My mother had a minor heart procedure (cardiac catheterization) and luckily all was well with no indication of significant plaque formation or ventricular damage due to infarct. What struck me as a neuroscientist, however, was the effect of various drug cocktails used to produce analgesia and amnesiac effects during and post procedure. In my experience, several conversations had shortly after the procedure ended where she seemed lucid, albeit drowsy, were either totally forgotten or blended with events occurring an hour or more later. Now, of course we all know these are due to the effects of benzodiazepines on the CNS, blended with blended opiate analgesia. The GABAergic system is affected, and memory formation is inhibited, preventing any solidification of short term-memories into long term storage.
But what the observation provokes in terms of my thoughts is the meaning of consciousness. Is it a tangible thing, or simply an arrangement of partially solidified memories with continuous sensory streams? Is there an actual state of "consciousness" or is it a product of other states, and therefore partly intangible? On the side of tangibility, we have the fact that there are states where a person or animal can be characterized as 'not-conscious' and other states where the characterization of 'semi-conscious' or 'delirious' and the facts that levels of consciousness can be interpreted as proceeding along a linear scale affected by various circulating drug concentrations. On the side of the intangible, there exists no real rubric to evaluate a person's subjective experience to altered states of consciousness or proof that consciousness, when maintained, is anything other than an instantaneous snapshot into a subjective reference frame composed of sensory input, near-term memories, and some higher order processes. Perhaps even someething like a 'side effect' of sensory integration.
A side effect. I imagine that a machine intelligence would say something like this: "Consciousness is nothing but a perceived byproduct of sensory integration, near-term, and long-term memory formation. it is an illusion. emotion is the process through which irrational situations are evaluated and consciousness exists as a low-order mediator between the irrational and rational self interest."
