.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it and I endorse it as a route to making all your worries go away.
I'm going to put words in the ops mouth here and assume what they were communicating is more akin to: "It's absolutely terrifying how quickly, easily, and thoroughly fentanyl can erase your sufferings and worries, replacing them with a feeling of total peace."
I'm assuming they didn't immediately become a fentanyl addict, precisely because they understand how destructive a path to equanimity it is.
Meditation and therapy are great, but addiction disorders often come with comorbidities like (or are comorbid to) PTSD, ADHD, MDD, and bipolar disorder. These are all things that can make establishing a habit like meditation difficult to impossible. Combine that with a lack of life skills and limited access to healthcare (or a complete unfamiliarity with navigating that system re:life skills) and therapy feels impossible as well.
In the last two years I've lost two very close family members to fentanyl. We scheduled therapy sessions and drove them there ourselves, we helped try to find rehab centers, we worked with them to find jobs, walked them through buying cheap transport on craigslist, helped work through medicaid paperwork with them, connected them with people we know who've gone through similar things, and in the end, they didn't make it.
I'm going to guess you're getting down-voted because your response interprets the OP as being against or unaware of meditation and therapy as tools for healthy living; it reads as lacking empathy and a recognition of the realities of addiction.
I'd encourage you to look into the literature in that area and read through the stories of people who have gone through it and survived. I find that for me it was especially helpful to find the stories of people who had life circumstances similar to mine, and still fell into addiction.
I also have strong opinions on the likelihood that meditation and therapy could mimic or match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl, but the whole topic is draining for me. I hope you'll forgive me for passing on it. I think it might be worth your time to specifically research the physiological mechanisms as well, though.
It's less a reading of "GP endorses it as a route to making all your worries go away" and more one of "GP thinks it should be especially salient to us as a route to making all your worries go away". This is where I disagree. If the thought of erasing all your worries from the mind is tempting to you to the point that you "understand" the addictive potential of a narcotic drug through that one lens, your first-line approach should be learning about equanimity and structured therapy, not strong narcotics.
Also, clearly we don't need to "match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl" (though there are newer substances like suboxone, now approved for medical use in the US and the EU, that seem to have some limited potential wrt. this), we only have to offer genuinely viable and sustainable approaches (which of course fentanyl isn't) to the narrower issue of dealing with the stressful worries in one's life.
With all respect, I would encourage you to investigate this more deeply, and the swipe is unnecessary.
I realize it sounds preposterous. I spent the majority of my life holding a similar view. I mentally categorized meditation as another religious affect not much different than prayer or the bliss people report about their personal relationship with some deity.
My view changed when a confluence of life circumstances led to an experience that opened my mind to the possibilities and I ended up going down a meditation rabbit hole where I found that I could access those states at will. What I found was entirely unlike my preconceptions, and made me realize that I’d been summarily dismissing (and judging) people for something I did not understand.
There’s a reason that many people find meditation through prior drug experiences. More commonly psychedelics, but dissociative anesthetics as well.
Certain drugs basically guarantee you’ll experience these states, while learning to meditate “properly” is something that most people find difficult or confusing. I think this confusion comes from the baggage people associate with it and from the frankly terrible meditation and mindfulness apps, books and gurus that have flooded the market, and the “do thing, get result” framing that is common in western contexts. I don’t think most people’s pop understanding of meditation even scratches the surface.
I’ve experienced the bliss of anesthesia drugs. Achieving similar states through meditation is a real thing. This doesn’t have to be “Buddhism” per se. It just happens to be one of the most well known and structured paths for exploring this.
For the record, I’m a materialist and agnostic atheist. My views were formed based on experience, not belief. I think Buddhism is useful in a utilitarian sense, but there are paths of practice that don’t require all of the religiosity.
I try to respond to comments like yours because I see an earlier version of myself in them. I take some issue with how the original comment was framed, but meditation is the real deal and worth exploring.
That's right, no amount of therapy or Buddhism will make you an addict who might overdose at any moment with deadly consequences. I think it's quite sensible to care about that.
> All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
> the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
This is just another way of saying that you don't think people (meaning you) would be moral without the threat of a bad outcome (hell, bad karma, reincarnation into suffering, etc).
Most avowed atheists would tell you that the finality of death is precisely why we have a responsibility to each other, because there's no one up above coming to fix our problems or right our wrongs. That humanity has to *be* better to become better.
Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I am both an atheist and a strong proponent of individualism without disagreeing with your comments on how this naturally comes with responsibility, more than many spiritual constructs do where you can pass some of your responsibility to a third party such as fate or God or karma. Collectivism is a shared brain, individualism is a hivemind.
To not believe in an afterlife is also a belief. We cannot know. The truth is we don’t know.
> Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I like to distinguish between religion and spirituality, where religion is the organized form where you are either a member or not. Religion requires certain beliefs which are externally prescribed, so in joining a religion I hand over authority to somebody else than myself when it comes to values and rules. This in my eyes makes it inherently more collectivist than individualist.
I am a strict atheist, but we cannot know. I faithfully believe that, finding no proof whatsoever, and the existence of a metaphysical/spiritual world coexisting with ours incredibly unlikely without some evidence, there is no god.
But, just like my faith in the supremacy of the speed of light, that's just my opinion, man... based on the combined knowledge of the human race and thousands or millions of experiments.
That's pretty much the definition of "agnostic". The gnostics literally claim to know and the agnostics say "Nope. Do not. In fact, we can't."
Agnostics can play the odds and base their actions on what they find more plausible precisely _because_ they haven't pre-committed to a specific answer.
I believe in the nonexistence of God, which in my understanding makes me an atheist, and at the same time I do not claim to know about the existence or nonexistence of an afterlife. There may well be one without necessarily including a God.
I had quite a number of procedures starting in early childhood and through my teen years.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
I understood it to be a self-centered statement (meant to explain, not judge). “Meaning” is something that exists in your head. You care about the state of the world because your cares are a state of your mind. Kill the mind, and there’s nothing left to do the caring.
The first objection is often “but I care about other people whom I will leave behind!” But yes, you care. Once you’re gone… there won’t be anyone left doing that caring.
By your interactions with them. Sure, after-the-fact caring won't result in any external effects, but a lot of caring is expressed in interaction which is indeed left with people. Who in turn have other cares and interactions influenced by those who cared about them. It's a chain.
When I was put under anesthesia they told me it would be like no time had passed when I woke up, but this wasn't true for me. It felt like time had passed the same way as sleeping.
Replies like these are a clear symptom of how terribly sick our culture is. Nietzsche truly saw it coming.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
Choosing to not have a mystical outlook on life is not indicative of some kind of moral sickness. Being a materialist is not wrong, either, as you clearly imply. The parent "has no way of knowing" - as you say, and I agree with you. But neither do you, so why be so strident in your denouncement?
"There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence."
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion. Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are". It's an impersonal phenomenon (as far as it goes - there's of course plenty of things, mental states, thoughts etc. that are genuinely personal about our individual lives!) not a state of being.
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time
True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do
To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.
(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion.
If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
And how is consciousness "a misconception and an illusion?"
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are".
This implies a lack of awareness of self, which is fundamental to the definition of consciousness. And if a being is aware of itself, then they "are".
> It's an impersonal phenomenon ... not a state of being.
If individual consciousness does not qualify as "a state of being", then whatever could?
> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time. But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next". Plenty of philosophers (including Western philosophers such as David Hume) have looked into this, and the account of individual persisting consciousness as a kind of misconception or illusion (or at least, a very rough "folk" theory of personal identity) is one that elegantly explains the data. That's before you get into the kind of deep inquiry into phenomenology that Eastern meditation practitioners would be deeply familiar with.
>> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
> That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time.
One could just as easily say memory is a component of consciousness, be it short or long term versions.
> But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next".
Amnesia is not the inability to "learn from one situation to the next." It is instead a condition affecting the ability of memory recall. Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.
It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness. I disagree with this position while respecting your right to have it.
Memory is definitely a key component of our thinking processes, but "consciousness" in a philosophical sense is usually taken to refer to the so-called "hard problem" of the phenomenal character of awareness and experience, at its most basic level. The insight that this basic phenomenal character can be impersonal and even momentary in a way that nonetheless fully explains our ordinary experience is quite a substantial simplification! It does seem to make the "hard" problem just a little bit easier, if only by potentially restricting its scope.
Amnesia is not the inability to "learn from one situation
to the next." It is instead a condition affecting the
ability of memory recall.
Someone having "both temporal lobes removed" is separate and apart from amnesia AFAIK.
Now as to the case you quoted - I was unaware of it until you kindly shared it. IMHO, this supports the plausibility of having consciousness while being unable to learn anything new (as you summarized). The implications of this are fascinating to me in a detached objective sense.
>> Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.
> But others are aware of same.
Hence my clear declaration of "I am unaware".
>> It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness.
> ad hominem.
My statement in no way qualifies as an ad hominem. It is simply a recognition of what I understand the person to whom I replied has expressed, without judgement.
> One can easily say things that aren't true.
Now this could reasonably be interpreted as an ad hominem, as you wrote the above in direct reply to my post.
I have a degree in Philosophy. I'm pretty sure I understand what an ad hominem is.
"It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness" Is a statement about the target's level of belief in their position. It does not state that the position is wrong because of the person who made the statement.
I share the feeling about it being impersonal (I've started to doubt its individuality as well). I like to think of consciousness as "the universe observing itself", but that sounds a bit too new-agey.
"[Bits of] the universe observing itself" is indisputably true. And we know (as far as we can tell) that maintaining our component atoms within a certain kind of dynamic pattern is a prerequisite for what we experience as life and consciousness. Nothing metaphysical just stubborn fact.
