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?
deleted by creator
Yeah, but doesn't change the fact of it not relating to the real which is not experiencable in itself. When I programmed my bug bots who moved around they created a mental model in their memory of the world they drive in by scanning a few viewpoints, at no point in time were any of the divergent models for it created the reality of the world itself. Similarly neither is my understanding of the world or others.
I don't see a break from physical materialism here. Neither do I see a problem in negating the assumption of "no evolutionary advantage" of having qualia. Neither would I say that an evolutionary advantage would've to be necessary to develop qualia, as it is pretty hard to impossible to say what got it and what hasn't. Therefore the idea to frantically search for qualia is a bit utopist/idealist in my opinion, instead of seeing to it that most people and potential beings aren't fucked over and organizing in the here and now to better situations for you and me and my dog.
deleted by creator
Except that there are already holes in our memories. From our perspectives, where those holes are, the exspanse of time they cover don't really exist. Like the last time I got knocked out, I didn't experience anything while unconcious. If my head didn't hurt or there weren't other people around to tell me what happened after I came to, I really wouldn't even be able to say "I got knocked out." It would just be a space of time that effectively never existed for me.
I feel like unless the universe is somehow deterministic, death could be that same phenomenon writ large? Death would erase experience retrocausally because all experience is enclosed in memory, and if death erases all memory, there too goes experience. It would be as though we never exiperienced anything at all, and yet here we are experiencing things.
I'm not thinking we're immortal, just that maybe our bounded mortal existence is itself an unchangeable part of the shape of things.
deleted by creator
Only outside observers to my death would be able to verify that though. Just like only outside observers were able to verify to me that I got knocked out.
Sorry, I don't think I'm explaining myself very well. I don't think death retroactively destroys experience/memory, because we're here experiencing things right now. But by all rights death should retroactively destroy experience and memory, because at a certain point any part of us capabale of remembering that anything has occurred - this moment even - dissipates. It's not so much "we forget stuff" so much as "we lose the capacity to remember we ever existed," which itself is effectively the same as "we never existed, except to outside observers."
It's this contradiction that makes me think conciousness itself implies a fixed nature to things. Our percieved experience can be bounded by birth on one side and death on the other, but unless that experience as a whole always exists, it seems tantamount to it never having existed at all.