# If you could switch off your consciousness, would you? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 18, 2011, 12:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822 "2011-04-18T12:58:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Engywook](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bc8723/32.png) [@Engywook](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Engywook)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 1:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/21 "2011-04-22T01:31:00Z")
> [@Yllaria](#): > > I’m skeptical that the philosophical zombie can exist. If it’s acting like a person, I’d have to believe that it’s aware, even if it won’t remember later. this. I’m very skeptical of any claims that intelligence can exist without consciousness, or vice versa. For that matter, I doubt that emotions can really be toggled separately of thinking and awareness. That said…as long as we’re talking fantasy, sign me up for those couple hours of the day between waking up and my email client powering up at work. Everything in between - degrogging, all the hygiene rituals, the morning commute - are unavoidable parts of life, but in my experience… not worth experiencing. Been there, done that. Thousands of times. Let Sysiphus do the rest. I would want to insist, though, that I have no episodic memory of what I’d want to skip… Just factual. If, for example, the subway is delayed for hours because of a switch malfunction, I wouldn’t want to remember the experience, because imho I still had the experience in that case. But I would want to remember that it had happened (as if I had read about it on an rss feed), with all the factual details. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/22 "2011-04-22T01:36:56Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > Well, there are certainly periods of diminished attention (to one’s internal state), but that’s not quite what I’m talking about (for instance, times when your consciousness is turned off can’t be enjoyable, as to enjoy something presumes experiencing something). Even if you’re not reflecting upon it, you constantly experience – yourself, the world around you (or the data about it you receive through your senses). The “reflecting on it” is the consciousness. Receiving sensory data and acting in response doesn’t require consciousness. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/23 "2011-04-22T01:55:27Z")
> [@Yllaria](#): > > I’m skeptical that the philosophical zombie can exist. If it’s acting like a person, I’d have to believe that it’s aware, even if it won’t remember later. _Awareness_ in the sense of receiving and reacting to data isn’t the same as _consciousness_ in the sense of self-awareness and internal reflection. It’s indisputable that many animals have awareness and reactive intelligence of the first sort, but highly arguable at best that they possess any of the interior “space” required for the second. Modern humans move between the modes all the time, usually with little or no _consciousness_ of the switching-off. > [@Yllaria](#): > > It reminds me of a comment that the doctor made about my oldest son’s circumcision. > > This was 1975 and they didn’t use any anesthetic, not even the swab-on kind. They just strapped him into a plastic baby-shaped holder and went at it. The comment was that he wasn’t really feeling pain, that screaming was just an automatic reaction. I didn’t buy that then, and I don’t believe it now. The scream was an automatic reaction to _feeling_ pain. That still doesn’t mean he was conscious (a person feeling pain consciously tends to scream a lot less, actually). He was certainly _experiencing_ pain but he didn’t develop the interior space of consciousness until later–probably in stages over a period of a few years. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/24 "2011-04-22T02:07:05Z")
How is that different from blacking out from drinking too much? Other than I guess there would be no side effects. ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/25 "2011-04-22T02:44:52Z")
I voted “no, never.” I’ve sleep-walked. It’s the same thing. It sucks. I just thank goodness that it’s really rare, and only happens when I need to pee. ---
**Author:** ![rhubarbarin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/eb9ed0/32.png) [@rhubarbarin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rhubarbarin)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/26 "2011-04-22T03:09:48Z")
These days? No, never (that’s my vote). When I had depression and severe anxiety, this was my fondest dream. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/27 "2011-04-22T10:46:19Z")
> [@Wheelz](#): > > Want to skip that boring meeting? OK, but then what happens next week when the boss asks you for that report you agreed to prepare? What if your zombie-self gets in an accident while driving and your conscious self is later asked in court under oath to describe the incident? What if you take a phone call regarding a family emergency but have no memory of it an hour later? How will you feel on your deathbed when you realize your life has gone by a lot faster than it should have? Note that as stipulated in the OP, you do have the memories of what happened in your zombie-time (though I’m not sure how consistent that would actually be – I suppose one could make an argument that what we remember is really our experience of what happened, and thus, memory of things we didn’t experience is not something that makes sense, but that’s all pretty irrelevant for a ‘what if’, I think). I do very much hear you on the ‘slippery slope’ thing, though – in fact, in the story I never ended up writing, actually conscious people quickly became a minority as most opted for the subjective ease of just ‘going through the motions’, so to speak – even though, of course, nobody ever really was certain of that. > [@Yllaria](#): > > I’m skeptical that the philosophical zombie can exist. I actually am, too – I think it’s frankly an incoherent concept (I’ve [argued](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13593068&postcount=31) to that effect on this board previously). > [@spark240](#): > > The “reflecting on it” is the consciousness. The reflecting on it is what in a higher-order theory of consciousness would be called a conscious mental state, yes. But creature consciousness and mental state consciousness are two different things, and even if you don’t reflect on your experiences, i.e. don’t have a conscious (second-order) mental state that has your experience as a content, you still have experience, i.e. creature consciousness. You still are a conscious being. The pill would remove that creature consciousness – there would no longer be something it is like to be you. > [@](#): > > Receiving sensory data and acting in response doesn’t require consciousness. No, but experience does, and certain concepts, such as pain, have experience as a prerequisite – you can’t nonconsciously feel pain, even though you can nonconsciously act as if you are in pain. The pill would eliminate the pain, but not the reaction to pain. ---
**Author:** ![Dinaroozie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Dinaroozie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinaroozie)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2011, 11:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822/28 "2011-04-22T11:08:10Z")
I went with ‘other’. The answer, according to my life experiences so far, is probably ‘never’ - that is, I’m not sure I’ve had any experiences that I’d skip. I would, however, want to keep the option. If I’m ever bitten by a stone fish, or have to pass a huge kidney stone, or any of the other things associated with the pinnacle of physical pain, I’d probably use it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-you-could-switch-off-your-consciousness-would-you/578822.md?page=1)