> I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside"
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
Hmm but that sounds pretty much like how I currently understand how our brains work. Not sure how factual this is, but I remember watching a video about how our brains essentially lie to us.
I think there was a ping pong example in the video. It said something like you think you watch the ball come towards you and you think that you are making a decision and action to move the paddle on the ball's trajectory, but what really happens is that most of that is pre-observed, pre-decided and pre- acted upon subconsciously.
So the subconscious part does most of the work and then when your conscious part catches up and you feel like you are doing the reacting, it's actually your subconsciousness lying to you that this was your observation and your decided reaction.
Again, not sure how factual any of that is, but it made sense to me when I thought about how complex the task of observing+deciding+acting is in e.g. ping pong and how very little time there is to actually do all of that. Is it really possible to consciously observe, decide and act to a ping pong ball with so very little time there is to do all of that?
So based on that it does seem like we are the observer and our subconscious is the actor which also lies to us to make us feel like that the actor is us.
I can introspect, but that could just be my subconsciousness doing it and lying to me that it was by own conscious introspection.
> Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.
But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.
That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.
I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.
I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)
The notion that consciousness is inherently linked to a clumsy homunculus in our mind that we call an "observer" is itself faulty. This "observer" is an entirely artificial construction that our minds engage in, and subjective experience at its most basic can exist without it. This is the arahant's perception: "In the seeing, there is only the seen; in the hearing, there is only the heard; in the sensing, there is only the sensed; in the cognizing, there is only the cognized. Thus you should see that – indeed there is no thing here; this, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself. ... As you see that there is no thing there, you will see that – you are therefore located neither in the world of this, nor in the world of that, nor in any place – betwixt the two. This alone is the end of suffering." (Gautama Buddha's teaching of Bahiya, as recorded in the Udana.)
As a very rough and basic intuition of this, think about how your basic perceptions might work when you're in the "zone" or in "flow" or a deep hyperfocus state, where the ordinary "default mode network" is temporarily made inactive. Do you ever think then about some clumsy intermediating "observer" that your "seeing, hearing, sensing, cognizing" must all be passing through? Of course not; that would instantly snap you out of your intense focus. Yet you're undeniably conscious, not a "zombie" of any sort! Your qualia are unaltered; if anything, they're perhaps being more intensely experienced.
I'd shared this article last week with the meditation group I'm part of, describing the author's state of mind on the eve of surgery as a state of samadhi. It's a great description of the state I end up in during almost every meditation session (practicing in the 'open awareness' style) and sometimes also in the middle of the day, unprompted.
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness? I feel like the daily grind would inevitably pull me back to my old self. Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
Its a constant practice, like anything. Part of you is changed forever when you go through something like this, the awareness part mostley, you can never go back to normality even when something like that wears off.
I know from experience because I survived a brain hemorrhage. I had a state where I experienced the world differently for many years. I still do. Something cracked open in me and it has stayed that way, other aspects of my physiology are returning to a baseline state, like my nervous system changes which damped my fear responses.
You typically don’t go back to the daily grind, as this kind of event often substantially changes your priorities.
I speak for myself, although I know I am not alone in my trajectory. About a decade ago I was ill enough for long enough with an uncertain enough prognosis that I was getting my affairs in order. At the same time a close friend died of an agressivo cancer, aged 32.
I decided to choose quality over quantity. Fuck my business, fuck my career, fuck stupid status games and absolutely fuck climbing the infinite pile of skulls.
Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.
It’s been almost a decade. I still live in the woods, start my days with a coffee and birdsong and “ein heiliges ‘ja!’”, still have zero temptation to return to my life before.
Surviving something like that (a much less serious adenoma near the brain) is neat because I can mentally use the memory to alter my current state of mind.
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
Most enlightened monks aren't walking around like enlightened monks, either! Enlightenment/awakening isn't really described as a "life changing" experience, though a sudden experience of the earliest hints of 'stream entry' can sometimes feel like one. Quite on the contrary, it seems to be connoted as a kind of very practical wisdom.
In Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how we all have a basic setting for these kind of things.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
> Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
A life-changing moment changes one's life by definition. Each time a person experiences one, they are changed in a way where who they were before they can remember, perhaps even look fondly upon, but know they are not that person anymore.
> Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness?
By living in the moment and remembering how you got there.
I think one of the big bummers about this kind of thing is that it’s not really something that could be planned or chosen for. We tend to change slowly and subconsciously through the things we prioritize and routinely practice, our brains and bodies adapt to our “normal”.
The times we tend to adopt changes quickly and consciously are most often with circumstance and external pressures, and the shortcomings implicit with such rapid adaptations can manifest as neuroses/complexes. In traumatic scenarios this might be something like PTSD, but it isn’t necessarily all downsides, either. People taking therapeutic amounts of MDMA or psilocybin (as in, occasionally, not “micro dosing” or whatever Elon Musk seems to be doing) might experience a durable improvement in subjective happiness and optimism.
Disclaimer: this is my own intuitive and wholly unqualified understanding of this, which was arrived at via discussions with behavioral therapists, but I’m an IT consultant, wtf do I really know about it?
I will say that I’ve found mindful meditation highly effective for treating mild to moderate PTSD. It isn’t fast to get started, but after a few weeks of training, you can deploy your own chemical Xanax directly within your own brain using breathing patterns. It really worked for me. I used the app “Headspace” to start out.
They really only took a tiny piece of brain out, I guess. They didn't show me, sadly. :(
It was all occipital lobe so vision would have been the only thing affected. I had terrible vision in the lower-left quadrant of both of my eyes anyways, based on a medical field-of-vision test, along with my own tendency to bump into people and things on my left side (still the case).
Based on many electroencephalographs (EEGs), they decided my epileptic seizures stemmed from the lower right occipital lobe of my brain. It is kind of neat proof to me that the opposite side of your brain has effects on the other side of your body; right occipital lobe affecting left visual field.
So, they removed some brain, which actually did not affect my epilepsy at all, positively or negatively. I went into the hospital, got surgery, and was out maybe a week later - when that photo was taken. I had to go back a week or two later to have the staples taken out.
My lower left peripheral vision is worse than it used to be. I have about eight visual seizures that each last maybe a minute or two per day, but I can carry on a conversation and nobody even knows. I take seven pills every morning, and another four each night. I do not have a drivers license, car, or really ever plan to drive again, but that is kind of why I moved to live in a city where I can walk, take public transit, and get deliveries quickly/reliably.
On the nerd side, I track my seizures with my own homemade Python Django (w/ REST Framework) application, PostgreSQL, and an Apple Shortcut, usually from my iPhone or watch. Datasette and Highcharts make visualizing all my seizures tracked since December 2021 pretty cool.
Thanks for being so open about this. Have you worn one of those diy and prosumer EEG devices? So when you have visual seizure, I can only imagine it is somewhat similar to visual migraine, that is my only reference, you tap log it on your device which triggers some web request. Have you noticed any patterns? What do your doctors think of the data? You sound ideal for working in a neuroscience lab, :)
Never heard of a DIY/prosumer EEG! I did do an ambulatory EEG for the hospital once overnight where I left wearing the fancy cap while all wired up, with a little backpack for the electronics and recording device. All the EEG leads fell off when I was sleeping overnight, so it ended up only getting about 6 hours of data, instead of 12 hours (but I got charged like $600 anyways).
My whole Django app is actually open source, including the Apple Shortcut that sends a JSON POST to Django REST Framework to add seizures.
I definitely have patterns. I swear my occipital lobe needs its watch battery changed. I occasionally will have 3-6 seizures all spaced exactly 10 minutes after one another. Sometimes exactly an hour apart too. To the minute.
Doctors like when I hand them a chart showing my seizures going down over time, but hate it when the chart shows them trending towards more frequent. The brain seems SO poorly understood from my perspective. I get the feeling that
neurologists are not sure what to say or think about the data, since it is not an EEG or MRI.
I called my seizures "double visions" as a kid. They usually only last a minute or two. I can generally carry on a conversation without anyone knowing (besides from noticing me tapping my watch, maybe). My parents and my ex-wife could occasionally tell when I was seizing, but I live solo, commute on foot, and keep
my cat alive.
My seizures really just consist of an odd minute or two of an "aura" (I know it's happening) with double vision and confusion. However, I have occasionally had much worse seizures - usually only if I miss medication, and when asleep. I once woke up to a passenger on a commercial flight telling me that they were a doctor while we were mid-air, before I threw up. I have also woken up on my bedroom carpet with bumps, bruises, and scratches maybe half a dozen times in ten years, but have never had any seizure-related injuries requiring urgent/emergency trauma care.
Stress definitely seems to be a trigger for my seizures, but not photosensitivity. I do not really mind strobe lights, but the randomness of the Sun shining through tall thick trees while driving down a long straight road is terrible.
A long time ago I made a simple tool to check my father's visual field changes due to cancer. At first he found it interesting to track his condition. Unfortunately it accurately tracked his condition and he, in my option wisely, stoped using it.
I never have really tried to measure my own peripheral visual field - no! I am not sure how I would track it - how did you?
I mostly notice bumping into things on my left side. While generally people "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path. For example, walking home through downtown, I like to try to keep my left shoulder as close to buildings as I can, to avoid people coming up behind me on my left side, since I always risk bumping into them. I always choose seating in venues that is very left of center as well.
While I generally do not have serious seizures resulting in falls, it's funny that the fall detection on my Apple Watch has only ever gone off when I accidentally bang my left wrist against a door frame because of my poor peripheral vision.
