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?

  • Bluegrass_Buddhist [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    it supposes that dialectical materialism is just the way the world seems to us but not how it is

    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.

    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).

    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!