Thanks to my collaborators @algarwegian.bsky.social, johan storm, Imad Bajwa, @gernoternst.bsky.social, @theneurocookies.bsky.social , Arnfinn Aamodt, and Benjamin Thurer.

unconscious in "unconscious states", and I think that's an issue most empirical and theoretical work on consicousness really doesn't discuss enough. I've written about that here:
www.frontiersin.org/journals/hum...

this is not evident in EEG. Either option would be a minor (or major depending on how you interpret it) blow. Either deep sedation is not useful as a contrast in terms of consciousness, or many existing methods thought to be sensitive to consciousness' absence are not.

I don't think we are

c) we find no evidence in EEG that there's anything different between periods associated with an experience (dreams) and periods associated with no experience

From this, a natural conclusion is that either we dream all the time during deep sedation, but forget - or we occassionally dream but

a) we dream a lot during deep propofol sedation, a state which is normally described as an unconscious state

b) forceful awakening from within the sedated state yields the occasional report of no experience (classically taken as a sign of unconsciousness)

True, but except for memory and connectedness which are easy to operationalize, a quantitative change in content or phenomenological aspects seems hard to even conceptually define beyond other vague terms like richness or diversity of experience. But I need to dive deeper into this literature.

Thanks! Yeah, the question is what a "different mode of consciousness" mean? It's easy to say that dreams and waking are different, but how? Just in terms of connectedness? Content is also different, but can it be parametrized? Dream decoding is posisble, somewhat, so it can't be THAT different.

We have a study in review doing just this (awakening people)! Hopefully it'll pass this round and be out soon. Granted, it's RASS-4 not RASS-5, but deeply sedated nontheless. There are some studies already doing something similar (nordstrom, sandin 1996; casey et al 2022). But yes recall is an issue

Curious about your speculations about this, and how this might generalize to sedation and anesthesia, which also show huge variance in report rates.

Nice work. Agree with the conclusion. I'd go as far as to argue sleep is a completely conscious state.the huge variance in report rate between studies and subjects for certain states suggests to me that methodology and sample characteristics explains more than variance in dream generation.

Agree. Pondering further, the artificial consciousness question will not be settled by science, but the science that allows conscious AI companions will be preferred over science that doesn't, much like a sci. theory of c. that doesn't allow animal consciousness is not considered seriously.

Interesting. My naive interpretation is that p consciousness of specific content (e.g. red) is distributed and that multiple pathways exists, but with the dominant path gone it takes time to 'resolve' and 'settle' a percept, like a weak attractor vs strong. It's not a without p, but a before p!