I did a little reading about Hemianopsia and came up with a very simple test about 15 years ago. It was a simple winforms app. One could write it/vibe code it very quickly in just about anything.
The test was run seated at a desk with a 24'' monitor. I drew a small square in the center of the screen on a back background and created a regular grid of dots which could be subdivided. Each small dot at random was briefly shown and I recorded the time it took him to hit a key. The defaults were .5 to .8 seconds and an off time from .75 to 2.5 seconds on a 7x5 grid with subdivisions for the areas he had trouble, but it's long enough ago that I don't remember what settings he preferred. The sample file I have to hand has 140 dots.
I set it up so that he could customise the number of columns and rows and the number of subdivisions to target his vision loss without having to spend too much time where it didn't matter. The outputs were a grayscale image of the reaction times and the reaction time values. It was helpful to preview all the dots before starting the test.
The main issue with the test was to keep it relatively short. If it took too long he found it boring and caused a bit of eye strain.
If I were to write it again I would to move the center square occasionally throughout the test, and then offset the test grid from that location. Unfortunately he didn't have much time and it eventually became a bit stressful to know the rate of progression of his disease so he/we let it go and I never tried to ease the eye strain issue.
> "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path."
Visit Australia for a mostly keep left experience (at least in the past) :)
I had to look up the proper name for it, but I have always had my visual field medically tested with a "Humphrey" visual field test machine in a hospital:
TIL, there is also something called the "Goldmann" perimeter test.
Visiting Ireland, as a kid, was fun for sure! I remember my father driving a "right-hand drive" car that had the steering wheel on the opposite side of what I was used to - on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to - all, while shifting the manual transmission with his left hand, but the floor pedal arrangement was the same.
Curiously, both of my parents are left-handed, but I am right-handed. I have no family history of epilepsy either! Maybe I am adopted.
I learned a new term: Survivor's Euphoria. Only having had relatively minor procedures, I have only had relatively minor instances. But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia. As if the interrupted mental processes carry some flow state forward, which I re-attach to.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
>> But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia.
> These sound like anaesthetic side effects.
General anesthesia[0] used in surgeries are effectively artificially induced comas. The pre-op discussion with the anesthesiologist includes them describing this and that there is a very real risk that you will die from its usage.
Regaining consciousness after having it applied most certainly invokes a feeling of "I came back" and has nothing to do with side effects.
Source: I have had two general anesthesia[0] and one epidural[1] surgeries.
The feeling of blinking out and suddenly being "back" is far from exclusive to comas or general anesthesia; it has been replicated via deep meditation. Specifically, it seems to be the core feature of what's technically known as nirodha samapatti (lit. "attainment of ceasing").
An easy way of intuiting what it might feel like (if imperfectly, of course) is just keeping a high state of lucidity and mental focus whilst you're naturally drifting in and out of light sleep; this might seem challenging at first but it's actually quite doable.
OK but you haven't provided any trustworthy evidence, just a personal anecdote. This is not convincing, especially since some anaesthetics have known long term psychological effects. There's no reason to believe that a person experiencing them would correctly identify the cause intuitively. In fact that would be extremely surprising.
Does general anesthesia affect memory? I swear my ability to form memories fell off a cliff after a procedure years ago. Going in is the last thing I vividly remember and everything since is hazy or ephemeral.
I have a theory that some people don’t fully wake up after the anesthesia wears off. A part of them is still sleeping. Like memory bank takes a slow break and stops working. I suspect it happened to me and now I am looking for answers.
I don't agree with anesthesia having long-term affects similar to their initial use (excluding any allergic reactions of course).
I will say that I believe when a person experiences significant pain of any kind, it changes their lived experience such that what previously might have been painful may not be as much if the event causing the pain is relatively less. Much like how the high-water mark of a river indicates what a riverbank can withstand.
For example, a person who has never had to use crutches due to injury may see having to park their car a great distance from a store's entrance as being "a pain in the ass" and might complain loudly. Yet that same person who doesn't have the option to drive to the store due to an injury, or if they did would have to use crutches to move about, may very well not care at all where they park once they regain full mobility.
In short, pain is relative and once one "raises the bar" of what is considered painful, that which once qualified as same very well may no longer be so.
Problem is, it takes the memory of "new levels of pain" to make this happen.
It's a reasonably well understood problem for older people in particular that general anaesthesia can trigger some kind of cognitive decline in some people.
Separately at least in Australia you are given specific advice regarding avoidance of operation of construction machinery, farm machinery and the like.
This is a great article. I've been in for surgery a few times, and I always cry before it because I never know what could happen. I could wind up dead, paralyzed, in chronic pain, a vegetable. Then I think to myself how unspecial I am. Millions of people die every day and yet we deny death, and lose sight of the stuff that actually matters that much. The billionaire and the homeless person still just fertilize worms after they die. That reality keeps me humble and in daily gratitude to the miracle of life, though my confidence does waver during the periods of ill health I've had.
What a beautiful, thought provoking article! When I saw the title , I thought it was a book summary of “My stroke of insight” [0]. This book is by a neuro-anatomist who had a rare stroke resulting in the left hemisphere of her brain being incapacitated. That led her to experiences similar to that of the article’s author. Do check out the book and pair it with the article
I had a craniotomy in 1996. Similar thing. The back of my head looked a bit like his, except the scar looked more like a Blue Oyster Cult symbol (backwards question mark). I know they left a piece of the skull out, so I do have a hole in the head.
Took me a couple months to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time, but I ended up making a full recovery.
I remember being wheeled into the OR. It was odd, because there was a damn good chance I wouldn’t wake up. Or I’d spend my life in a wheelchair. The cerebellum is a bad place to have problems. I was actually pretty chill. Maybe they gave me Valium.
The recovery sucked. I spent a week in ICU (basically no sleep).
Versed/midazolam, almost certainly, was a part of the preoperative regimen.
I had jaw surgery and basically didn't sleep the night before, for obvious reasons, and they gave me a bit of versed in prep and had to wake me up on the table to put me under for anesthesia proper. Hey, not my fault the blankets were warm and the pillow was perfect.
It's a very useful medication both for anxiety, but also to reduce your seizure risk, which I imagine for cerebellar surgery was a definite factor.
You gotta appreciate how this lovely story, (which to me has too many Is to have "enlightenment" close to it), is sitting on /business/, even though Bigthink has Neuropsych, Thinking, The Present, The Future, Life, Health and Special Issues. I guess it wasn't a conscious decision to have it there, or so I hope. ;)
What a great piece. I’m so glad not only that his daughter will get to know her dad, but that her dad is going to appreciate every moment he has with her.
Glad for him and without a doubt the support network and relationships he had in place significantly contributed to his positive outcome. I recently went through a similar trial and tribulation but as an inmate and by receiving sub-standard care. That's how I was able to turn inward and finally crack into real enlightenment and it's the solid kind because comparatively speaking, I had fuck-all to live for. No family. No future. No nothing but more suffering. And yet I found the release into accepting the beauty of futility. I commit to the program, I give. Let Go and Hang On. IYKYK.
This isn't really relevant to this site nor is it noteworthy. There was nothing revelatory about consciousness. I'm happy that the author survived their brain surgery though.
The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
I felt the exact same, I can't believe nobody else has commented on it. It feels so disrespectful to such a powerful story to tell it in this way. I mean there's a really interesting core but I just wish I could read the first draft before LLMs overwrote it to death.
"Survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation."
Yeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it.
If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.
Every time I see people talking about this, I see new alleged LLM fingerprints. Keeping up with that is a significant burden, especially without a centralized place to easily find an up to date list. This is even harder for me specifically because I have been told that my writing style (even when looking at things that I wrote before LLMs became widely available) closely resembles that of an LLM.
It's not fair but yes, it may help once AI users stop making obvious mistakes that give it away.
At least until the publisher secretly runs the content through AI by themselves. YouTube already does that with short videos, making them all look like AI generated content and making drawn animations etc look objectively worse.
If you are using one of the small handful of phrases that chatgpt hammers into everything it writes, yes you should change them if you don't want people to think you are a LLM.
How do you draw the conclusion that the writer doesn't care about their craft though? If someone uses an emdash, but spent three hours and a ton of effort on a three paragraph comment and some of that time was spent running it through ChatGPT to hone their point so it comes across better,
does that invalidate the point they're trying to make? Should we start documenting how long it took to write something, regardless of if an LLM was used in some capacity to help write something instead?
Because they're human writers, and don't sit down and calculate the most efficient use of time, and then only do that? Most scientists and engineers I know aren't that obsessive about how to most optimally spend their time.
"Got Milk" cost tens of thousands of dollars per word. Sometimes it's about quality not quantity.
You missed the point entirely. You can't actually tell if an article is AI-assisted or not. A writer that doesn't leverage AI is going to get outcompeted full stop.
> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
> I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
Is it possible you are experiencing confirmation bias[0]?
In other words, by your own admission, you have been "trying to see how well llms can help" as it pertains to writing. With that degree of LLM intimacy, is it possible "the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript" is a pattern you are predisposed to identify in other works?
That wouldn’t be confirmation bias, just pattern recognition.
If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
> If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it. Native speakers pretty much never make this mistake, but they're likely to make other mistakes, like confuse "there", "they're" and "their", which never happens to me.
Not to mention the overall sentence structure even if my text is grammatically correct. I'm likely to build sentences in a way that mirrors my native language. Sure, after being exposed to tons of text in English I got rather good at it, but if you ask me to speak Spanish, I'll produce sentences that are grammatically correct, but a native would never say them because they prefer other structures to express the same ideas.
> Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it.
