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?
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
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!
I don't think they co-exist so much as they sequentially follow each other. Or maybe they do co-exist in the dialectical "unity of opposites" way, where non-existence eventually overtakes existence. I'm sure Engels' Dialectics of Nature would be of some use here but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I have this intuitive sense of dialectical materialism that tells me that a "static" universe is not really the case without supposing some unchanging metaphysical layer to it, which I'm resistent to since it seems fundamentally superstitious. It's kind of hard articulating it but this is a good exercise.
But the ability of something to do anything is still a quality of things that exist. Non-existence can't have any qualities; the ability to overtake existence included.
I don't think a static / deterministic / self-repeating universe contradicts dialectical materialism, though. Like from our perspective everything is still dynamic and transient. Like if you look at a train car from the rail's perspective, the car's direction of movement doesn't really matter to the rails. It's only from the persective of the car itself (or the people inside it) that the direction of movement is meaningful.
This would contradict it though, as it supposes that dialectical materialism is just the way the world seems to us but not how it is which would be static, deterministic, self-repeating, etc. And with my comment about the unity of opposites, I think it's tricky to understand using the work existence. The way I have had it explained is that within a thing, there are contradictory aspects, which we can understand as the thing and it's negation (A and not-A).
In a social system like capitalism, there is both capitalism and its negation, socialism. In an organism, there is life but also death creeping up on them. Life is just matter capable of moving itself, while dead matter is inert and not self-moving (this is Aristotles definition of life). Conciousness is the mental manifestation of life, becoming more complex the more complex the organism is (Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics sees existence as being made up of one substance, where "mind" and "extension" are only different aspects of the same thing).
I'm kind of just writing stream-of-concious so I don't know how much any of this holds up lol
Well the difference between the world "seeming" to be someway and it "being" someway is just a matter of information and perspective. I'm not sure where the contradiction with dialectical materialism is in saying the universe could have a static form if viewed viewed from an exterior perspective but a dynamic form if viewed from its interior. The forces which shape history would still be part of the form of the universe, and DM could still explain how those forces work... from our own human perspective.
Right, and I agree, but even the negation of a thing is still something that exists, somewhere in space and time. The negation of "capitalism" isn't "void," it's "socialism." The very act of imagining that system, sussing it out by way of investigating capitalism, gives it a form of existence. Likewise, When it comes to life and conciousness, I think a close inspection shows that death is not the oppositte of life at all. A good chunk of our bodies' cells are dead right now, for instance, yet those dead cells are important for a lot of our vital functions. And the Buddhist perspective (for the most part) is that our ego is dying constantly, because each moment we're a slighlty different person, with no version of ourselves being more "true" or "real" than any other.
So if death and life are not opposittes, then one of them must not exist. As I'm here typing this out, I'm inclined to believe that death doesn't really exist. Life just "Is." It's the only thing that can ever be experienced. And all this comes back to my original thought that, if life Is, does it not imply a permanence to reality, or at least to our experience of it? If death existed as an entity that could overtake life and erase it - life's past included- then in effect nothing would have ever existed at all.
Im also kind of high and probably less than coherent myself, so no worries!
this is why i hate philosophy. sorry mate but it's just not for me lol
No worries! This post mostly me just trying to think through my high.