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u/Will_Yeeton 2d ago
This is about as compelling as the idea that maybe I'll go to Christian Hell. Like, I guess it could happen. Not like anybody's woken up to tell us about it.
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u/Will_Yeeton 2d ago
"What if you die and become a ghost but like, in a really lame way"
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u/iinsistuponmyself 2d ago
i don't think you understand the concept
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u/iinsistuponmyself 2d ago
I'm being downvoted but they genuinely dont understand the concept, no hate
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 2d ago
Typically helps to state how you think they are misunderstanding it when you tell someone you think they don't understand it.
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u/Will_Yeeton 2d ago
I looked up enough things to know my ghost comment is silly, you're right that I don't understand well. Can you give me your basic impression or a good link to read?
I still stand by my Hell comment, at least as far as people saying they're afraid that this is how death and consciousness operates. I'm mostly afraid of death because the good times will seemingly end, not the maybes after.
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u/kake92 2d ago edited 2d ago
There is an actual, simple but substantive argument to be made though, which doesn't really have a good rebuttal no matter how you try to cut it. If the "condition" of nonexistence that preceded your current life is identical to and completely consistent with the one after death, meaning that it's a qualitatively identical state of just blank and void in both cases where there should be no experience or sentience of any form, then it doesn't make much sense at all to say that there couldn't be life and experience again eventually, if it already occurred the first time. Because tell me now, how could the latter one of two completely identical, only temporally separated conditions of null and nothingness be definitively and categorically excluded from any outcome for all of eternity? There was no such absolute law of exclusion in the time prior, so why this arbitrary exception in the latter??? Genuinely, that is a real problem. A double standard of logic perhaps. And I would like a real, equally substantive answer. It would make sense if the latter, post death condition was different, but I have seen no reason to argue for that. We come from the void, we return to it, right? X>Y... Y>X... X>Y... not X>Y>Z! Is anybody with me here??
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u/Messier_Mystic 2d ago edited 2d ago
It would be instantaneous too. A googolplex years could pass and suddenly something else wakes up.
It's an utterly unfalsifiable prospect, but for the reasons you've identified, I can't completely write it off. And it unnerves me. I derive zero comfort from the thought.
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u/Will_Yeeton 1d ago
I think I get you. I don't think I can logically argue against it happening because we can't know. Like we don't know if we're going to hell either. There doesn't seem to be anything for the argument except for the fact that it's unfalsifiable and logically possible.
While I don't have all the reading to argue that consciousness itself comes from brains alone, I would say we can see a bit more clearly that memories do with how they're stored, created, and can be manipulated. Without my memory and experience I don't think I'm meaningfully me. So unless that second consciousness also happens to be neurologically identical or very similar to my brain at the point of death, that's just a different guy. Why should I be scared that a different guy could one day be born? Or spontaneously generated or some other logically possible fantasy.
Idk. It feels kinda like we're just fishing for a secular afterlife to get scared about. A second consciousness is just as logically possible as a billion other things. I think I understand the argument at this point but I don't get why people are unsettled by it.
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u/Messier_Mystic 1d ago
Personally, I think calling it far-fetched is generous, but I find it unnerving because it could entail that ANY possible experience can happen. Like, as I mentioned earlier, being a chicken in a slaughterhouse or an alien from a world where biological life persists despite being in constant physical agony. And since it's an entirely secular concept, there's no karma to influence the odds of what "your" next rebirth is.
Of course, as you pointed out, without memory linking instances, your identity is lost and there is no recall of good or bad lifetimes. As far as utility goes, however, I think you could motivate an argument to reduce the suffering of all conscious beings as much as possible if we take this possibility seriously. But that's being more serious than I care to be on a memes page.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 1d ago
This just seems to assume that there’s some irreducible “me” which would somehow form again on the other side. But of course many people would reject that. I’m the sum of my parts, so once this life is over it’s permanently over. Any future experience wouldn’t be “mine”
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u/Immediate_Song4279 2d ago
We at least know its not bad enough to die and come back to complain about
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u/JDwalker03 2d ago
Don't be afraid to cast into hell but be afraid even to be rejected by hell, after heaven said no.
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u/Messier_Mystic 2d ago
I for one, look forward to the next phenomenal experience as a toad in a small pond somewhere.
Of course the odds are overwhelming it'll be a chicken in a slaughterhouse, but I'm not letting the dread win today.
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u/PM_ME_MEW2_CUMSHOTS 2d ago
Sorry, you've gotta go through nematode a few hundred million times before you roll a vertebrate again.
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u/Inevitable_Bid8719 2d ago
And then the beetles lol
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u/Conscious_Archer2658 2d ago
Who says you won't be a random bacteria floating around in someone's nostril? Or perhaps a bedbug :)
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u/Katten_elvis 2d ago
Yup, biological death is no guarantee of phenomenal death (in fact I think it's likely imppossible to truly die)
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u/iKruppe 2d ago
But we can literally show your brain going dark after death. And nothing has ever really indicated that experience is anything but an emergent property of our brains. So when that stops, so do you. This seems like a fun fantasy idea though.