"A" and "an" are indefinite articles[0] used to identify a single entity (noun) without specificity. "The" is a definite article[1] used to identify a single entity (noun) specifically. For example:
A car is parked on the street.
The car is parked on the street.
The former sentence indicates a vehicle of unknown origin exists "on the street", whereas the latter indicates a vehicle known to the speaker exists "on the street."
Now, to the topic at hand. Part of the original post to which I replied is:
> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
> I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
To the best of my knowledge, this was not posted by the person who wrote the article nor someone with direct interaction with same. Additionally, the quoted text self-identifies as being intimate with LLM generated content in work important to the poster as well as unequivocally identifying the article as "OpenAI gpt 5."
My premise is only that having this level of intimacy with LLM generated text may create a bias toward "this was made by a LLM" when reading prose published by an unknown person.
Okay so according to that rule, we should say "I've been to the Germany" because there's one specific Germany we're talking about. Correct? Also, I can say "I like listening to a music when walking" because there's no one specific music I enjoy, it's a general habit I have that I like music in general. Just like I enjoy "listening to a podcast".
Moreover, we say "The Lake Michigan" just like we say "The Gulf of Mexico" because in both cases we talk about specific bodies of water. Right?
I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go “this is probably written by a non native speaker” when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.
>> And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
> I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go "this is probably written by a non native speaker" when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.
The problem is that the more a person is looking for a pattern, the more they are likely to believe they have found an instance of one.
For example, if a police officer is regularly tasked with identifying drivers leaving bars who might be intoxicated, they will naturally use a form of "pattern recognition" to determine which vehicles to stop. Common indicators are a vehicle that is driving too slow or remains stationary after a traffic light turns green.
So what happens when a sober designated driver is tired and drives overly cautious?
What will the cop do if the designated driver falls asleep at a traffic light?
Would the cop testify along the lines of:
I wasn't looking for anything. As I observed the vehicle,
something in my brain immediately said "this is probably
a drunk driver" when coming across those driving patterns.
This is by definition a form of confirmation bias.
You're being fooled by the humans. They're not writing intimately any more than TFA is. They've learned and practiced to write in a way that conveys whatever emotion they choose to show, whether they really feel it or not. LLMs just bring a professional writer's abilities to normal people.
Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
It's different. Yes you can be a good writer or musician and convey whatever emotion you want. But if you have truly experienced that emotion or experience and unflinchingly hone your writing to convey the true experience of it, it shows. It's the difference between a good song and a great song, or a good story and a great story.
I'm all in on AI, but not to replace true human artistic expression. There's something we feel to our core when someone nails the expression of visceral emotion or experience.
It feels like you've been cheated when you felt some emotion reading a true story then discovered it was generated by an LLM, or equally, by an artist who admits it was a lie. But I don't think that's because the writing isn't great - it often is great, which is why it affects the reader so much. I suspect the real complaint that people have is not the writing itself but the knowledge that an LLM generated it. You see people here discussing clues that helped them guess it was an LLM, and asking for authors to disclose that, etc. People worry that the emotion they feel from reading it isn't the same the author felt themselves. What they're forgetting is that good human writers can lead you to feel emotions they never experienced themselves either. You say a "great" story can't be written that way and perhaps if you set the bar high enough that might be true, but for more common writing like the TFA, there's no need to have experienced the emotion first hand if the writer is capable enough - human or LLM.
I wonder how it would affect those us with english as their second language. I initially learned mine through movies and tv shows from the west. Later hanging around in various forums.
Definitely rewritten with ChatGpt. There are strong tells that even humans writing in this style would not do. Using "hum" 3 different times in the same text is one of them.
It is really a shame that people who do have something to say think that an LLM can express it better, because that is not the case at all.
Impossible to say, a few people really do write like that and their writing gets flagged by those detection systems all the time, but I think we all know which option is far more likely.
"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."
The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.
One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."
This short sentence cadence always stands out to me – a native British English speaker – as a hallmark of a contemporary American writer trying to write something deep and impactful and profound. Usually just comes across as the opposite.
TBH I've struggled to get through long-form writing - and this isn't even that long - for years, mostly because they're so full of filler. A compelling headline, but every time it starts to get close to an answer to the compelling headline, it diverts into telling the backstory of one of the people in it. Loads of filler. AI just seems to make it cheaper or faster to generate filler.
I don't know if the tide has shifted on this site, but I was scolded by dang some months ago for pointing out something was obviously GPT-written. I guess that's against the rules.
There's a rule against commenting about "tangential annoyances" like text formatting or bad UX on a linked website. It's possible a comment about GPT use might have been interpreted as that, but I would disagree - this has an effect on the quality of the content. Either way this rule is not very consistently enforced as far as I observed.
There's also the rule against generic tangents, which this subthread certainly is. The trouble with those is that they tend to get upvoted to the top of a thread (as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089350 was), where they choke out the rest of the discussion.
My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
edit: paragraphs
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
Before Wittgenstein, Epicurius:
> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_Menoeceus
It’s the same with sleep.
I thought about this a lot. I tried comparing going to sleep and sleeping to being put under. The only differences I have is that after waking up sometimes I have a recollection of having dreams. But if something happened and I died in my sleep I would not know any better.
Just because you don’t remember after doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing in the moment.
That's right. This is true for regular sleep and for anesthesia.
Depends on the anesthesia. General anesthesia actually does knock you out for real -- literally shuts down the parts of the brain where we believe consciousness resides.
I've had various forms of anaesthesia, uh, five times in the year or so.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
I understand how people can get addicted to it.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
That was my exact thought the moment it was injected as a painkiller after a surgery. World went from pain to bliss with frightening speed and ease.
> It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
> I understand how people can get addicted to it.
If you really care that much about making "every worry in the world disappear" from your mind by entirely artificial means (even to the point of remarking that you understand the POV of those who get addicted!), you might benefit from learning about how to live your life with more equanimity. It's a vastly healthier approach to coping with the challenges of a stressful life than any kind of strong narcotic. The topic is explored in great depth in both Stoicism and Buddhism - and via the latter, in more generic "mindfulness" approaches. (It can of course be useful to cross-reference all of these philosophies; they tend to have complementary perspectives.)
Needless to say, therapy can also have very similar benefits, and many people will derive even more benefit from that kind of highly structured approach.
I think you're interpreting
> I understand how people can get addicted to it
as
> I understand how people can get addicted to it and I endorse it as a route to making all your worries go away.
I'm going to put words in the ops mouth here and assume what they were communicating is more akin to: "It's absolutely terrifying how quickly, easily, and thoroughly fentanyl can erase your sufferings and worries, replacing them with a feeling of total peace."
I'm assuming they didn't immediately become a fentanyl addict, precisely because they understand how destructive a path to equanimity it is.
Meditation and therapy are great, but addiction disorders often come with comorbidities like (or are comorbid to) PTSD, ADHD, MDD, and bipolar disorder. These are all things that can make establishing a habit like meditation difficult to impossible. Combine that with a lack of life skills and limited access to healthcare (or a complete unfamiliarity with navigating that system re:life skills) and therapy feels impossible as well.
In the last two years I've lost two very close family members to fentanyl. We scheduled therapy sessions and drove them there ourselves, we helped try to find rehab centers, we worked with them to find jobs, walked them through buying cheap transport on craigslist, helped work through medicaid paperwork with them, connected them with people we know who've gone through similar things, and in the end, they didn't make it.
I'm going to guess you're getting down-voted because your response interprets the OP as being against or unaware of meditation and therapy as tools for healthy living; it reads as lacking empathy and a recognition of the realities of addiction.
I'd encourage you to look into the literature in that area and read through the stories of people who have gone through it and survived. I find that for me it was especially helpful to find the stories of people who had life circumstances similar to mine, and still fell into addiction.
I also have strong opinions on the likelihood that meditation and therapy could mimic or match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl, but the whole topic is draining for me. I hope you'll forgive me for passing on it. I think it might be worth your time to specifically research the physiological mechanisms as well, though.
It's less a reading of "GP endorses it as a route to making all your worries go away" and more one of "GP thinks it should be especially salient to us as a route to making all your worries go away". This is where I disagree. If the thought of erasing all your worries from the mind is tempting to you to the point that you "understand" the addictive potential of a narcotic drug through that one lens, your first-line approach should be learning about equanimity and structured therapy, not strong narcotics.
Also, clearly we don't need to "match the physiological response a brain has to fentanyl" (though there are newer substances like suboxone, now approved for medical use in the US and the EU, that seem to have some limited potential wrt. this), we only have to offer genuinely viable and sustainable approaches (which of course fentanyl isn't) to the narrower issue of dealing with the stressful worries in one's life.
You misinterpret me. I have never taken fentanyl outside of a surgical setting and have no intention of ever doing so.
But because I have experienced it (in a surgical setting), I have a better understanding of the motivations behind people who are addicted to it.
No amount of therapy or Buddhism will make you feel how fentanyl makes you feel and to claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.
With all respect, I would encourage you to investigate this more deeply, and the swipe is unnecessary.
I realize it sounds preposterous. I spent the majority of my life holding a similar view. I mentally categorized meditation as another religious affect not much different than prayer or the bliss people report about their personal relationship with some deity.
My view changed when a confluence of life circumstances led to an experience that opened my mind to the possibilities and I ended up going down a meditation rabbit hole where I found that I could access those states at will. What I found was entirely unlike my preconceptions, and made me realize that I’d been summarily dismissing (and judging) people for something I did not understand.
There’s a reason that many people find meditation through prior drug experiences. More commonly psychedelics, but dissociative anesthetics as well.
