I think experiencing anesthesia should be counted as death. There’s no consciousness there any more, so…death.
You wake up as the same person — you think — but really it is a different you. One who has passed through cessation of all conscious thought, volition, action, experience.
And then been rebooted in the same body, but with a different mind. Much like the other, dead mind, but not quite the same.
How many times have you died?
So every time Buffy gets major surgery, a new Slayer was called? And couldn’t you say the same of deep sleep cycles? After all, conscious thought, volition, action and experience cease during that time too.
You mean general anesthesia, though. I’ve been under anesthesia but none so complete I wasn’t aware of where I was or what was generally going on. When I was under to remove my wisdom teeth, I was hooked up to an IV. I was aware there was surgery going on in my mouth, and when he was about to close up I asked my dentist whether he remembered all of my teeth, including the extra baby tooth growing on the side of my molar. He didn’t so he went back in and removed it.
Yeah, I should’ve specified — general anesthesia.
General anesthesia is different than sleep in many important ways. In sleep, you can be woken. There is still some continuous consciousness present. No matter how deeply I am asleep, within less than a second of someone talking to me, I can have a full conversation. Without some interceding chemical or just the anesthetic wearing off, you cannot be woken from general anesthesia if it’s applied correctly. (And an anesthetized brain in an MRI under GA looks very different than a sleeping one.)
But I agree that non-REM delta sleep does approach some of the loss of self as GA. It’s a transition, more than a hard line.