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I guess this makes sense -- a brain is gonna do brain stuff. The only difference is that we're not present to witness it.
I would think anesthesia, in specific doses, would only attenuate consciousness...if it stopped other processes your organs and nervous system would stop. I guess this confirms that.
This is strong evidence against LLMs experiencing qualia. (I know that that topic often gets people laughed out of the room but please don't jump on me for engaging in that debate. When we can collect evidence and be able to show it to people.)
Since this is about what happens in humans, not LLMs, it couldn't possibly be evidence of any sort regarding LLMs.

(I think there are overwhelming reasons to think that LLMs don't experience qualia, but this has nothing to do with it.)

I sometimes ge the most complex logical dreams whilst going to sleep on a programming problem. The dreams are normal dreams but structured like a programming problem or logic…it’s like my brain is trying to dream normally but it’s also Fixated on programming logic so it subliminally incorporates it into dreams. Then I wake up and I feel like I’ve compiled the whole code in my head and did not rest.
If that mechanism can be activated, it may significantly compress the time required for education and learning.
Or, worryingly, unsolicited brainwashing, no?
This sounds odd to me:

> ... neural signals could predict upcoming words in a sentence. ... This kind of predictive coding is something we associate with being awake and attentive, yet it’s happening here in an unconscious state

In psycholinguistics, the assumption is, and always has been, that language processing is unconscious, a background process like visual object recognition. For starters, conscious attention is too slow by two orders of magnitude, and infants can process language, while presumably not yet (fully) conscious.

What you call "conscious attention" seems to be a sort of cognitive process. What the article calls unconscious state is a state. The idea is that in some states, some processes (like predictive coding) don't take place.