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?
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.