Under anaesthesia we are not conscious. I remember during the war when I first saw decomposing human bodies I felt oddly comforted at the difference between a decomposing body and a merely anaesthetized one, and I thought that the soul might free itself from a decomposing body even though it could not free itself from a merely anaesthetized one, so that perhaps after death we might be conscious, notwithstanding the fact that anaesthetics made the living person unconscious.
But that was in my unregenerate religious youth and now I find it hard to recapture the feeling that this argument could have any force at all.
(J. J. C. Smart, "Science and Religion," The Australian Rationalist 3 [November 1973]: 3-7, at 5-6)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 