The Sleep-Synapse II

I received some much-appreciated and very reasonable criticism regarding my last post on sleep. And yes, it's radical to compare sleep to suicide. The real difference lies less in the fact that you have to sleep and don't have to die (both are equally inevitable, which is to say, almost but not quite completely), and more in the fact that sleep performs a much more ambivalent terminal function.

Specifically, it doesn't just annihilate the short-term memory/consciousness; it entrenches this consciousness and memory into the long-term. So although many aspects of my current state might not make it through, a number of core ones do. And these aren't selected randomly (although they are selected somewhat unpredictably). Focus, emotion, repetition, etc., make things more likely to persist.

A system of zero complexity is equivalent to a system of complete complexity, in that both contain zero information. The universe begins and ends with zero as entropy runs its course. An episode of consciousness between sleeps accumulates more and more experience. Continuing this process of accumulation, without cutbacks, without selection, is overwhelming to the point of shutdown.

You can submerge your sorrows or solve intractable problems (perhaps by obscuring important elements!) through sleep; sleep can force a necessary simplification when the world is qualitatively too much with us. Perhaps also the world can be too much with us through brute continuation and quantity. And perhaps we need sleep to deal with this problem in the same manner.