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?
But you did, in fact, exist despite the fact that you die and your concious experiences ceases to be. I don't see how you're drawing your conclusions here.
Well because I'm assuming the internal record of your existence gets wiped out when you die too, which from the deads' perspective is tantamount to never having existed at all. Thus it seems like the only way we can experience, well, experience, is if our experience is just a permanent fixture of reality.
Maybe? I'm still sussing this line of thought out.
Why can't conciousness be a transient feature of a thing? The point is that they were concious for a time, and now they cease to exist. I don't think the "perspective of the dead" really factors in because there is no such thing. They have no conciousness and no perspective.
edit: I hope this doesn't read as hostile, just trying to work through the argument
They have no conciousness and no perspective.
Right, and that's exactly my point. We can't experience non-experience. It sounds silly to say, but non-existence doesn't exist.
So how can our existence and our memory of existing co-exist with non-existence, which doesn't exist?
Like no doubt conciousness is transient relative to the amount of entropy in the universe, but I feel like the fact it exists at all implies a static quality to reality. Think, like, Slaughterhouse 5 where even though we experience time moving forward, all time is equally "real."
And no worries, didn't think you were being hostile at all!
So how can our existence and our memory of existing co-exist with non-existence, which doesn’t exist?
I don't think they co-exist so much as they sequentially follow each other. Or maybe they do co-exist in the dialectical "unity of opposites" way, where non-existence eventually overtakes existence. I'm sure Engels' Dialectics of Nature would be of some use here but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I have this intuitive sense of dialectical materialism that tells me that a "static" universe is not really the case without supposing some unchanging metaphysical layer to it, which I'm resistent to since it seems fundamentally superstitious. It's kind of hard articulating it but this is a good exercise.
non-existence eventually overtakes existence.
But the ability of something to do anything is still a quality of things that exist. Non-existence can't have any qualities; the ability to overtake existence included.
I don't think a static / deterministic / self-repeating universe contradicts dialectical materialism, though. Like from our perspective everything is still dynamic and transient. Like if you look at a train car from the rail's perspective, the car's direction of movement doesn't really matter to the rails. It's only from the persective of the car itself (or the people inside it) that the direction of movement is meaningful.
I don’t think a static / deterministic / self-repeating universe contradicts dialectical materialism, though. Like from our perspective everything is still dynamic and transient.
This would contradict it though, as it supposes that dialectical materialism is just the way the world seems to us but not how it is which would be static, deterministic, self-repeating, etc. And with my comment about the unity of opposites, I think it's tricky to understand using the work existence. 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).
In a social system like capitalism, there is both capitalism and its negation, socialism. In an organism, there is life but also death creeping up on them. Life is just matter capable of moving itself, while dead matter is inert and not self-moving (this is Aristotles definition of life). Conciousness is the mental manifestation of life, becoming more complex the more complex the organism is (Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics sees existence as being made up of one substance, where "mind" and "extension" are only different aspects of the same thing).
I'm kind of just writing stream-of-concious so I don't know how much any of this holds up lol
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!
No worries! This post mostly me just trying to think through my high.
The things that are are material things. There is no "conscious" which memorizes, there is a physical body which in my opinion has the emergent property of the illusion of conscious and memory.
The idea of passing time is intuitive and you dying doesn't destroy the universe itself (only your conscious illusion of yours), as your body will not be able to do the processes which give you aforementioned illusion.
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.
There's also 'can you repeat the question?'
Malcolm in the Middle is theory.
Think of the universe as having 4 dimensions. The path we travel through time traces out a complex form in the 4d fabric of the universe. In other words, each “moment” in time is a 3 dimensional slice of that 4 dimensional whole. The same way a circle is a 2D slice of a sphere.
In other words: the universe can be considered static in 4 dimensions, and our perception of time is really our travel through that 4 dimensional space.
This is what I was trying to get at, thanks. I just had the feeling that the existence of conciousness as a phenomena implied what you're describing.
You should take a closer look at what "memory" is as it relates to consciousness. I'd argue that for a consciousness experiencing a memory is the same transient experience as any other qualia like hot, red or pain. Hell, you can imagine a conscious being that doesn't have (subjective experience of) memory the same way as you can imagine a conscious being that has never experienced "red".
Also another interesting way to recontextualize those kind of questions is to ask them not about meat-and-bone people but about computer simulation people a-la Black Mirror. Do they have consciousness? Do they have memory? Can they die? What would happen to memory then?
Your life and actions exists whether you remember it or not. You will have existed and been conscious whether you remember it or not. This sounds very much in the realm of the abstract and idealism which to me is always a view that focuses too much on our own perception and consciousness and ends up believing that "nothing is real" outside of our perception of it, which I think is a silly if not dangerous view point.
I'm more materialist myself, the material/natural world and what happens in it exists and comes first, our perception of it (and our awareness of our own existence) comes second and is derived from it rather than the other way around in the idealist view.
I always had a weird thought that life is the universe attempting to explore itself. like, each life form sees the universe from a new perspective and so with each instance of life, the universe gets a slightly better picture of what it is. Every new angle bringing a slightly more complete understanding.
That or it's just energy bouncing around IDFK.
it is real as an illusion
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.
we are here because we haven’t died yet. your memory wouldn’t be erased until you died.
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.
the experiences and memories still happened in the past if you die
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.
While I have never died I assume the world will keep moving along after death, there's billions of people, countless living organisms, and artificial intelligence all capable of perceiving the world in ways I can only imagine. To assume all existence will stop upon death seems a bit selfish, I may not know what happens after death but assuming it's nothingness, your conciousness may no longer exist but your body and actions will remain. Unless it's a simulation of course, which in my opinion is not atheism.
Unless it’s a simulation
For real, sometimes I almost hope this is all just the background simulation for a matrioshka brain.
So no, there is no such thing as consciousness. There are an infinite variety of states to whatever pile of hydrocarbins that feels it at the time though.
