Did your friend actually wake up or did they start forming memories again?

Great question. I would guess he woke up and that this was subsequent to him forming memories again. Memory seems to be a requirement for the kind of self-referential conscious experience that appears to be basically unique to humans. An anesthetic that acts entirely on memory formation and paralyzes the body is in many ways the ideal anesthetic. It's not super unlikely this is how many anesthetics work to at least some degree. If you were administered such a perfect anesthetic it's likely that subjectively you'd experience a distrinct discontinuity in time. Even if you received surgery during that discontinuity, you wouldn't ever suffer from it - not even on some deep non-conscious level. There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

>There is no suffering in the now, suffering requires a self which requires memory.

If there's no suffering in the now, then how can one remember that one suffered?

I don't think there's a way define suffering without invoking contextualized pain and an entity that suffers (a self). A self is a complex phenomenon that has a bunch of additional requirements not least of which is the capacity for bridging multiple moments of sensory input that happen in the now.

One can remember that one suffered because one can experience pain in the now and bridge that into a context where the self exists. Selfing is the trick of consciousness, it's not necessarily the natural state of all creatures with sensory equipment or memory - it's an additional trick that only a handful of creatures have.

You are so stunningly Dunning-Kruger wrong here. Neurotransmitters, cortisol and other stress hormones, protein expression, epigenetics, the gut microbiome, all of these and more can lastingly be affected by trauma which is not committed to long term memory.

Nevermind the fact that even if it is forgotten, an awake mind will suffer greatly in the moment - pretending that suffering did not occur because it was forgotten is some next level self-deception.

What about what I said implied anything about various other systems like stress hormones not being lastingly be affected by trauma?

I don't think most surgical patients are concerned with the kind of trauma their cells or gut microbiome sustain during surgery. In fact, if these systems recollected zero trauma it's doubtful the surgical outcome would be positive. When most people discuss suffering they are usually discussing the suffering of their selves. The self requires coordinated effort from the brain. When surgery occurs, it could be well argued you would want to use the least anesthesia necessary to avoid the kind of suffering the patient wants to avoid.

What are you actually on about? Why be purposefully insulting?

ah I see what I wrote. "not even on some deep non-conscious level" yeah that was sloppy nm.

It’s not that your friend “woke up” it’s that his BAC dropped enough for his brain to start correctly forming memories again not that his consciousness “came back online”. It never went away just that no memories were formed during that time

I was trying to explain the relayed subjective experience there. The relayed subjective experience is a discontinuity occurring that's similar to waking up. The self is the thing that relays the experience to other people. You're probably right that consciousness in some expansive sense didn't go away, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to what it was like to be the part of my friend that relayed the story to me.

There is an event that made me reconsider driving by night when sleep deprived.

I was driving back home after spending night at friend's place. It was around 4am, the whole family sleeping in the car. I didn't have any alcohol in my system because I always kept a 0 alcohol policy if I have to drive. I knew the trip well because I was driving it several times a months. A few km before reaching home I realized I had no recollection of having driven past a number of the usual landmarks. Yet I couldn't have possibly been completely asleep as the highway had a number of curves and I would have smashed the guardrails had I been totally unconscious.

So my theory was that I was so tired that my brain wasn't recording anything but I had been conscious enough to actually follow the road.

That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

> That was still frightening enough that the next time I just asked to bring inflatable mats and sleep at our friends living room before going home in the morning.

Excellent move for your family and yourself, congratulation.

There are flow states that seem like this. It can be pleasant and it can also be unnerving. Something about memory and the sense of self fall away and it leaves you with a discontinuity despite some part of you obviously carrying on the show while the self was away.