When we sleep our physical bodies basically go offline, so we experience our spiritual existence only. Our dreams are what our spirit self is going through.
There is a place of darkness that some dwell in in the spiritual, for them even dreams will not exist, their spirit exist in a form of isolation even from the universe, they entered a dark baron universe to themselves, no light, no matter, just nothingness.
That is not the only reason for a dreamless sleep, but one of them.
Just to ask, is there any evidence that when we have a “dreamless” sleep, it really is dreamless, as opposed to “nothing I remember the next morning”? I know about REM sleep and all that, but I’m not sure how exactly current technology “knows” when you’re dreaming, and how consistently accurate it is.
You know, even though I know you meant “barren”, I think it’s pretty cool that in my sleep, I might be a solipsist Dark Baron. A bit gothy I suppose, but black spiked platemail goes with everything IMO.
The software exists. It’s just not being executed. It’s like the letters on a page that is not being read.
It doesn’t really matter to this question, a brain is not turned off when it sleeps.
I was using the term to refer to the first-person “what-it-is-like” of experience. I believe this is how the OP was using it since it is this that is typically associated with a soul (most Christians would say that bugs don’t have souls but they are clearly aware of their surroundings in the sense that they can respond to them). Sometimes “awareness” is used in the sense that I was using “consciousness” but sometimes both words are used in the sense of being able to respond to your surroundings. But these are two distinct senses of the words - there does not have to be a first-person aspect to something for it to influence behavior.
Yes that happens too :eek:
We may not be conscious in some phases of sleep, but certainly there is a lot of brain activity ongoing, so it’s not like turning off your computer at the end of the day.
But the OP does allude to an interesting philosophical point about the self.
If we phrase it, say, as a dead body being revived using future tech, is that the same person? If not, why not? Is the self an illusion?
I’m afraid that “consciousness is that which a bug lacks” isn’t really a very useful definition, either.
I think defining consciousness, in the sense refered to by the OP, isn’t something that is easily defined. It’s not unlike how we define intelligence, where people would at times say that a computer would be intelligent if it could beat a human in chess, and now that’s pretty much done and yet no one would argue that that system is as intelligent as a person. We can say that insects show very few signs of consciousness, but perhaps a mammal will show more signs of it, but consciousness is something that is, as far as we know, uniquely human.
To the OP’s question specifically, I think that drawing a parallel between dreamless sleep and annihilation is a big step that isn’t justified. As others have said, there is still brain activity, we’re still able to be awakened my outside stimuli, we do have some awareness upon waking up that we were asleep and that some amount of time has passed. If it were like annihilation, then we ought not to be only a bare minimum of brain activity to keep the body physically alive, it ought to be very difficult to be awoken, and we ought to only be able to draw that we were asleep from external cues, like time or changes in light.
Anyway, for my view, it’s sort of similar to the view in the link to Jewish tradition, though it’s not really something I’ve thought about enough to have a really fleshed out idea. The main parallel for me is that I don’t just feel physically refreshed, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually as well. I can also achieve some degree of that freshment, particularly the non-physical ones, from meditation which, in this particular pursuit, is an attempt to reconnect with God.
Darn, I was about to prove that consciousness equals a corvette.
If one subscribes to hebrew theology (in its purest form) one realizes that the “soul” is the totality of one’s being.
Genesis maintains that Yah made a body for Adam out of the dust of the earth and breathed the breath of life into it, and at that point, Adam “became a living soul.” When one dies, the breath of life (which is generic and not stamped with a person’s identity) returns to Yah. The body, made of dust, returns to dust.
The Pharisee sect and the Christians maintain that one can be resurrected. Immortal life is a gift given to those who receive it. No one was or is immortal before this gift is given. I would suppose at the moment of resurrection that the breath of life returns in some fashion, though its qualities may be different the second time around, since one is now immortal when before they were mortal.
The concept of the “immortal soul” is not Hebrew in origin. it is Greek. This idea got mingled into Hebrew beliefs during the Hellenization of the Hebrews. Hellenization happened as the Greeks sought to unify their beliefs with those of the Hebrews in order to promote stability in the Greek world. The basic idea was to convince the Hebrews that Yah is the same as their Zeus–and the angels were the same as the Greek lesser Gods, etc., so that the only difference between their two religions is simply point of view.
Therefore “breath of life” became the greek “immortal soul;” the grave became Hades; Heaven became Elysian fields. Modern Christianity is very remiss, in my opinion, for claiming to base its theology on Hebrew theology + the teachings of Jesus. Half of its concepts come straight from greek mythology, and they believe this is proper because some Hebrews were deceived during the Hellenization as though everything every Hebrew ever believed is Yah’s own truth.
In short, to the Hebrews before the Greeks poisoned their culture and religion, there was no such thing as a spirit, immortal, that resides in our bodies that is indelibly stamped with our individuality. They just never had that concept, and what they called a “soul” is a synonym for our word “person.”
That’s one of the reasons I reject mainstream Christianity–It’s half warmed over Greek mythology, and the practitioners of it do not even understand it, nor, for the most part, do they care–but they’ll sure get upset over such “heresy” such as what I here state and defend their greek mythology as the truth.
Mine goes out bar hopping and picking up women of loose morals.
Kinda sad it has a better social life then the rest of me does.
Where is the soul right now? Is it inside our brain? Or somewhere else beaming information to the brain like a satellite dish?
A better question is what was the soul doing for the billions of years before it became a parasite of our corporeal bodies. I can’t remember anything before I was born.
Assuming it makes sense to ask the location of something that is immaterial.
They don’t have to.
They assume a falsity is true - that some god exists, therefore anything real has to be accepted and not questioned since they accept an unproven hypothetical, therefore any consequence has to be accepted as possible.
I agree with Leaper. Just because you don’t remember your dream, it doesn’t mean you didn’t dream.
I think we always dream when we sleep.
Let’s say you have an 8 hour flight with nothing to do, but sit and think. What do you think about?
I don’t think that is much different than our dreams.
I keep mine in a jar on the nightstand.