What happens to my soul when I’m under deep anesthesia?

[mikekle]

I believe that your soul, just like your body, hovers between life and death during anesthesia. There are more than a few of accounts of people watching their surgery from the ceiling of the operating room.

Ive read about some of these accounts, If Im not mistaken, some people have seen what looks like a silvery cord attaching them to their body.

 

[GEddie]

Ive read about some of these accounts, If Im not mistaken, some people have seen what looks like a silvery cord attaching them to their body.

Yeah, this is said to join the body to the “spiritual body” at both heads and to keep the human body alive while the mind goes travelling. Some have equated this with the silver cord in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

ICXC NIKA

 

[GEddie]

You were asked: “what happens to my soul when I am under deep anesthesia?”; then you correctly rephrased it this way “what happens to you when you are under deep anesthesia?”; and responded to it according to your two personal experiences. Though correct, your answer was partial, of course, because some other things happened to you during the surgical intervention. For example, you didn’t feel pain; you were unconscious…; in general, your ability to interact with the world was dramatically inhibited. When you die, your ability to interact with this world, at least from what your relatives and friends will know, will be eliminated. What is the complete picture of what will happen to you when you die? Who knows!

But Iaocmo is questioning a thought according to which you have a soul, and a body, and some thoughts, etcetera, because he sees certain problems in it. What is that soul that you supposedly have? Can you lose your body and still keep your soul? Or can you lose your soul, and still keep your body? Or can you lose your soul and your body and still exist somehow, with your thoughts, for example? Very strange questions…

I think the issue is the idea of “having.”

You can lose what you ‘have’ such as money, excess weight, or even a limb, and go on being.

But you do not “have a body”. You are a body.

You do not “have a soul.” You are a soul.

Even our colloquial language recognizes this, when we say we “hear somebody” (some body) or that we “didn’t see a soul.”

The soul generates your life, and your mind while your head is working.

You are a breathing mind, and a thinking body.

Without a functional head, the soul endures because it is not biological and so cannot die. But it could be that our mind goes into abeyance, as when anaesthetised, until the spiritual body.

ICXC NIKA

 

[GEddie]

Your thoughts reside in your mind, which is generated by the soul. There can be no thoughts without the soul.

ICXC NIKA

 

[JuanFlorencio]

I think the issue is the idea of “having.”

You can lose what you ‘have’ such as money, excess weight, or even a limb, and go on being.

But you do not “have a body”. You are a body.

You do not “have a soul.” You are a soul.

Even our colloquial language recognizes this, when we say we “hear somebody” (some body) or that we “didn’t see a soul.”

The soul generates your life, and your mind while your head is working.

You are a breathing mind, and a thinking body.

Without a functional head, the soul endures because it is not biological and so cannot die. But it could be that our mind goes into abeyance, as when anesthetized, until the spiritual body.

ICXC NIKA

There are some expressions that are less fortunate than others. “I am a soul”, “I am a body” express our common experience that besides being affected by our physical surroundings, we are able to theorize and transform our environment in unprecedented and creative ways. We can theorize even about ourselves producing more or less good metaphors, like when you say “the soul generates your life”. At first sight it seems a simple and intelligible statement, but when we reflect on it, it becomes questionable: “At a given moment I am, but I don’t have life; then the soul generates one and gives it to me. From that moment on I have a life”. Of course, I know this is not what you want to mean, but it is only thanks to the other statements that you have written. Then, what your metaphor tells me is this: “You, as a human, are a peculiar living being”.

Even though we theorize about ourselves, we don’t have a thorough comprehension of what we are, and how peculiar we are. Based on the fact that we can reflect, and theorize, etcetera, I tend to think that we persevere in our being when we “die”, but I am totally unable to say which kind of actions we will able to perform. I would not compare that unknown state or process with the process of an anesthetized individual. Currently, we interact with other entities in such a way that they appear to us as colored, odorous, flavorful, etcetera; and when we are anesthetized (I have been once), some of our current modes interaction are inhibited and some others are still operating. It seems obvious to me that our modes of interaction will change dramatically when we “die”. That is why, to me, dying is not a kind of total inhibition of our interaction modes.

 

[An_Atheist]

Well, here’s my 0.02¢.

As an atheist, I don’t believe in the existence of the soul. Everything that is “me” is fully explainable by neurology; a “soul” becomes an extraneous concept, and because there is no evidence for its existence–and because all the evidence points to the idea that the mind is entirely a product of the brain–I can safely say that worrying about your soul during any state is a meaningless endeavor.

This is also why I’m critical of out-of-body experiences (OBEs). If a person is hovering outside their body, how can they “look” if looking requires a physical eyeball to capture the light that bounces off an object and a physical brain to interpret that captured light as sight? Ditto with hearing. An “immaterial” soul hovering around in the air would experience none of the physical world without the means to do so. And if the soul can experience the physical world–if it’s a material thing, in other words–then we should have found it by now.

