Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)
naturalism.org
naturalism.org
I kept thinking that something profound was coming but no.
Edit: Perhaps it is interesting that so many non-theistic historical figures do reference death as a nothingness and suggest that that nothingness is somehow experienced by some remainder of one’s being, which is of course bit of a spiritual stance. A paradox in their worldview perhaps? Or just a sign that to drop a believe in god does not mean to drop believe in a soul, for some at least?
On the other hand I highly doubt that nothingness actually exists. Why should we expect the arising of experience to be a one off occurrence ?
If the void exists it has a major bug because experience (ie. non-void) somehow arose from it and every programmer knows that bugs always repeat.
I'm pretty sure you are relying on memory because how do you know this "evidence" other than by experiencing it as memories ?
What is certain is that this "evidence" is only known to you within conscious experience (either memories, thoughts, or maybe some other kind of experience I haven't thought of) so using it to infer something about the nature of conscious experience itself is a questionable exercise.
In any case I disagree that we know nothing. We know that subjective experience exists. I think it makes sense to start with what we actually know rather than with a bunch of concepts we've invented (like matter) to explain the phenomena we experience. The only basis I see for believing in the reality of these concepts is their apparent consistency and predictability, but even that is largely illusory once you move beyond very simple systems or machines that we've designed to be predictable.
I did not say this, I said the discussion is boring because it’s not falsifiable. We might as well just say fairies are real but not perceivable by humans or any device humans can build. It could be true, but who cares? We’ll never know one way or the other by definition.
In many ways materialism is more like your example about unknowable fairies than anything I have said because ultimately it postulates that there is something called matter that exists independently of consciousness and yet is knowable only through consciousness. That concept of "bare matter" as a thing in itself looks a lot like your unknowable fairies.
Given 7.9 billion people alive right now, give or take, I'm not quite sure where the idea it might be a one-off occurrence comes from.
But even if you mean our individual personal experience, I'm not sure what that would mean. A copy of me would think and experience in ways similar to me to a point, but we would still have different and distinct actual individual experiences of being.
The idea leads to so many questions. In your version, is the reincarnated person conscious of their past selves? If not, is that any different than a clone? What happens between death and reincarnation? How does the math work? Is there an upper limit to the number of human consciousnesses that can be incarnated at once? Non-human consciousnesses? Non-sentient ones?
Along those lines: what is it that links (solely) my body with (solely) my consciousness? Why do I experience only my own experiences and not that of my friend's? How can I prove to myself that I'm not a brain in a vat?
Personally I have no particularly strong views on these matters but some form of non-dualism (in the the sense of advaita vedanta) seems to me to make the most sense.
From that perspective many of your questions kind of go away because at the most fundamental level there is only one consciousness. You don't perceive the experiences of others because consciousness has created a construct within itself that filters out experiences that don't make sense from "your" point of view. The part that I admit is difficult to get one's head around is that it has created not one but many (perhaps even infinitely many) such constructs. We are only able to experience one dream at a time but absolute consciousness/brahman/God/I or whatever you want to call it experiences many.
EDIT: Sorry I did want to address one of your questions more specifically:
> How can I prove to myself that I'm not a brain in a vat?
I don't think you can, even in principle.
In fact advaita is a lot like that in some ways, or like the simulation hypothesis. Where I think it differs is that "brain in a vat" and the simulation hypothesis are both making assumptions that what's outside the simulation is something like what's inside it. Advaita makes no such assumptions.
That was just shorthand for "in what you mean when you say reincarnation".
Yeah, you just re-invented nothingness after death, just with more words...
Shout out to Peter F. Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy, in which an interstellar humanity is threatened by the discovery that souls persist after death. Recommended for my fellow sci-fi aficionados.
In other words, he just means "death is not an experienced nothingness".
Well, big deal. It's still nothingness, as far as we're concerned as living beings now (when we consider our death).
If there's nothing after death. That will last forever. This nothingness will be an infinite nothingness after death. Then, even if the experience of nothingness is timeless/instantaneous, the infinitude of this nothingness becomes qualitatively different. Because you can't have infinity pass instantaneously. Say there's some point after which there's infinitely no life. Then, and only then, this forever of nothingness is as good as experienced. A paradoxically instantaneous yet infinite time of non experience. Essentially a non experience, that we can't experience, forever. At that extreme it becomes akin to an experience. This is how I could agree one could imagine there is nothingness forever after death.
Still there remains the issue of whether or not this nothingness actually occurs. If it's the case that it does, how are we not there already? Almost surely, I'd find myself in the infinitely dead timespan of the universe rather than in the relatively zero sized timespan of the universe in which life exists. The infinitely unconscious tail end of the universe would be like an inescapable trap.
The idea that if infinite experience of any sort exists I would be experiencing it already also requires some justification. To me, I lean more toward the ideas of determinism, and that time isn't so absolute as we tend to experience it. The block universe, perhaps. I think that the theories of relativity lend credence to this seeing as they show us that time is very real but that there is no absolute reference frame from which time is ticking along at the same rate always for everyone within it. Add to these ideas that you could have woken up at any time in the past, as someone living hundreds of thousands of years ago, but did not. Equally, there's no reason why you didn't wake up as anyone in the future. Contentious, I know, but that goes along with my "b theory" belief of time. And we are living in the future, compared to those who found themselves waking up in the past. Why did you wake up into this particular body? Why not one of the past or future? Why not as anybody else? Why did I wake up as me? And then imagine, if ever I "wake", just as I woke into this body, into some experience that is infinite, then I will be trapped forever.
Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.
Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.
If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.
And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.
But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.
But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.
But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.
That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?
My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."
I think the article touches on that.