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u/iinsistuponmyself 2d ago
It's literally a physicalist materialist account of death. It's predicated on the idea that "you" are your brain, or rather that there is no true "you", rather something completely arbitrary, transient and deterministic. It's true that your brain goes "dark" but other brains still exist, which is the point.
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u/iKruppe 2d ago
Yeah but I don't experience those other brains, so how would that impact my peaceful death? Just because some nebulous definition of consciousness persists, if it's not at all related to "me" anymore then "me" is gone.
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u/WhereTFAreWe 2d ago edited 2d ago
You don't experience five minutes ago either, so why identify with the being that did?
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u/Messier_Mystic 2d ago
None of what you said is incompatible with Tom Clark's Generic Subjective Continuity theory
I don't buy it for ten seconds, but it's a purely physicalist concept.
And boy do I hope it's just bollocks.
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u/iKruppe 2d ago
I haven't explored this concept, the algorithm just showed it to me and the synopsis I read which indicated that my personal experiences won't be part of such a continuity just made me think.... so why? What does it matter. If my thoughts cease, then whether some collective consciousness exists or not, my experience is gone either way. Just seemed like a weird theory that means nothing really. Still the scientific, prevailing notion is that consciousness is a result of the biology of the brain, at least at the core it's neurons firing. So I guess I'm coming from that perspective.
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u/iinsistuponmyself 2d ago
Well you saying it doesn't matter is in his view equal to you saying what does your future self matter, what does it matter what i will experience in a week or thirty years, because that's not me, not now. The view is predicated on you being your brain, that is in no way contradictory to the philosophy.
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u/Messier_Mystic 2d ago
Again, GSC accepts all of that. There is no collective consciousness, and consciousness is entirely a consequence of brains on this view.
What it suggests is that there is ultimately no strict indexicality to subjectivity.
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u/TheEricle 2d ago
The way I see it is things existed before I was alive, but from my perspective there was nothingness. Therefore I assume that after I die, I will be returned to that very same nothingness. And I certainly didn't have any complaints about not existing before I suddenly did, so dying is probably fine in the long run. Not like I'd want to die. Existing is a once in a lifetime chance and all that
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u/notaprotist 1d ago
Who’s “I?” You don’t really believe in “I,” do you, if you’re a reductionist? “I” is just more things. It doesn’t go away, it just gets really different
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u/FixGMaul 2d ago
You can't really prove experience is an emergent property of brains either.
They don't call it "the easy problem of consciousness"
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u/iKruppe 2d ago
Maybe not, but whatever constitutes consciousness in a living body that we can tell disappears when they die. Sure, some magic could "leak" out but what does that really change about your peaceful death if that continuous experience doesn't include your thoughts, memories and experiences anyway?
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 1d ago
lol what? Why would that be impossible?
How did 8 people agree with this
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u/Enthiogenes 2d ago
I have always wondered how to ask people this question. What if instead of being generic, our subjective continuity after death is the experience of our final state of mind, eternalized?
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u/Inevitable_Bid8719 2d ago
Everything changes in our universe. Our consciousness is in this universe so I don't think it can be eternalised like that.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 1d ago
Not sure what It means to have an experience with no temporality or change.
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u/Enthiogenes 1d ago
I don't know about temporality, but as for change, I could conceptualize that within the cognitive model of perception; Specifically the model of the mind as a prediction engine. To have an experience without change is the absence of perception. But I wouldn't necessarily assume this to be an experience without change. More like, it is the experience of the last change, but forever.
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u/lurkerer 1d ago
OP are you talking about Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity by Thomas Clark?
If so, it's actually a pretty interesting take.
TL;DR Say you had brain surgery and it changed a part of you. Like you wake up and now you hate coffee. Still you we'd all say. Now keep changing more and more and we get some Sorites as to when it's not you anymore. Many people agree it's subjective awareness that's the most core "you" thing. But if you can wake up as a different person and it's still you, then what makes a different person not you in some sense? If consciousness is a process, like fire, then one flame being snuffed out doesn't end fire as a thing, it persists elsewhere or in potentio.
I don't really agree with this but it's a good read anyway.
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u/reeseesxx 2d ago
basically samsara, but inescapable and not powered by karma, sounds promising
did i get it right?
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u/Elegant_Athlete_3737 2d ago
i have thought about this before, it is a interesting idea, i also independently thought of it a while ago so that's cool, that someone else also did, but they prob articulated it better, but then i wonder this, what differs me and you? the contents of our awareness may differ but how our awareness works is the exact same no? can't it just be one conciousness multiplexed across multiple bodies essentially lol?
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u/mada-din-sarin 1d ago
“Peace of death” and it’s me going to Hell. At least it might mean something
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