 

[Aloysium]

Neurology does not explain the existence of mental functioning.
It describes the physical manifestation of a person thinking and feeling.
It does not explain one’s existence as a separate being in the universe.
It does not explain the structure of the moment as past-present-future.
It does not explain how we are able to relate to the world through perception, feeling and understanding.
It does not explain the existence of its subject matter.
It does not explain love.
Neurology speaks to the physical reality of the person.

When you are sleeping, you are not dead.
The soul, which is one with the body, making oneself a person, is engaged in rest.
The processes which govern consciousness are recovering, rebuilding.
One is typically not aware of the dormancy and cannot recall what hasn’t been “logged”.

When you are dead, the soul exists as itself, a relational spiritual being.
All that remains is the status of its relationships, the love that exists between the person and all else that is other.

It can be very scary to think of our eternity as being constructed in this very moment.
Scarier obviously than the thought of there simply being an end to all this.
That does not make it true.
The fact is that we will all die; all will be lost save what we have done with what we have been given.
What we have done is set in metaphysical stone. The past is the past. Some pray that no one is watching or remembers.

He who never sleeps and knows all, is Compassion and Love.

 

[Wesrock]

The soul is not a separate substance from the body as Descartes would have claimed. It is simply your form in the Aristotlean sense. A living body retains the form, or soul, of a human, until it’s death, after which it is no longer one being but a collection of dead cells materially attached together but with no central purpose.

The better question is what happens to the mind, if it is immaterial as theists claim? It stops receiving sensory data, or at least, most external data, and is thus limited to the data it receives from the slumbering and temporarily handicapped brain.

That, I think, answers the questuon, but there are some obvious follow ups from a Christian perspective. The mind, being immaterial, persist after death, still with the form (or soul) of a human. Without a body, it would naturally remain in the dark (this much I believe follows simply from reason and natural theology, while the following is based on revealed theology), not gaining any new data or changing, barring something extraordinary, such as God filling it with “sense” data again (perhaps the beatific “vision”)? And such would be existence until the resurrection, when the body is restored and provides the mind with its own way to obtain sense data again, though God would continue to “(name removed by moderator)ut” the beatific vision for the saved, not necessarily by any bodily senses, but possibly through immaterial means.

 

[Aloysium]

. . . And such would be existence until the resurrection, when the body is restored and provides the mind with its own way to obtain sense data again, though God would continue to “(name removed by moderator)ut” the beatific vision for the saved, not necessarily by any bodily senses, but possibly through immaterial means.

The way I put it together is to view human existence, an image of God’s, to be relational in nature. We exist as self-other with respect to one another, the world in general and to God, the Father of our being. When we see and hear and touch and taste, our senses, as imperfect as they might be, take us into communion with what is physically other. Our minds attempt to connect with the structure that is the world.

As one humanity, we are working to rebuilding a loving relationship with all that is other. Its a variation of your idea of (name removed by moderator)ut; I think of those loving relationships coming together as a participation in the love that exists within the Triune Godhead, shared with all creation in one joyous, eternal communion.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I recently had a minor medical procedure that required about an hour of deep anesthesia. I remember watching a TV monitor and a nurse adding something to my IV then what seemed like immediately I was wondering who took the TV away. I was in a different room, perfectly awake, and an hour had passed. I might as well have ceased to exist during that time. That time was completely gone. Where did my soul go during that hour? With proper monitoring they could have kept me in that state of nonexistence for days, weeks, who knows how long.

I should think if my soul is separate from my body that it would have remained awake and alert during that time and remembered what took place. It makes me think that my so called soul is just my thinking process, my mind, and not some special thing. If they had given me something that stopped my other bodily functions one by one, not just my thinking, I would have technically died. And the missing hour would have extended forever. My soul would still have been as inactive as during the one hour I was out.

Anyone got an opinion here?

Your soul does not depend on sleep for its existence, but your mind depends on sleep.

The soul and the mind are not to be confused with each other.

Think of it this way.

When you are three months old you hardly have a mind. But you are fully endowed with a soul.

 

[Sneaux]

Don’t know about that. I’ve had some trippy dreams under general anesthesia. And I’ve had nights where I didn’t dream at all, like last night.

We dream every night, despite not remembering some of our dreams

 

[GEddie]

Your soul does not depend on sleep for its existence, but your mind depends on sleep.

The soul and the mind are not to be confused with each other.

Think of it this way.

When you are three months old you hardly have a mind. But you are fully endowed with a soul.

The soul generates your mind. But it requires a physical being in almost normal function to do so.

The soul also keeps you alive, and does so even when your head functioning is too suppressed to generate your mind, in which case your mind goes into an abeyance.

ICXC NIKA

 

[fisherman_carl]

I recommend reading this article by Edward Feser which touches on this issue.

edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html?m=1