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.
The thing that's helped me understand this argument is that there are different forms and sizes of infinity. let's say you add 1 infinitesimal (1/infinity) every given time interval. Even if time is infinitely long, you will never surpass 1. So you will never produce 100 or 1000, or any arbitrary number greater than 1.
Similarly there are so much variables required to form your conciousness that even in an infinite amount of time it can never be reformed spontaneously. The size of infinities involved in producing a given person's conciousness is orders of magnitude greater than the infinity of time.
Why? It's a finite system. There's a finite number of particles. Why would it take a "larger infinity" than a countably infinite amount of time for, after the heat death of the universe, enough space dust to come together again and spontaneously cause another big bang? If the universe keeps going infinitely, what's to stop it from happening again, and again, and again, until the big bang and all subsequent events are exactly the same as the universe we know? Or at least arbitrarily close if you want to think of it as a continuous system.
To counter your argument about adding up 1/infinity an infinite number of times: it's not 1/infinity. The chance that a bunch of hydrogen particles fuse together to form the necessary elements, then happen to react to form the necessary chemicals, to form a human brain in the vacuum of space, is clearly very unlikely. It might be 1 / 10^10^1\0^10^10^10... or whatever. The denominator in that fraction is a number that is freakishly large and impossible to conceptualize. But it's definitely finite. There's a world of difference between that number and infinity, and there's no reason at all for it to be infinite.
Edit: also, small nitpick, infinity * 1/infinity actually can surpass 1. Or it can equal 0. It's an indeterminate form. If you get it as the result of taking shortcuts while solving a limit e.g. lim x -> inf x^2 / 4x^2 which you could substitute the x by infinity and get infinity / infinity, it just means you have to do more work. In this case, you can factor out the 1/4 and get x^2 / x^2, which simplifies to 1, and the limit is equal to 1/4. So even if the probability was actually 1/infinity, it wouldn't be sufficient to say that over an infinite period of time it would never add up to anything. Maybe your point would be better illustrated with a geometric series? Like when you add 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8.... you'll tend towards 2 but never above it.
Yeah, the idea that space dust could randomly form a brain for a moment is pretty odd. We are products of infinite causal factors including millions of years of stable life, and I’d have to guess are consciousnesses reformation would occur under vaguely similar circumstances. “This happened once so within infinity it will happen again” is a little absurd if you think it will happen again in totally different circumstances.
I was interpreting the statement as 'the production of the same Earth up until this point where I died but instead do not.'
That’s an odd idea. Eternal recurrence multiverse version. If that were the case there would have to be so many factors identical to this world and then suddenly the universe decides to do something different preventing someone’s death temporarily? Ignoring the question of whether that would just be a clone, I find it hard to believe identical conditions would produce different results.
My thinking is that my consciousness, the set of qualia that make up my subjective experience, "what it feels like to be me", literally is the physical system that is my brain. So if my brain exists, and my brain is functioning properly, then I exist and I'm alive, experiencing the universe.
I can't see it any other way, even if two such brains exist in the same space through some weird happenstance then I guess my consciousness is in a superposition of two locations.
I understand your odd western philosophical assumptions. I know what the process of thought identification feels like. But that doesn’t make it logical or correct to experience. “This feels like me” is a fleeting thought based on changing memories that are not a real experience of the past. That feeling is not “literally the physical system that is your brain.” You cannot feel your brain. Scientifically all experience including apparent external physical sensations are artificially jumbled together electrical signals turned into an illusory unified moment. You cannot feel directly your brain or tell me how that feels. What you probably mean is the feeling suggested by temporary thoughts that there is an eternal thinker behind them.
This is a statement with a lot of assumptions tied in with it. I’m not trying to name call, I have nothing against you, but it’s a bit ableist. If one is dissociating, having an out of body experience, meditating, on drugs, being depressed, having adhd, having amnesia etc is that same continuous awareness not there? Is one not conscious? How do you define “properly” anyway? The conscious mind is doing something different from each moment to the next and same with the physical mind, always dying and renewing.
With a little spiritual practice or mental illness you would.
This is a very odd statement from both a scientific and philosophical perspective. Do you suppose you have an eternal soul? That said soul is bound to any body of a certain sort? Human bodies are very similar and your own body is always different from one moment to the next. What an odd combination of Christian doctrine with vague science.
I’m genuinely curious how you answer these questions and what other underlying assumptions and beliefs are behind such statements.
Yeah, I can see how that might be interpreted as ableist, should have watched my wording. What I think I meant by "functioning properly" is essentially "not dead", i.e, my brain is doing my brain stuff right now, i.e it's not currently smeared all over a wall after a high energy impact.
I more than anyone can understand that my brain can take on a very weird array of states and still be conscious and experiencing the world. I've gone down the dissociatives rabbit hole, and the psychedelics rabbit hole, and I've been under general anesthesia before, and all that experience has made it very hard to place what exactly I am in this world, what my subjective experience is.
Like I can come back from all of that, I don't see why I can't come back from more if my brain was rebuilt closely enough later. I don't think I have an eternal soul, I think my conscious experience has thus far been very bound to this body, but I'm not sure if that's only because that's all I can remember.
You referenced anesthesia though, so more consistently, moments without conscious experience do not have conscious experience. Otherwise, deep sleep and spiritual “reset” experiences are “the brain not functioning.” I suppose that’s linguistically complementary with death as “sleep from which you do not wake” except perhaps you do.
Yeah, there are times my brain is existing and producing consciousness, and there are times where it isn't, but so far my experience has been an uninterrupted chain of continuous consciousness regardless of any of those events, and as such it might well be the case that's just the one universal constant I can be sure of, and I shouldn't expect that to change with my death, especially when it might be the case that my brain, the thing supposedly producing the consciousness, might exist again in the case of Poincare recurrence, just like it exists again when I come out of the effects of general anesthesia, or it exists again when I'm born.
None of this is solid philosophically or scientifically I'm sure, I'm literally just trying to put it in a way that makes sense to me and the way I understand the rest of the world.