Certain drugs basically guarantee you’ll experience these states, while learning to meditate “properly” is something that most people find difficult or confusing. I think this confusion comes from the baggage people associate with it and from the frankly terrible meditation and mindfulness apps, books and gurus that have flooded the market, and the “do thing, get result” framing that is common in western contexts. I don’t think most people’s pop understanding of meditation even scratches the surface.
I’ve experienced the bliss of anesthesia drugs. Achieving similar states through meditation is a real thing. This doesn’t have to be “Buddhism” per se. It just happens to be one of the most well known and structured paths for exploring this.
For the record, I’m a materialist and agnostic atheist. My views were formed based on experience, not belief. I think Buddhism is useful in a utilitarian sense, but there are paths of practice that don’t require all of the religiosity.
I try to respond to comments like yours because I see an earlier version of myself in them. I take some issue with how the original comment was framed, but meditation is the real deal and worth exploring.
That's right, no amount of therapy or Buddhism will make you an addict who might overdose at any moment with deadly consequences. I think it's quite sensible to care about that.
I find your lack of faith, curious. I’ve experienced stronger and more intense joy from meditation than from 200mg of MDMA
The beauty of meditation is that no faith is necessary. No belief. Just a willingness to explore one’s own mind in new ways.
All of the claims made by practitioners can be individually/personally verified.
> All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
I am in complete agreement. People literally carry out suicide bombings based on their belief system about the afterlife.
> the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
This is just another way of saying that you don't think people (meaning you) would be moral without the threat of a bad outcome (hell, bad karma, reincarnation into suffering, etc).
Most avowed atheists would tell you that the finality of death is precisely why we have a responsibility to each other, because there's no one up above coming to fix our problems or right our wrongs. That humanity has to *be* better to become better.
Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I am both an atheist and a strong proponent of individualism without disagreeing with your comments on how this naturally comes with responsibility, more than many spiritual constructs do where you can pass some of your responsibility to a third party such as fate or God or karma. Collectivism is a shared brain, individualism is a hivemind.
To not believe in an afterlife is also a belief. We cannot know. The truth is we don’t know.
> Being religious doesn't intrinsically make one more or less collectivist or individualist, it all depends on the philosophy of the religion (or non-religion).
I like to distinguish between religion and spirituality, where religion is the organized form where you are either a member or not. Religion requires certain beliefs which are externally prescribed, so in joining a religion I hand over authority to somebody else than myself when it comes to values and rules. This in my eyes makes it inherently more collectivist than individualist.
https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/spirituality-vs-...
> We cannot know
You are an agnostic, not an atheist.
I am a strict atheist, but we cannot know. I faithfully believe that, finding no proof whatsoever, and the existence of a metaphysical/spiritual world coexisting with ours incredibly unlikely without some evidence, there is no god.
But, just like my faith in the supremacy of the speed of light, that's just my opinion, man... based on the combined knowledge of the human race and thousands or millions of experiments.
That's pretty much the definition of "agnostic". The gnostics literally claim to know and the agnostics say "Nope. Do not. In fact, we can't."
Agnostics can play the odds and base their actions on what they find more plausible precisely _because_ they haven't pre-committed to a specific answer.
I believe in the nonexistence of God, which in my understanding makes me an atheist, and at the same time I do not claim to know about the existence or nonexistence of an afterlife. There may well be one without necessarily including a God.
I had quite a number of procedures starting in early childhood and through my teen years.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
I understood it to be a self-centered statement (meant to explain, not judge). “Meaning” is something that exists in your head. You care about the state of the world because your cares are a state of your mind. Kill the mind, and there’s nothing left to do the caring.
The first objection is often “but I care about other people whom I will leave behind!” But yes, you care. Once you’re gone… there won’t be anyone left doing that caring.
Your caring will be passed on, that's the point.
How?
If you care about that little red-headed girl you knew as a nearly-bald kid, and you die in a cabin in the woods, how is your care passed on?
By your interactions with them. Sure, after-the-fact caring won't result in any external effects, but a lot of caring is expressed in interaction which is indeed left with people. Who in turn have other cares and interactions influenced by those who cared about them. It's a chain.
When I was put under anesthesia they told me it would be like no time had passed when I woke up, but this wasn't true for me. It felt like time had passed the same way as sleeping.
Odd. I feel that time hasn't passed when I am sleeping.
i wonder if they lied how long you were asleep how it would render after knowing the actual duration
I don't think the article tells us how we should live. The author had a peak experience and he shared that with us. I appreciate that.
I had the same experience when under anesthesia. It feels like the time before I can remember being alive.
Replies like these are a clear symptom of how terribly sick our culture is. Nietzsche truly saw it coming.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
Choosing to not have a mystical outlook on life is not indicative of some kind of moral sickness. Being a materialist is not wrong, either, as you clearly imply. The parent "has no way of knowing" - as you say, and I agree with you. But neither do you, so why be so strident in your denouncement?
You seem very nihilist, and frankly, ugly inside. Why so critical of other's beliefs?
"There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence."
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion. Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are". It's an impersonal phenomenon (as far as it goes - there's of course plenty of things, mental states, thoughts etc. that are genuinely personal about our individual lives!) not a state of being.
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time
True. But then again, there is nothing that persists over time. Entities with enduring identities - of any kind - are just abstractions that we superimpose on experience.
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do
To my eyes, you're switching over to another meaning of "consciousness" here. Sure there's no enduring self, but that doesn't mean consciousness (the capacity for experience, rather than mere behavior) is just something we do. We can understand feelings, thoughts, emotions etc as fundamentally "impersonal", yes, but that doesn't mean that they are not states of being. To me such states are about as real as anything. Again, it's two separate issues: 1) the nature of a persistent self, 2) the nature of mental states, not taken as "possessions" of such a self.
(Still, psychologically speaking, the sense of self is baked into even our most basic acts of cognition. When you see an apple, there is always an implicit "you" in relation to the apple. In practical terms, it takes a lot of effort to separate one from the other - yet another topic!)
' Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are"'
I'm not sure what distinction you're making
> There's no such thing as an individual conscious self that persists over time - it is always a misconception and an illusion.
If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
And how is consciousness "a misconception and an illusion?"
> Consciousness is just something that living beings do, not something that they "are".
This implies a lack of awareness of self, which is fundamental to the definition of consciousness. And if a being is aware of itself, then they "are".
> It's an impersonal phenomenon ... not a state of being.
If individual consciousness does not qualify as "a state of being", then whatever could?
> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time. But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next". Plenty of philosophers (including Western philosophers such as David Hume) have looked into this, and the account of individual persisting consciousness as a kind of misconception or illusion (or at least, a very rough "folk" theory of personal identity) is one that elegantly explains the data. That's before you get into the kind of deep inquiry into phenomenology that Eastern meditation practitioners would be deeply familiar with.
>> If individual consciousness does not persist over time, how does one explain existence from one day to the next? Or learning from one situation to the next?
> That's easy: consciousness piggybacks on memory, which is what really creates persistence over time.
One could just as easily say memory is a component of consciousness, be it short or long term versions.
> But an amnesiac can be conscious in the moment and not "learn from one situation to the next".
Amnesia is not the inability to "learn from one situation to the next." It is instead a condition affecting the ability of memory recall. Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.
It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness. I disagree with this position while respecting your right to have it.
Memory is definitely a key component of our thinking processes, but "consciousness" in a philosophical sense is usually taken to refer to the so-called "hard problem" of the phenomenal character of awareness and experience, at its most basic level. The insight that this basic phenomenal character can be impersonal and even momentary in a way that nonetheless fully explains our ordinary experience is quite a substantial simplification! It does seem to make the "hard" problem just a little bit easier, if only by potentially restricting its scope.
You have given me a few things to think about, and for that I thank you.
Henry Molaison had both temporal lobes removed in 1953 and was unable to learn anything new, but was still conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison
What are you saying? I don't get it.
> What are you saying? I don't get it.
What I said was:
Someone having "both temporal lobes removed" is separate and apart from amnesia AFAIK.Now as to the case you quoted - I was unaware of it until you kindly shared it. IMHO, this supports the plausibility of having consciousness while being unable to learn anything new (as you summarized). The implications of this are fascinating to me in a detached objective sense.
One can easily say things that aren't true.
> Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.
But others are aware of same.
> It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness.
ad hominem.
>> Furthermore, I am unaware of any credible research claiming there exists amnesia such that all memory is blocked.
> But others are aware of same.
Hence my clear declaration of "I am unaware".
>> It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness.
> ad hominem.
My statement in no way qualifies as an ad hominem. It is simply a recognition of what I understand the person to whom I replied has expressed, without judgement.
> One can easily say things that aren't true.
Now this could reasonably be interpreted as an ad hominem, as you wrote the above in direct reply to my post.
No, an ad hominem would be him saying your argument was invalid because of something about you unrelated to your argument - profession, race, age etc
It's a textbook ad hominem ... there's no reason to make the statement other than to undermine the credibility of the person's claims.
I have a degree in Philosophy. I'm pretty sure I understand what an ad hominem is.
"It is apparent to me you have a firm belief in your position regarding consciousness" Is a statement about the target's level of belief in their position. It does not state that the position is wrong because of the person who made the statement.
I share the feeling about it being impersonal (I've started to doubt its individuality as well). I like to think of consciousness as "the universe observing itself", but that sounds a bit too new-agey.
"[Bits of] the universe observing itself" is indisputably true. And we know (as far as we can tell) that maintaining our component atoms within a certain kind of dynamic pattern is a prerequisite for what we experience as life and consciousness. Nothing metaphysical just stubborn fact.
> "the universe observing itself", but that sounds a bit too new-agey.
