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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I actually am, too – I think it’s frankly an incoherent concept (I’ve argued to that effect on this board previously).
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.
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.
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.