We don’t know how anesthesia works, only that it does. Remarkably, anesthesia works on single-celled amoebas. Nick Lane explains how this opens up all sorts of questions not only about anesthesia, but consciousness itself.

@dwarkesh_sp "Unknown mechanisms of action" - my favorite Wikipedia category.... it's for the drugs that work well but we don't know how they work. Empirical science at its finest until LLMs came along, which we also don't understand to a large degree.

Plants as well!

As someone who's had to be anaesthetised into the the double digits this is something I always try to forget while they're putting me under.