[driggs]

I didn't "experience nothingness"; I did not experience, full stop.

My consciousness did not exist. I had no awareness of the passage of time. There was no observer. No dreams. From my perspective, I teleported from a chair to another room, with an existential discontinuity in between. The only "experiencing" was after my consciousness was brought back online.

I cannot describe it to you sufficiently with words, and you likely cannot understand it sufficiently without ceasing to exist for yourself. Are the dead aware that they are dead? It seems, from my perspective, that for those 45 minutes, my consciousness was extinguished, not unlike that of someone fully dead.

(Not that I have first-hand experience being fully dead, of course! And, in a conversation about panpsychism, I suppose the experience of being a dead body isn't something to discredit as "nothing"!)