fucked up question, I know - but ultimately it’s a question about suffering and experience of personhood - did “you” really experience the torture for an hour if you don’t remember it later?
What about the hour where you were awake and present, before the memory is wiped? How much does that suffering matter? Does the fact that after the torture you won’t remember override the suffering you will experience in the present during the torture, relative to suffering you will remember the rest of your life?
I think you’d like Severance first of all.
Second, if I do not remember it at ALL like including trauma responses or subconscious stuff, then the hour. EZ
Yes, though second season was disappointing to me, I really enjoyed first season.
And yes, I think in this case there is no memory as though you had been under anaesthesia (but unlike anaesthesia, you will be fully conscious the whole hour and experience the suffering - so this is a bit adjacent to a Severance situation, someone is suffering and that someone is you, still).
Don’t touch my memories, they’re already fragile enough I don’t need someone I don’t know rolting around in there. I’ll take the lucid torture.
I may be mistaken, but isn’t the first what basically happens during surgery? Though I think it’s more along the lines of anesthesia prevents the formation of memories. Potato potato.
no, that’s not how anaesthesia works - anaesthesia actually blocks the nerve signals communicating pain from getting to the brain in the first place, you never have the experiences to later forget
No, this is a misconception of how twilight anaesthesia works.
Ngl, I’ve had things done to me that approached torture. I’ve had injuries bad enough that they might as well have been.
I can handle almost anything for a minute, as long as it doesn’t kill me.
But an hour? You aren’t coming out of that with the same level of health you went into it with, so remembering isn’t important. Hell, I’d even say that having the consequences of the torture and not knowing how it happened is a form of torture itself.
There’s also the possibility, since you’re exploring the hypothetical beyond just seeing what people say, that you would have the memories, just buried and inaccessible to your conscious mind. That actually happens with some trauma anyway.
There’s also the fact that part of some anaesthesia is drugs that block memory formation. So people have gone through what might be considered torture with their memories not being present afterward. So far, I’ve never seen reports of someone later gaining access to any memories from during surgery when those drugs are used. Some when they were not quite under, and some from after surgery, but before they were “awake” (which I’ve experienced), but not the period when memory formation was suppressed.
So, as an argument for the memory wipe option, it could be a solid pick, if you add in that neither torture session would result in injury or illness. But, anything that you’d think of as torture normally isn’t going to be risk free in the real world.
I think for the sake of the thought experiment, we will consider the torture method as being some fictitious method that causes great pain, distress, and suffering but no risk of death or injury at all. The idea here is that the hour isn’t meant to be more risky in terms of injury, we’re strictly focused on the pain and suffering you will experience - you either experience an hour of it and then forget, or you experience a minute and don’t forget.
I’ve also been through a lot of physical pain. Recently, hair removal has had me thinking a lot about pain and suffering, and one of the methods I have been using have been to take a large dose of CBD, which is known to reduce negative and traumatic memory formation, and since I started that I don’t get as anxious before sessions even when my memory was that there was a lot of pain last time.
I also get an hour of electrolysis once a week, and I never found a way to sufficiently dull the pain enough that it’s tolerable, so I have introduced taking a benzodiazepene in a large enough dose that I actually have memory issues later, mostly to help keep me calm - which also reduces my sense of anxiety and suffering later even if I do remember that in the present moment it was painful.
This relationship of memory to suffering and distress is interesting to me, because there is a sense that my perception of my self as a person extends through time, and memory is the way that hangs together, so messing with my memory seems to mess with the sense of suffering I experienced, even though I know it’s an alteration.
Anaesthesia drugs block memory formation but also block experience in the first place, and it’s pretty important a patient not be awake and experiencing the pain and suffering for various reasons like physiological changes such as adrenaline being released and going into fight-or-flight, etc.
Makes total sense. I’m a chronic pain sufferer, so I’ve gone down some similar paths of thought. Can’t do cbd personally; tried it and it hits me the same as weed itself does, which is unpleasant in my case. But I’ve had access to the usual combinations of pain management options, and that includes stuff like benzos that can alter memory formation and retention.
So we’ve maybe not been on the exact same path, but we’ve got similar mud on our boots, so to speak. I guess anyone that’s had prolonged treatments that hurt, or repeated acute pain causing injury/illness, and chronic pain patients all end up having the same basic options at some point. It isn’t like there’s hundreds of possibilities (yet).
Surprisingly, there are circumstances where the mix of anaesthetics can be chosen so that consciousness isn’t fully suppressed. There’s also a clinically significant percentage of people that, while unable to move or react even on an involuntary level like heart rate, come to periods of consciousness during procedures. So the mixes sometimes get adjusted with the memory blocking agents even when the goal is total suppression of consciousness.
It definitely isn’t a super common thing, but it does happen just often enough that there’s been some research into it, though without much in the way of results that explain what’s going on in a useful way. Which is both interesting and terrifying to me.
I was hit by a car and had some physical trauma that resulted in permanent muscular-skeletal damage. That left me in pain for a couple years, though at this point I consider it a 0 / 10 most days now. Either way, I really can grok that chronic pain life, even though I tend to feel my situation was not that bad overall compared to most.
Have you tried Kratom?
Re cannabis: I should say, I use full spectrum hemp flower, not a CBD isolate. I did find hemp was more psychoactive before my transition, but I actively sought out hemp that had higher THC levels and I didn’t mind the effects. After a few months on estrogen CBD has a more mild effect, even with larger doses like 60+ mg I mostly experience some mild to moderate sedation, but it’s much less dramatic than it used to be.
Also, cannabis with THC impacts me significantly too, esp. pre-transition it led to anxiety, paranoia, and psychedelic mental spaces (even open-eyed visuals, geometric patterns, etc.). Post-transition I have to take higher doses to get to that same space, and I notice much less anxiety and paranoia.
Either way, I feel you about side effects - I don’t know what it’s like for you, but I understand anyone not wanting to mess with cannabis. It’s only my experiences with much stronger stuff that gave me the mental skills to cope with and even enjoy cannabis.
There’s also a clinically significant percentage of people that, while unable to move or react even on an involuntary level like heart rate, come to periods of consciousness during procedures
I’ve read about this and it terrifies me too, lol. I’ve been under general anaesthesia once before, I remember the moment I lost consciousness, and the moment I woke up - was very happy to not be an anomaly that way.
I think I’d treat it like Odysseus meeting the sirens. I could avoid the whole memory, but there’s a chance I could learn something from the encounter. Might put my life into perspective or something.
Are you saying you’d sign up for the whole hour of torture without memory loss? 😜
I wonder if this question doesn’t say more about the psychology of the person being asked. People vary in the degree to which they identify with their future selves. I believe this characteristic is often called psychological connectedness. It seems that people who have a stronger psychological connectedness would likely prefer the erased hour. Personally, I’m more inclined to choose the one minute, because the immediate experience feels more real to me. However, I think some of the technical questions about the long term impact of being tortured complicate things. Like would I be suffering PTSD for the next 20 years? If so, then things become much less apples-to-apples.
I think PTSD’s mechanism involves memory, but for the sake of the experiment let’s just guarantee the hour doesn’t result in mental or physical injury - the difference is really meant to be that you can either:
- experience an hour of torture and forget, or
- experience a minute of torture and not forget
I’m trying to drive the choice to be about the experience and whether the promise of forgetting at the end is enough to make you willing to go through the experience of an hour of torture.
