This paper addresses one of the oldest unresolved problems in modern medicine: how general anesthesia selectively extinguishes consciousness. Although anesthesia has been used since 1846, and the Meyer-Overton correlation has suggested a common physical target since 1899, the precise substrate through which chemically diverse anesthetics shut down consciousness remains unsettled. The paper does...
This paper addresses a neglected physical question at the boundary of biological death: if consciousness is physically instantiated as information processing, and if physical information is not annihilated under quantum theory, what happens to consciousness-related information when the brain shuts down? The paper develops a quantum-thermodynamic framework in which biological death is modeled...