I think there are levels of inebriation disable your ability to contextualize sensory experience within a self. I think it basically amounts to becoming a p-zombie with some caveats.

I think I'll title my memoir: "Drunk people are p-zombies, and other facts I learned on the Internet."

Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?

A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.

Traditional* p-zombies presumably form and act on memories, as well - another strike against the 'drunk people are p-zombies' argument.

(* - Not to be confused with the 'fast p-zombies' which were briefly popular in 90's existentialist cinema.)

Not if they're super drunk. ;) But yes.

That's fair. Being blackout drunk is more than just memory impairment though - significant parts of the brain unrelated to memory also have impaired function during drunkenness. I would also suggest that there is a level of impairment where the impaired person lacks a sense of self while still being animated and seemingly conscious. This is what makes me think a blackout drunk person seems like a p-zombie (albeit temporarily).

I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there, but it's radically different from what is normally considered subjective experience. The person can have consciousness clinically (as in they show external signs of consciousness) - but their self is not there and their subjective sense is in discontinuity.

The definition of blackout drunk is not remembering what happened. This /could/ simply be a failure to form lasting memories, rather than a loss of 'self-ness.' If we imagine a switch which put a person's long-term memory in read-only mode, would flipping that switch necessarily remove consciousness?

Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.

(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)

When my friend found himself walking around in a new place after a complete discontinuity in experience. Was this discontinuity entirely driven by the impairment of lasting memory formation? Seems possible to me. Problem is, I've never experienced this myself - only heard his story from a close friend (repeatedly) and similar stories from others. The stories could be unreliable - but they suggest that the self was offline and came back while the body was still performing complex externally awake actions. Seems p-zombie-like to me.

They're conflating episodic memory retainment with consciousness. Consciousness process may result in things to store in memory, but, not being able to store those things long term doesn't necessarily mean consciousness was missing in that moment.

After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.

I think the self can be disrupted by significant alterations in memory storage among other things. I think memory is one of many key ingredients in having a self. When your memory is adequately disrupted your self is disrupted. Without a self subjective experience is radically different than with a self. It's radically different in that it's often described by the self (who stops being blackout drunk at some point) as being a discontinuity similar to sleep. The interesting thing here is that people who are blackout drunk continue to do things that a clinically-conscious person does (eat, talk, stumble around). Your experience is really interesting too - you seemed to still have an intact self, just not extended memory beyond 30 seconds. I think maybe we are talking about different things or my view is wrong.