If death (assuming no afterlife) erases your conciousness, it should also erase your memory of ever having been concious. It should be as though you never existed at all, right? Not just future and present gone, but past.
So then how are we here, being concious and remembering stuff? How could that be unless the universe is inherently static, or at least endlessly self-repeating, and us being concious is just a permanent feature of our corner of it?
Has anyone else thought about this or am I just rambling?
But you did, in fact, exist despite the fact that you die and your concious experiences ceases to be. I don’t see how you’re drawing your conclusions here.
Well because I’m assuming the internal record of your existence gets wiped out when you die too, which from the deads’ perspective is tantamount to never having existed at all. Thus it seems like the only way we can experience, well, experience, is if our experience is just a permanent fixture of reality.
Maybe? I’m still sussing this line of thought out.
Why can’t conciousness be a transient feature of a thing? The point is that they were concious for a time, and now they cease to exist. I don’t think the “perspective of the dead” really factors in because there is no such thing. They have no conciousness and no perspective.
edit: I hope this doesn’t read as hostile, just trying to work through the argument
They have no conciousness and no perspective.
Right, and that’s exactly my point. We can’t experience non-experience. It sounds silly to say, but non-existence doesn’t exist.
So how can our existence and our memory of existing co-exist with non-existence, which doesn’t exist?
Like no doubt conciousness is transient relative to the amount of entropy in the universe, but I feel like the fact it exists at all implies a static quality to reality. Think, like, Slaughterhouse 5 where even though we experience time moving forward, all time is equally “real.”
And no worries, didn’t think you were being hostile at all!
The things that are are material things. There is no “conscious” which memorizes, there is a physical body which in my opinion has the emergent property of the illusion of conscious and memory.
The idea of passing time is intuitive and you dying doesn’t destroy the universe itself (only your conscious illusion of yours), as your body will not be able to do the processes which give you aforementioned illusion.
Thinking about it some, I think it implies the opposite. Death may erase your consciousness, but it doesn’t erase whatever effects it had on the world. Your consciousness impacted the world, even if in a very small way. Your consciousness directed action that left evidence. Maybe not in the minds of tons of people, but from a physics perspective it changed a ton of things. We don’t know what exactly the consciousness of Leonarda Da Vinci was doing, but we do know it did something, and that something affected the consciousness of someone thousands of years later. If it never existed, how could it have done that?
I agree with you in terms of valuing cause and effect, it’s just that I don’t think death “erases” conciousness as much as it just ends its movement further in time. If death erased conciousness, then it should also erase memory. But if that were the case then neither of us should really be here, because all of our experience is really just memories of what happened in the preceding moment.
That’s why I feel like conciousness, specifically memory, carries with it the implication that everything that is simultaneously always has been and always will be. We just don’t experience that simultaneity because we’re a bounded part of the universe, not exterior to it.
yeah
You should take a closer look at what “memory” is as it relates to consciousness. I’d argue that for a consciousness experiencing a memory is the same transient experience as any other qualia like hot, red or pain. Hell, you can imagine a conscious being that doesn’t have (subjective experience of) memory the same way as you can imagine a conscious being that has never experienced “red”.
Also another interesting way to recontextualize those kind of questions is to ask them not about meat-and-bone people but about computer simulation people a-la Black Mirror. Do they have consciousness? Do they have memory? Can they die? What would happen to memory then?
