“Inverse P-Zombies: the Other Direction in the Hard Problem of Consciousness”, Gwern2011-12-18 (ethics, mind, anesthesia; backlinks; similar)⁠:

[Discussion of “inverse p-zombies” via excerpts of “Inverse zombies, anesthesia awareness, and the hard problem of unconsciousness”, Mashour & LaRock2008: the problem of telling when someone is conscious but otherwise appears and acts unconscious, a problem of particular concern in anesthesia for surgery—anesthesia occasionally fails, resulting in ‘anesthesia awareness’, leaving the patient fully conscious and feeling every last bit of the surgery, as they are completely paralyzed but are cut open and operated on for hours, which they describe as being every bit as horrific as one would think, leading to tortured memories and PTSD symptoms. Strikingly, death row executions by lethal injection use a cocktail of chemicals which are almost designed to produce this (rather than the simple single reliable drug universally used for euthanasia by veterinarians), suggesting that, as peaceful as the executions may look, the convicts may actually be enduring extraordinary agony and terror during the several minutes it takes to kill them.

Further, anesthesia appears to often operate by erasing memories, so it is possible that anesthesia awareness during surgery is much more common than realized, and underestimated because the victims’ long-term memories are blocked from forming. There are some indications that surgery is associated with bad psychiatric symptoms even in cases where the patient does not recall any anesthesia awareness, suggesting that the trauma is preserved in other parts of the mind.

While doctors continue to research the problem of detecting consciousness, it is far from solved. Most people, confronted with a hypothetical about getting money in exchange for being tortured but then administered an amnesiac, would say that the torture is an intrinsically bad thing even if it is then forgotten; but perhaps we are, unawares, making the opposite choice every time we go in for surgery under general anesthesia?]

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