That's hilarious. New Age has such a bad rep that the universe itself is repelled by it.
New Age is the absolute worst, even though it might contain elements of truth.
A modern analogy: New Age is to spirituality what using an LLM is to reading a book in search of knowledge.
Research has been done that shows the popular pet theory among amateur consciousness scientists, that consciousness is emergent of the brain, holds no water, see https://dn721502.ca.archive.org/0/items/davidickehumanracege...
That's literally just one theory: "these other theories are wrong".
Get back to us when loads of actual scientists agree.
Would you mind developing a bit to help us find out if that long reference is relevant or not?
> I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside"
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
We're not simply observing "from the outside".
Hmm but that sounds pretty much like how I currently understand how our brains work. Not sure how factual this is, but I remember watching a video about how our brains essentially lie to us.
I think there was a ping pong example in the video. It said something like you think you watch the ball come towards you and you think that you are making a decision and action to move the paddle on the ball's trajectory, but what really happens is that most of that is pre-observed, pre-decided and pre- acted upon subconsciously.
So the subconscious part does most of the work and then when your conscious part catches up and you feel like you are doing the reacting, it's actually your subconsciousness lying to you that this was your observation and your decided reaction.
Again, not sure how factual any of that is, but it made sense to me when I thought about how complex the task of observing+deciding+acting is in e.g. ping pong and how very little time there is to actually do all of that. Is it really possible to consciously observe, decide and act to a ping pong ball with so very little time there is to do all of that?
So based on that it does seem like we are the observer and our subconscious is the actor which also lies to us to make us feel like that the actor is us.
I can introspect, but that could just be my subconsciousness doing it and lying to me that it was by own conscious introspection.
Kinda explains how CEOs take credit for the company’s success! Postfact justification.
> Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.
But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.
That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.
I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.
I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)
The notion that consciousness is inherently linked to a clumsy homunculus in our mind that we call an "observer" is itself faulty. This "observer" is an entirely artificial construction that our minds engage in, and subjective experience at its most basic can exist without it. This is the arahant's perception: "In the seeing, there is only the seen; in the hearing, there is only the heard; in the sensing, there is only the sensed; in the cognizing, there is only the cognized. Thus you should see that – indeed there is no thing here; this, Bahiya, is how you should train yourself. ... As you see that there is no thing there, you will see that – you are therefore located neither in the world of this, nor in the world of that, nor in any place – betwixt the two. This alone is the end of suffering." (Gautama Buddha's teaching of Bahiya, as recorded in the Udana.)
As a very rough and basic intuition of this, think about how your basic perceptions might work when you're in the "zone" or in "flow" or a deep hyperfocus state, where the ordinary "default mode network" is temporarily made inactive. Do you ever think then about some clumsy intermediating "observer" that your "seeing, hearing, sensing, cognizing" must all be passing through? Of course not; that would instantly snap you out of your intense focus. Yet you're undeniably conscious, not a "zombie" of any sort! Your qualia are unaltered; if anything, they're perhaps being more intensely experienced.
I'd shared this article last week with the meditation group I'm part of, describing the author's state of mind on the eve of surgery as a state of samadhi. It's a great description of the state I end up in during almost every meditation session (practicing in the 'open awareness' style) and sometimes also in the middle of the day, unprompted.
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness? I feel like the daily grind would inevitably pull me back to my old self. Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
Its a constant practice, like anything. Part of you is changed forever when you go through something like this, the awareness part mostley, you can never go back to normality even when something like that wears off.
I know from experience because I survived a brain hemorrhage. I had a state where I experienced the world differently for many years. I still do. Something cracked open in me and it has stayed that way, other aspects of my physiology are returning to a baseline state, like my nervous system changes which damped my fear responses.
You typically don’t go back to the daily grind, as this kind of event often substantially changes your priorities.
I speak for myself, although I know I am not alone in my trajectory. About a decade ago I was ill enough for long enough with an uncertain enough prognosis that I was getting my affairs in order. At the same time a close friend died of an agressivo cancer, aged 32.
I decided to choose quality over quantity. Fuck my business, fuck my career, fuck stupid status games and absolutely fuck climbing the infinite pile of skulls.
Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.
It’s been almost a decade. I still live in the woods, start my days with a coffee and birdsong and “ein heiliges ‘ja!’”, still have zero temptation to return to my life before.
> Sold up. Put everything on 00 and gave the wheel a spin.
Wait, what?
Surviving something like that (a much less serious adenoma near the brain) is neat because I can mentally use the memory to alter my current state of mind.
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
Most enlightened monks aren't walking around like enlightened monks, either! Enlightenment/awakening isn't really described as a "life changing" experience, though a sudden experience of the earliest hints of 'stream entry' can sometimes feel like one. Quite on the contrary, it seems to be connoted as a kind of very practical wisdom.
In Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how we all have a basic setting for these kind of things.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
Different traditions have been systematically iterating on techniques to do exactly this for thousands of years.
> Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
A life-changing moment changes one's life by definition. Each time a person experiences one, they are changed in a way where who they were before they can remember, perhaps even look fondly upon, but know they are not that person anymore.
> Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness?
By living in the moment and remembering how you got there.
I think one of the big bummers about this kind of thing is that it’s not really something that could be planned or chosen for. We tend to change slowly and subconsciously through the things we prioritize and routinely practice, our brains and bodies adapt to our “normal”.
The times we tend to adopt changes quickly and consciously are most often with circumstance and external pressures, and the shortcomings implicit with such rapid adaptations can manifest as neuroses/complexes. In traumatic scenarios this might be something like PTSD, but it isn’t necessarily all downsides, either. People taking therapeutic amounts of MDMA or psilocybin (as in, occasionally, not “micro dosing” or whatever Elon Musk seems to be doing) might experience a durable improvement in subjective happiness and optimism.
Disclaimer: this is my own intuitive and wholly unqualified understanding of this, which was arrived at via discussions with behavioral therapists, but I’m an IT consultant, wtf do I really know about it?
I will say that I’ve found mindful meditation highly effective for treating mild to moderate PTSD. It isn’t fast to get started, but after a few weeks of training, you can deploy your own chemical Xanax directly within your own brain using breathing patterns. It really worked for me. I used the app “Headspace” to start out.
https://imgur.com/a/vsRq0a9 I had some occipital lobe taken out in 2010 when I was 20 years old, to try to treat epilepsy!
Wow, that looks drastic?
How much did it help? Did you notice a change in your personality? How long did it take to recover? Did you lose vision in one eye?
They really only took a tiny piece of brain out, I guess. They didn't show me, sadly. :(
It was all occipital lobe so vision would have been the only thing affected. I had terrible vision in the lower-left quadrant of both of my eyes anyways, based on a medical field-of-vision test, along with my own tendency to bump into people and things on my left side (still the case).
Based on many electroencephalographs (EEGs), they decided my epileptic seizures stemmed from the lower right occipital lobe of my brain. It is kind of neat proof to me that the opposite side of your brain has effects on the other side of your body; right occipital lobe affecting left visual field.
So, they removed some brain, which actually did not affect my epilepsy at all, positively or negatively. I went into the hospital, got surgery, and was out maybe a week later - when that photo was taken. I had to go back a week or two later to have the staples taken out.
My lower left peripheral vision is worse than it used to be. I have about eight visual seizures that each last maybe a minute or two per day, but I can carry on a conversation and nobody even knows. I take seven pills every morning, and another four each night. I do not have a drivers license, car, or really ever plan to drive again, but that is kind of why I moved to live in a city where I can walk, take public transit, and get deliveries quickly/reliably.
On the nerd side, I track my seizures with my own homemade Python Django (w/ REST Framework) application, PostgreSQL, and an Apple Shortcut, usually from my iPhone or watch. Datasette and Highcharts make visualizing all my seizures tracked since December 2021 pretty cool.
Thanks for being so open about this. Have you worn one of those diy and prosumer EEG devices? So when you have visual seizure, I can only imagine it is somewhat similar to visual migraine, that is my only reference, you tap log it on your device which triggers some web request. Have you noticed any patterns? What do your doctors think of the data? You sound ideal for working in a neuroscience lab, :)
Never heard of a DIY/prosumer EEG! I did do an ambulatory EEG for the hospital once overnight where I left wearing the fancy cap while all wired up, with a little backpack for the electronics and recording device. All the EEG leads fell off when I was sleeping overnight, so it ended up only getting about 6 hours of data, instead of 12 hours (but I got charged like $600 anyways).
My whole Django app is actually open source, including the Apple Shortcut that sends a JSON POST to Django REST Framework to add seizures.
https://github.com/ericoc/seizures.ericoc.com (lots of screenshots and examples of the live data)
I definitely have patterns. I swear my occipital lobe needs its watch battery changed. I occasionally will have 3-6 seizures all spaced exactly 10 minutes after one another. Sometimes exactly an hour apart too. To the minute.
Doctors like when I hand them a chart showing my seizures going down over time, but hate it when the chart shows them trending towards more frequent. The brain seems SO poorly understood from my perspective. I get the feeling that neurologists are not sure what to say or think about the data, since it is not an EEG or MRI.
I called my seizures "double visions" as a kid. They usually only last a minute or two. I can generally carry on a conversation without anyone knowing (besides from noticing me tapping my watch, maybe). My parents and my ex-wife could occasionally tell when I was seizing, but I live solo, commute on foot, and keep my cat alive.
