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?
it is real as an illusion
Yeah, but doesn’t change the fact of it not relating to the real which is not experiencable in itself. When I programmed my bug bots who moved around they created a mental model in their memory of the world they drive in by scanning a few viewpoints, at no point in time were any of the divergent models for it created the reality of the world itself. Similarly neither is my understanding of the world or others.
I don’t see a break from physical materialism here. Neither do I see a problem in negating the assumption of “no evolutionary advantage” of having qualia. Neither would I say that an evolutionary advantage would’ve to be necessary to develop qualia, as it is pretty hard to impossible to say what got it and what hasn’t. Therefore the idea to frantically search for qualia is a bit utopist/idealist in my opinion, instead of seeing to it that most people and potential beings aren’t fucked over and organizing in the here and now to better situations for you and me and my dog.
we are here because we haven’t died yet. your memory wouldn’t be erased until you died.
Except that there are already holes in our memories. From our perspectives, where those holes are, the exspanse of time they cover don’t really exist. Like the last time I got knocked out, I didn’t experience anything while unconcious. If my head didn’t hurt or there weren’t other people around to tell me what happened after I came to, I really wouldn’t even be able to say “I got knocked out.” It would just be a space of time that effectively never existed for me.
I feel like unless the universe is somehow deterministic, death could be that same phenomenon writ large? Death would erase experience retrocausally because all experience is enclosed in memory, and if death erases all memory, there too goes experience. It would be as though we never exiperienced anything at all, and yet here we are experiencing things.
I’m not thinking we’re immortal, just that maybe our bounded mortal existence is itself an unchangeable part of the shape of things.
the experiences and memories still happened in the past if you die
Only outside observers to my death would be able to verify that though. Just like only outside observers were able to verify to me that I got knocked out.
Sorry, I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well. I don’t think death retroactively destroys experience/memory, because we’re here experiencing things right now. But by all rights death should retroactively destroy experience and memory, because at a certain point any part of us capabale of remembering that anything has occurred - this moment even - dissipates. It’s not so much “we forget stuff” so much as “we lose the capacity to remember we ever existed,” which itself is effectively the same as “we never existed, except to outside observers.”
It’s this contradiction that makes me think conciousness itself implies a fixed nature to things. Our percieved experience can be bounded by birth on one side and death on the other, but unless that experience as a whole always exists, it seems tantamount to it never having existed at all.
Think of the universe as having 4 dimensions. The path we travel through time traces out a complex form in the 4d fabric of the universe. In other words, each “moment” in time is a 3 dimensional slice of that 4 dimensional whole. The same way a circle is a 2D slice of a sphere.
In other words: the universe can be considered static in 4 dimensions, and our perception of time is really our travel through that 4 dimensional space.
I always had a weird thought that life is the universe attempting to explore itself. like, each life form sees the universe from a new perspective and so with each instance of life, the universe gets a slightly better picture of what it is. Every new angle bringing a slightly more complete understanding.
That or it’s just energy bouncing around IDFK.
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!
So no, there is no such thing as consciousness. There are an infinite variety of states to whatever pile of hydrocarbins that feels it at the time though.
