Does a break in consciousness mean a death of personhood?

Question

Descartes famously states, "I exist but how often," In this statement, he assumes that in every instance of consciousness, it is him —- the same self —- that exists. If we conceive of consciousness as a continuous stream, it seems reasonable to believe that the self persists from one moment to the next. But this assumption becomes problematic when considering states like dreamless sleep, during which conscious awareness seems to vanish entirely.

Descartes does not explicitly address the question of whether the self persists through these gaps in consciousness. Can we truly be certain that it will be "me" who wakes up after sleep? It seems possible to doubt whether the continuity of self is preserved when consciousness is absent, such as during deep sleep, coma, or severe brain injury.

While some might argue that consciousness persists in a reduced or latent form during dreamless sleep, this "scientific" perspective on consciousness does not necessarily align with the philosophical concept of self-awareness. Even if this reduced state of consciousness exists, it still raises questions about whether the conscious "I" is the same before and after a period of unconsciousness. Thus, it remains a genuine philosophical concern (also keep the cloning problem in mind when answering).

Answer 1

You ask:

Does a break in consciousness mean a death of personhood?

No. Generally, personhood is often tracked in terms of personal identity (SEP). Therefore, a minor gap in conscious experience in no way fundamentally alters the identity of a person. That is to say, there is continuity of identity even with sleep. The SEP says:

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, moral agents, or material objects. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die?

Notice that breaks in consciousness, even if extended, do not alter fundamentally the answers to these questions, at least no more than other life-altering experience that have existential import. After an extended coma, one might wake up and reassess one's life, but barring brain damage, one wouldn't come back speaking a different language, remember a false history, or experience life as a fourteenth-century sailor.

Answer 2

Personal identity, or personhood, is generated via items of recognition in the field of awareness:

Awareness = {items}

If the field of awareness is empty then there are no items of recognition and therefore one cannot identify a source of cause of Awareness.

Awareness = {}

The question evokes these items of recognition including a map or relation to truth values:

Awareness = {disrupted-consciousness, disrupted-personhood, life or death, true or false?}

One can see that a subjective relation must be evaluated forming a relation or map from more fundamental concepts of continuity or disruption, consciousness, personhood, life or death, true or false.

I refer to the cause of Awareness = {items} using the pseudo-scientific concept of Psychogenesis.

Awareness = {Psychogenesis}

This just means we recognize conscious recognition arising as the product of an unknown and mysterious natural process. The mystery must exist because the field of awareness is theoretically empty and one can experience the empty field of awareness via modes of contemplation. Any idea of a source of cause of awareness, however, means the field of awareness is populated with items of recognition.

Answer 3

To be conscious is a property of certain mental processes.

1. The conscious processes shutdown during dreamless sleep and restart at awakening. The awakening individual experiences himself/herself as being the same person as before.

   So a break of consciousness is normally not felt as the death of personhood.

   But there are some mental disturbances - sometimes due to brain injuries - where an individuum loses his personhood, e.g., the dissociative phenomenon of depersonalization.

2. Self-consciousness and consciousness of the world around us is the human capability to develop a self-model embedded within a world-model, see Thomas Metzinger: Being No One. Both models are implemented as a dynamical mental data structures.

   A good introduction from the viewpoint of neuroscience is Christof Koch: Consciousness.