My seizures really just consist of an odd minute or two of an "aura" (I know it's happening) with double vision and confusion. However, I have occasionally had much worse seizures - usually only if I miss medication, and when asleep. I once woke up to a passenger on a commercial flight telling me that they were a doctor while we were mid-air, before I threw up. I have also woken up on my bedroom carpet with bumps, bruises, and scratches maybe half a dozen times in ten years, but have never had any seizure-related injuries requiring urgent/emergency trauma care.
Stress definitely seems to be a trigger for my seizures, but not photosensitivity. I do not really mind strobe lights, but the randomness of the Sun shining through tall thick trees while driving down a long straight road is terrible.
Do you also track /check your field of view?
A long time ago I made a simple tool to check my father's visual field changes due to cancer. At first he found it interesting to track his condition. Unfortunately it accurately tracked his condition and he, in my option wisely, stoped using it.
All the best managing and tracking
I never have really tried to measure my own peripheral visual field - no! I am not sure how I would track it - how did you?
I mostly notice bumping into things on my left side. While generally people "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path. For example, walking home through downtown, I like to try to keep my left shoulder as close to buildings as I can, to avoid people coming up behind me on my left side, since I always risk bumping into them. I always choose seating in venues that is very left of center as well.
While I generally do not have serious seizures resulting in falls, it's funny that the fall detection on my Apple Watch has only ever gone off when I accidentally bang my left wrist against a door frame because of my poor peripheral vision.
I did a little reading about Hemianopsia and came up with a very simple test about 15 years ago. It was a simple winforms app. One could write it/vibe code it very quickly in just about anything.
The test was run seated at a desk with a 24'' monitor. I drew a small square in the center of the screen on a back background and created a regular grid of dots which could be subdivided. Each small dot at random was briefly shown and I recorded the time it took him to hit a key. The defaults were .5 to .8 seconds and an off time from .75 to 2.5 seconds on a 7x5 grid with subdivisions for the areas he had trouble, but it's long enough ago that I don't remember what settings he preferred. The sample file I have to hand has 140 dots.
I set it up so that he could customise the number of columns and rows and the number of subdivisions to target his vision loss without having to spend too much time where it didn't matter. The outputs were a grayscale image of the reaction times and the reaction time values. It was helpful to preview all the dots before starting the test.
The main issue with the test was to keep it relatively short. If it took too long he found it boring and caused a bit of eye strain.
If I were to write it again I would to move the center square occasionally throughout the test, and then offset the test grid from that location. Unfortunately he didn't have much time and it eventually became a bit stressful to know the rate of progression of his disease so he/we let it go and I never tried to ease the eye strain issue.
> "walk to the right" on sidewalks and such, I prefer to stay as left as I can on a path." Visit Australia for a mostly keep left experience (at least in the past) :)
This sounds like such a cool useful project!
I had to look up the proper name for it, but I have always had my visual field medically tested with a "Humphrey" visual field test machine in a hospital:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585112/
TIL, there is also something called the "Goldmann" perimeter test.
Visiting Ireland, as a kid, was fun for sure! I remember my father driving a "right-hand drive" car that had the steering wheel on the opposite side of what I was used to - on the opposite side of the road from what I was used to - all, while shifting the manual transmission with his left hand, but the floor pedal arrangement was the same.
Curiously, both of my parents are left-handed, but I am right-handed. I have no family history of epilepsy either! Maybe I am adopted.
I learned a new term: Survivor's Euphoria. Only having had relatively minor procedures, I have only had relatively minor instances. But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia. As if the interrupted mental processes carry some flow state forward, which I re-attach to.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
These sound like anaesthetic side effects.
>> But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia.
> These sound like anaesthetic side effects.
General anesthesia[0] used in surgeries are effectively artificially induced comas. The pre-op discussion with the anesthesiologist includes them describing this and that there is a very real risk that you will die from its usage.
Regaining consciousness after having it applied most certainly invokes a feeling of "I came back" and has nothing to do with side effects.
Source: I have had two general anesthesia[0] and one epidural[1] surgeries.
0 - https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/anesthesia/about...
1 - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21896-epidu...
The feeling of blinking out and suddenly being "back" is far from exclusive to comas or general anesthesia; it has been replicated via deep meditation. Specifically, it seems to be the core feature of what's technically known as nirodha samapatti (lit. "attainment of ceasing").
An easy way of intuiting what it might feel like (if imperfectly, of course) is just keeping a high state of lucidity and mental focus whilst you're naturally drifting in and out of light sleep; this might seem challenging at first but it's actually quite doable.
> The feeling of blinking out and being "back" is far from exclusive to comas or general anesthesia ...
Awesome. But this has nothing to do with the topic to which I replied:
OK but you haven't provided any trustworthy evidence, just a personal anecdote. This is not convincing, especially since some anaesthetics have known long term psychological effects. There's no reason to believe that a person experiencing them would correctly identify the cause intuitively. In fact that would be extremely surprising.
Does general anesthesia affect memory? I swear my ability to form memories fell off a cliff after a procedure years ago. Going in is the last thing I vividly remember and everything since is hazy or ephemeral.
I have a theory that some people don’t fully wake up after the anesthesia wears off. A part of them is still sleeping. Like memory bank takes a slow break and stops working. I suspect it happened to me and now I am looking for answers.
I don't agree with anesthesia having long-term affects similar to their initial use (excluding any allergic reactions of course).
I will say that I believe when a person experiences significant pain of any kind, it changes their lived experience such that what previously might have been painful may not be as much if the event causing the pain is relatively less. Much like how the high-water mark of a river indicates what a riverbank can withstand.
For example, a person who has never had to use crutches due to injury may see having to park their car a great distance from a store's entrance as being "a pain in the ass" and might complain loudly. Yet that same person who doesn't have the option to drive to the store due to an injury, or if they did would have to use crutches to move about, may very well not care at all where they park once they regain full mobility.
In short, pain is relative and once one "raises the bar" of what is considered painful, that which once qualified as same very well may no longer be so.
Problem is, it takes the memory of "new levels of pain" to make this happen.
It's a reasonably well understood problem for older people in particular that general anaesthesia can trigger some kind of cognitive decline in some people.
Separately at least in Australia you are given specific advice regarding avoidance of operation of construction machinery, farm machinery and the like.
This is a great article. I've been in for surgery a few times, and I always cry before it because I never know what could happen. I could wind up dead, paralyzed, in chronic pain, a vegetable. Then I think to myself how unspecial I am. Millions of people die every day and yet we deny death, and lose sight of the stuff that actually matters that much. The billionaire and the homeless person still just fertilize worms after they die. That reality keeps me humble and in daily gratitude to the miracle of life, though my confidence does waver during the periods of ill health I've had.
What a beautiful, thought provoking article! When I saw the title , I thought it was a book summary of “My stroke of insight” [0]. This book is by a neuro-anatomist who had a rare stroke resulting in the left hemisphere of her brain being incapacitated. That led her to experiences similar to that of the article’s author. Do check out the book and pair it with the article
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142292.My_Stroke_of_Insi...
I had a craniotomy in 1996. Similar thing. The back of my head looked a bit like his, except the scar looked more like a Blue Oyster Cult symbol (backwards question mark). I know they left a piece of the skull out, so I do have a hole in the head.
Took me a couple months to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time, but I ended up making a full recovery.
I remember being wheeled into the OR. It was odd, because there was a damn good chance I wouldn’t wake up. Or I’d spend my life in a wheelchair. The cerebellum is a bad place to have problems. I was actually pretty chill. Maybe they gave me Valium.
The recovery sucked. I spent a week in ICU (basically no sleep).
> Maybe they gave me Valium.
Versed/midazolam, almost certainly, was a part of the preoperative regimen.
I had jaw surgery and basically didn't sleep the night before, for obvious reasons, and they gave me a bit of versed in prep and had to wake me up on the table to put me under for anesthesia proper. Hey, not my fault the blankets were warm and the pillow was perfect.
It's a very useful medication both for anxiety, but also to reduce your seizure risk, which I imagine for cerebellar surgery was a definite factor.
Im glad you're still around
Total agreement here. His posts indicate a life well lived.
Thanks so much, folks!
I also am very grateful things worked out.
You gotta appreciate how this lovely story, (which to me has too many Is to have "enlightenment" close to it), is sitting on /business/, even though Bigthink has Neuropsych, Thinking, The Present, The Future, Life, Health and Special Issues. I guess it wasn't a conscious decision to have it there, or so I hope. ;)
this moral of this zen story
https://www.graceguts.com/quotations/zen-story-tigers-and-a-...
We do spend a large fraction of the age of the universe not thinking.
What a great piece. I’m so glad not only that his daughter will get to know her dad, but that her dad is going to appreciate every moment he has with her.
when we go to sleep and wake up next day there is a moment when we loose consiousness and then get it back.
That’s more like altered consciousness because deep sleep provides dreaming.
Glad for him and without a doubt the support network and relationships he had in place significantly contributed to his positive outcome. I recently went through a similar trial and tribulation but as an inmate and by receiving sub-standard care. That's how I was able to turn inward and finally crack into real enlightenment and it's the solid kind because comparatively speaking, I had fuck-all to live for. No family. No future. No nothing but more suffering. And yet I found the release into accepting the beauty of futility. I commit to the program, I give. Let Go and Hang On. IYKYK.
Without meaning this in any way condescending: I am really proud of you as fellow human being!
Finding peace in such a situation takes courage, strength, and reflection, and you apparently have/found all of these.
This isn't really relevant to this site nor is it noteworthy. There was nothing revelatory about consciousness. I'm happy that the author survived their brain surgery though.
Consciousness is all there is
The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
Edit: llamas > llms
I felt the exact same, I can't believe nobody else has commented on it. It feels so disrespectful to such a powerful story to tell it in this way. I mean there's a really interesting core but I just wish I could read the first draft before LLMs overwrote it to death.
"Survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation."
Yeah the “No _____. No _____. Just the ______.” is such a dead ringer for AI writing these days that I just ignore any writing that features it.
If you don’t care about your craft as a writer to the extent that you can’t even realize how straight-out-of-a-LLM your writing sounds, I’m not going to care about it either.
Every time I see people talking about this, I see new alleged LLM fingerprints. Keeping up with that is a significant burden, especially without a centralized place to easily find an up to date list. This is even harder for me specifically because I have been told that my writing style (even when looking at things that I wrote before LLMs became widely available) closely resembles that of an LLM.
I wouldn't focus on it. People notice naturally after spending time with an LLM rather than focus on lists of phrases
So writers / publications should change their writing style because LLMs have adopted it?
It's not fair but yes, it may help once AI users stop making obvious mistakes that give it away.
At least until the publisher secretly runs the content through AI by themselves. YouTube already does that with short videos, making them all look like AI generated content and making drawn animations etc look objectively worse.
Yes, I had to give up my cherished em-dashes.
If you are using one of the small handful of phrases that chatgpt hammers into everything it writes, yes you should change them if you don't want people to think you are a LLM.
How do you draw the conclusion that the writer doesn't care about their craft though? If someone uses an emdash, but spent three hours and a ton of effort on a three paragraph comment and some of that time was spent running it through ChatGPT to hone their point so it comes across better, does that invalidate the point they're trying to make? Should we start documenting how long it took to write something, regardless of if an LLM was used in some capacity to help write something instead?
Why would you think a writer would spend three hours on a single paragraph when it ends up being indistinguishable from ChatGPT?
Is that an efficient use of time?
How would such a writer that spends that much time per paragraph even survive in today's competitive economy?
Because they're human writers, and don't sit down and calculate the most efficient use of time, and then only do that? Most scientists and engineers I know aren't that obsessive about how to most optimally spend their time.
"Got Milk" cost tens of thousands of dollars per word. Sometimes it's about quality not quantity.
You missed the point entirely. You can't actually tell if an article is AI-assisted or not. A writer that doesn't leverage AI is going to get outcompeted full stop.
I'm not sure where I claimed I can tell AI assisted writing from not.
A writer that doesn't leverage AI might get outcompeted, it's not a foregone conclusion, and it's their perogative to use AI or not.
> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
> I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
Is it possible you are experiencing confirmation bias[0]?
In other words, by your own admission, you have been "trying to see how well llms can help" as it pertains to writing. With that degree of LLM intimacy, is it possible "the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript" is a pattern you are predisposed to identify in other works?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
That wouldn’t be confirmation bias, just pattern recognition.
If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
> If I teach English as a foreign language, am familiar with the kind of mistakes non native speakers make when writing in English, and can easily identify texts written by non native speakers - that’s not confirmation bias.
And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it. Native speakers pretty much never make this mistake, but they're likely to make other mistakes, like confuse "there", "they're" and "their", which never happens to me.
Not to mention the overall sentence structure even if my text is grammatically correct. I'm likely to build sentences in a way that mirrors my native language. Sure, after being exposed to tons of text in English I got rather good at it, but if you ask me to speak Spanish, I'll produce sentences that are grammatically correct, but a native would never say them because they prefer other structures to express the same ideas.
> Just like in speech, people also have accents in writing. For example, despite having used English on daily basis for years, I can't tell when to use "a" and "the" even if my life depended on it.
"A" and "an" are indefinite articles[0] used to identify a single entity (noun) without specificity. "The" is a definite article[1] used to identify a single entity (noun) specifically. For example:
The former sentence indicates a vehicle of unknown origin exists "on the street", whereas the latter indicates a vehicle known to the speaker exists "on the street."Now, to the topic at hand. Part of the original post to which I replied is:
> The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
> I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
To the best of my knowledge, this was not posted by the person who wrote the article nor someone with direct interaction with same. Additionally, the quoted text self-identifies as being intimate with LLM generated content in work important to the poster as well as unequivocally identifying the article as "OpenAI gpt 5."
My premise is only that having this level of intimacy with LLM generated text may create a bias toward "this was made by a LLM" when reading prose published by an unknown person.
0 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-a-or-an
1 - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the
Okay so according to that rule, we should say "I've been to the Germany" because there's one specific Germany we're talking about. Correct? Also, I can say "I like listening to a music when walking" because there's no one specific music I enjoy, it's a general habit I have that I like music in general. Just like I enjoy "listening to a podcast".
Moreover, we say "The Lake Michigan" just like we say "The Gulf of Mexico" because in both cases we talk about specific bodies of water. Right?
I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go “this is probably written by a non native speaker” when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.
>> And if you immersed yourself in the writings of non-native English speakers for a significant amount of time, then a paper written by a native English speaker was presented without you knowing who the author was, would you look for the same kind of mistakes in it that you have been finding?
> I wouldn’t look for anything. As I’m reading a text, something in my brain would immediately go "this is probably written by a non native speaker" when coming across certain awkward turns of phrase.
The problem is that the more a person is looking for a pattern, the more they are likely to believe they have found an instance of one.
For example, if a police officer is regularly tasked with identifying drivers leaving bars who might be intoxicated, they will naturally use a form of "pattern recognition" to determine which vehicles to stop. Common indicators are a vehicle that is driving too slow or remains stationary after a traffic light turns green.
So what happens when a sober designated driver is tired and drives overly cautious?
What will the cop do if the designated driver falls asleep at a traffic light?
Would the cop testify along the lines of:
This is by definition a form of confirmation bias.You're being fooled by the humans. They're not writing intimately any more than TFA is. They've learned and practiced to write in a way that conveys whatever emotion they choose to show, whether they really feel it or not. LLMs just bring a professional writer's abilities to normal people.
Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
It's different. Yes you can be a good writer or musician and convey whatever emotion you want. But if you have truly experienced that emotion or experience and unflinchingly hone your writing to convey the true experience of it, it shows. It's the difference between a good song and a great song, or a good story and a great story.
I'm all in on AI, but not to replace true human artistic expression. There's something we feel to our core when someone nails the expression of visceral emotion or experience.
It feels like you've been cheated when you felt some emotion reading a true story then discovered it was generated by an LLM, or equally, by an artist who admits it was a lie. But I don't think that's because the writing isn't great - it often is great, which is why it affects the reader so much. I suspect the real complaint that people have is not the writing itself but the knowledge that an LLM generated it. You see people here discussing clues that helped them guess it was an LLM, and asking for authors to disclose that, etc. People worry that the emotion they feel from reading it isn't the same the author felt themselves. What they're forgetting is that good human writers can lead you to feel emotions they never experienced themselves either. You say a "great" story can't be written that way and perhaps if you set the bar high enough that might be true, but for more common writing like the TFA, there's no need to have experienced the emotion first hand if the writer is capable enough - human or LLM.
I wonder how it would affect those us with english as their second language. I initially learned mine through movies and tv shows from the west. Later hanging around in various forums.
That era is definitely over.
When I got to the third hum, I got suspicious, which is sad for this kind of beautiful experience.
To whom do I hum, to whom?
Send not to know for whom the hum hums, it hums for thee.
Is it really OpenAI/ChatGPT, or just the kind of writing ChatGPT was trained to replicate?
Definitely rewritten with ChatGpt. There are strong tells that even humans writing in this style would not do. Using "hum" 3 different times in the same text is one of them.
It is really a shame that people who do have something to say think that an LLM can express it better, because that is not the case at all.
Impossible to say, a few people really do write like that and their writing gets flagged by those detection systems all the time, but I think we all know which option is far more likely.
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Yup, it's the short sentence cadence.
"And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window."
The usage of these short sentences (which, people do use, but sparingly) is a good marker. My hunch is this is because of how they call attention to themselves and are rewarded by human RLHF participants. I don't know if incentives including spending time on essays like this but if they don't and the rater is trying to do a speed-read, these stand out.
Have written about other markers here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/it-isnt-just-x-it-s-y-54cb403d6...
One along those lines: "Not just that we think. But that we feel. That we can marvel. That we can sit in silence across from someone we love and feel time slow down and become something."
This short sentence cadence always stands out to me – a native British English speaker – as a hallmark of a contemporary American writer trying to write something deep and impactful and profound. Usually just comes across as the opposite.
Like the rlhf is all Hemingway bros (and I love Hemingway)
TBH I've struggled to get through long-form writing - and this isn't even that long - for years, mostly because they're so full of filler. A compelling headline, but every time it starts to get close to an answer to the compelling headline, it diverts into telling the backstory of one of the people in it. Loads of filler. AI just seems to make it cheaper or faster to generate filler.
Agreed. Lots of recent (last 10-20 years, say) non-fiction is annoyingly flabby.
> I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately
This made me slightly nauseous. What's ahead is going to suck so, so bad. We shouldn't have left the ocean...
I don't know if the tide has shifted on this site, but I was scolded by dang some months ago for pointing out something was obviously GPT-written. I guess that's against the rules.
There's a rule against commenting about "tangential annoyances" like text formatting or bad UX on a linked website. It's possible a comment about GPT use might have been interpreted as that, but I would disagree - this has an effect on the quality of the content. Either way this rule is not very consistently enforced as far as I observed.
There's also the rule against generic tangents, which this subthread certainly is. The trouble with those is that they tend to get upvoted to the top of a thread (as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45089350 was), where they choke out the rest of the discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Out of curiosity, where was that? The only moderation reply I can find to you is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797043.
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Good read! Enjoyed that. I meditate but have never reached that state fwiw.