From where I'm sitting, it looks like death should not be the end in that case.
You can't perceive the passage of time when you are dead, so you're just going to experience dying and then immediate rebirth after the countless eons pass for that rare moment where entropy spontaneously reverses to form your mind again.
Infinity =/= everything
Even if the universe has an infinite lifespan (unknown) that does not in any way imply any possible outcome will occur. So there is absolutely no reason to expect a body like yours will be recreated. Even if it was, it still wouldn't be you it would be your clone.
Poincare recurrence is, as far as we understand the laws of the universe, totally possible. If you think of the set of possible states of the universe, the current state it's in is necessarily in that set. Then, because it's a closed system, it necessarily has to come back to that state eventually. The hard part to grasp of how that's physically possible is that, of course, classical thermodynamics tells us that there's an arrow of time that points in the direction of increasing entropy. But looking at statistical thermodynamics, it turns out that it's only the case that it's overwhelmingly more likely that a system, in the macro scale, goes in the direction of increasing entropy. A system spontaneously becoming more ordered is possible, just so very unlikely that it will take a completely unimaginable amount of time to happen. Heat death could reverse itself and little by little build up into a new big bang after silly amounts of time. Like, Tree(Graham's Number) silly.
With scientific premises isn’t it more likely an identical “you” lives the exact same life that you did independently, rather than your consciousness picking up where you left off? Maybe Nietzsche was right, lol.
I didn't really get to the topic of consciousness. IMO if poincare recurrence happened, there's no reason to think that the new 'you' would continue your consciousness, it would just be a different person who lives the same life. But we don't know how consciousness works.
I didn't say it wasn't possible
Why doesn't it imply that? We can put a number on the chance that particles randomly come together to reform minds. That number is arbitrarily small, but it's not zero, hence why we are considering arbitrarily large time scales.
The set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, ...) is an infinite set, but its infinite nature does not imply that it contains every number (for example, 0.5 is not in the set). Being infinite and being all-encompassing are two different concepts.
It's very possible that the universe will have an infinite lifespan but will never accumulate matter after heat death, they will just continue to spread apart at a rate greater than gravity can gather them.
Right, but we aren't talking about the set of natural numbers, we're talking about the set of ways matter can be distributed in the universe. I know a living me is a possible state in this universe because I exist, so if I can spotaneously form once, why can't I spontaneously form again?
I didn't say it couldn't happen, I said a universe in existence for an infinite amount of time does not imply that it would.
But again, like I said earlier even if molecules spontaneously arranged themselves such that a replica of your body is created it still isn't you. It would best be described as a clone of you.
I was thinking that maybe if it's similar enough to my brain, it should just pick up my consciousness from whereever the fundamental of consciousness is stored. Like what happened the first time, right?
That's assuming consciousness is fundamental to the universe and not some emergent thing, I guess.
I know there's an acceptable margin of error here because I can place drugs, foreign objects, inside my head to radically alter the functioning of my brain without losing consciousness or irreparably damaging it.
IDK comrade tbh you kind of stopped making sense to me here. If you think consciousness is some mystical thing that transcends time, space and matter then you don't need probability and thermodynamics to believe you'll live again just embrace the mysticism if it gives you peace.
I don't know what consciousness is, but I can be sure mine exists, and yours too probably.
But it seems pretty inherently mystical to me considering we can't even scratch the surface of researching the how and why we have qualia and subjective experience seemingly disconnected from material reality.
Idk, I took an edible and wanted to poke Hexbear with the idea, it's a fun time!
I'm saying that's fine, if you want to explain the unknown with mysticism who am I to say otherwise.
I'm just saying if you're using mysticism to explain the unknown you don't need science just by mystical. Either embracing a mystical tradition that believes in this sort of recurrence or creating one for yourself are both cooler than pseudoscience