Thread: Drug that replaces sleep - hypothetical

That wasn't really the basis of what I was trying to communicate though; it wasn't really an argument about the physical basis (that was just to show that you can't appeal to a physical argument), it's more about the subjective experience. We experience a continuity of consciousness during waking life. That is indubitable. But when we go to sleep, that consciousness is destroyed. There is zero awareness. There's no perception of time (or anything else), and yet we still think we wake up a period of time later. But what does a period of time mean if we can't percieve it..? Was that period of time finite; did it even exist, are you the same person? Another weird thing is that you can't ever pinpoint the moment that you do become conscious again. You just seem to fade in. So in that respect it is also like birth.

It's not a genuine 'belief'. It's just that thinking about it freaks me out and I don't see why it doesn't freak out other people very much. The whole thing is as impossibly insane as consciousness itself... though interestingly, philosophers don't seem very bothered about it, even though they are bothered about consciousness, birth, and death. I think that's simply because sleep is so common.