After my first knee surgery, I regained consciousness midway through speaking a sentence to my mother. I was literally listening to words coming out of my mouth and had no idea where I was, who I was, or what I was talking about. My very next sentence was a panicked question to my mother trying to figure out those things. Turned out I had 'been awake and having cohesive conversation' with her for over an hour. I still have no memory of that conversation.

As I was being prepped for my third knee surgery, my doctor asked if I had any problems with anesthesia. I told him about the memory loss after my first surgery. My friends who were accompanying me, and had been at my second knee surgery, started mumbling "um, huh, well, oh, actually". It turns out that after my second knee surgery, when the surgeon was giving me a summary of how the surgery went, he told me he botched up my knee, and I proceeded to make very coherent and precisely detailed threats against his life. (The threats were bad enough that the surgeon considered bringing security into the recovery area and restraining me. In the end, my friends, including a combat vet, convinced the doctor that I'm not actually a violent person and agreed to restrain me if I actually became violent.) Again, I have absolutely no memory of this!

I read this book "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" and based on that I would say your left hemisphere were active when right one was suppressed for some time. I can't recommend this book highly enough - it's very comprehensive and it give you an opportunity to look at the world from a different perspective

I also highly recommend that book. I wonder whether I'd consider this a hemispheric situation.

It seems to me like the internal, autobiographic self being disabled, and then upon awakening this self immediately says "wait, discontinuity in the recording ... where was I?" and this feeds back into the rest of the brain creating the confusion.

He wasn't confused the moment before, because his autobiographical self wasn't recording.

For me the main sign is the different behaviour. Left hemisphere is vile, ignorant and selfish. Threatening a doctor with death because he hurt you falls in the being sociopathic bastard category. This is my highly uneducated guess

Sounds fascinating. Thanks for the recommendation!

Yeah, I've had that also. Very strange, like how does one recognize that one has "woken up" from being already awake? It's like, oh, the tape recorder turned back on.

Maybe we're just the tape recorder?

Yes, it's a popular view nowadays among psychologists and cognitive scientists that the conscious self is just a sort of a senior manager that receives reports and thinks he's in charge while in fact his subordinates work just fine even when he's temporarily not available at all.

Well, it's an interesting point, because apparently if the tape recorder never turns back on, you're just kinda stuck in time as the person you were. So it suggests at the least that the tape recorder aspect of consciousness, perhaps in the way it feeds back one's perception of oneself to oneself, is crucial in the sort of consciousness we humans see as critical to identity.

Clearly though, this guy is still "conscious" - it seems like a situation we don't have quite the correct terminology to describe.

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

It's sort of a weak version of a P-zombie. Presumably the lack of conscious awareness would still be observable using a sufficiently detailed brain scan if not anything else, as opposed to a "real" P-zombie where the presence of consciousness is assumed to be completely epiphenomenal.

It's not that we're not aware, it's essentially that we may only be aware - aware of our thoughts once our subconscious thinks them, aware of our actions and their consequences once they're made.

The trick, seemingly is manipulating the focus of awareness to convince the subconscious decision-making apparatus to make different decisions, even though all we really have control of is our awareness.

Yes, this is the "weak" position. The original definition of a P-zombie is an entity that really does have no qualia, that is, subjective experience or "consciousness", but behaves exactly like it did, down to the neuronal level. It is a thought experiment and can be used as a reductio ad absurdum to argue that eg. uploads still have qualia.