This has to be an old and settled issue given the obviousness of it, but I’ve never heard the answer. When we sleep without dreaming we effectively don’t exist- no conciousness, no memory, no self. Other than the fact that we still can wake up, it’s equivalent to annihilation. So how do theologians reconcile this with the idea that we have an immortal soul?
An immortal soul obviously doesn’t need a physical body to exist, else it would be mortal. So why would it be affected by any state the body is currently in?
So if we had an immortal soul you’d think it would be unaffected by a little nap.
Yes. The Great Borders In The Sky, where they have every book ever dreamed; super comfy sofas; everflowing hot cocoa dispensers and no pestering staff. Pretty chill place, despite the poor state of the Science section.
Actually that would make for a pretty tolerable afterlife.
Well if our immortal soul isn’t our conciousness, memory or identity, none of which exist while we’re asleep without dreaming, then what it it? Or to put it another way, what changes when a dreamless sleeper suddenly dies in their sleep?
Even in dreamless sleep, we certainly have at least some consciousness, since we can be wakened by appropriate stimuli. And I don’t know about you, but when I wake up, my memory’s still intact, so it must have still been there when I was sleeping, too. “Identity” I don’t know about; you’ll have to define what you mean by that.
For traditional Christian theology — at least of the Aristotelian(/Thomistic) sort — that’s not necessarily true. Aquinas held the soul to be the form of the body, what makes this parcel of matter human (or a cat, or a tree) rather than anything else. Considered in this way one’s soul cannot be disentangled from the body any more than roundness could be disentangled from a baseball; squash a baseball and its roundness ceases to exist; it doesn’t shuffle off to baseball heaven.
However, for Aquinas (though not, probably, for Aristotle), humanity has an out. Because the human intellect is immaterial (so it is held) the human soul can exist in an incomplete way apart from the body, although it can’t really do much until such a time as God joins it back to its bodily material. If this sounds a bit like a copout to you, you’re not alone, although that’s another discussion entirely.
In any event, from the Thomistic perspective there’s not necessarily anything surprising or confounding about (say) sleep. The soul provides form to the event of which brain activity is the physical cause; if we’re sleeping then I suppose the soul just isn’t doing very much.
These are both invalid arguments. Virtually everyone who actually studies the brain believes that there is some kind of correspondence between brain activity and consciousness but it is also well-known that certain kinds of activity or activity in certain regions are not responsible for consciousness (at least to a significant degree). Just because external stimulation can result in activity which underlies consciousness (i.e., can wake you up) does not mean that the activity prior to the stimulation was correlated with any consciousness at all, nor that the external stimulation was consciously perceived.
The link below is a cite for my claim that certain areas of the brain are known to not be significantly linked with consciousness, but it is an extremely interesting paper for anybody interested in consciousness to check out. It is written by a sleep psychiatrist presenting the view that consciousness is directly correlated with the level of integration of information in a system (which is measurable).
Remembering something is an active process, like imagining something. The fact that you have a memory of something now does not entail that you consciously experienced it (which is why memory implantation is not logically impossible). But the larger point is that you do not have have memories of your dreamless sleep, and the OP dealt with dreamless sleep only.
The question is addressed in “Be As You Are, The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi.” The guy doesn’t preach a religion so much as answer questions after having entered into an apparently permanent transcendental experience. As a result we don’t get a book by the subject but instead transcriptions of interviews:
