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?
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.