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?
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.
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