From where I’m sitting, it looks like death should not be the end in that case.

You can’t perceive the passage of time when you are dead, so you’re just going to experience dying and then immediate rebirth after the countless eons pass for that rare moment where entropy spontaneously reverses to form your mind again.

  • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Yeah, I can see how that might be interpreted as ableist, should have watched my wording. What I think I meant by “functioning properly” is essentially “not dead”, i.e, my brain is doing my brain stuff right now, i.e it’s not currently smeared all over a wall after a high energy impact.

    I more than anyone can understand that my brain can take on a very weird array of states and still be conscious and experiencing the world. I’ve gone down the dissociatives rabbit hole, and the psychedelics rabbit hole, and I’ve been under general anesthesia before, and all that experience has made it very hard to place what exactly I am in this world, what my subjective experience is.

    Like I can come back from all of that, I don’t see why I can’t come back from more if my brain was rebuilt closely enough later. I don’t think I have an eternal soul, I think my conscious experience has thus far been very bound to this body, but I’m not sure if that’s only because that’s all I can remember.

    • QueerCommie [she/her, fae/faer]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      You referenced anesthesia though, so more consistently, moments without conscious experience do not have conscious experience. Otherwise, deep sleep and spiritual “reset” experiences are “the brain not functioning.” I suppose that’s linguistically complementary with death as “sleep from which you do not wake” except perhaps you do.

      • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Yeah, there are times my brain is existing and producing consciousness, and there are times where it isn’t, but so far my experience has been an uninterrupted chain of continuous consciousness regardless of any of those events, and as such it might well be the case that’s just the one universal constant I can be sure of, and I shouldn’t expect that to change with my death, especially when it might be the case that my brain, the thing supposedly producing the consciousness, might exist again in the case of Poincare recurrence, just like it exists again when I come out of the effects of general anesthesia, or it exists again when I’m born.

        None of this is solid philosophically or scientifically I’m sure, I’m literally just trying to put it in a way that makes sense to me and the way I understand the rest of the world.