Hot take but I disagree. Yeah, I have been under anesthesia before. The doctor ask me to counter backwards from 10, and before I even get to 0, I ask him when the surgery will start, and he tells me it is already over. It feels like I experienced nothing at all.

But how can I be so sure? Let’s say you watch a film and you never take your eyes off of it. When the credits roll, someone asks you, “what was the color of the shirt of background character #42 at exactly the 1 hour and 12 minute mark?” You probably would be stumped and would have no answer to it. Yeah, you watched the whole film, you experienced it all, clearly you saw the character, but why would you pay any attention to that?

We can experience things without being aware of them. Indeed, if you disagree, then if a person experiences a whole wonderful life but then bumps their head and forgets everything, you would have to claim that they retroactively went into the past and erased having ever experienced it. No, they still experienced it, they just have no memories that they do.

Anesthesia works by flooding your brain with noise, which makes it hard to be aware of anything, and so you don’t recall anything, but your physical body is still there and it is still interacting with the environment. It seems to me to make more sense to say you are thus still experiencing the world just not aware of it.