Submitted by BernardJOrtcutt t3_xuk9z9 in philosophy
AnAnonAnaconda t1_irf6r9z wrote
Reply to comment by amirealonthisplain in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | October 03, 2022 by BernardJOrtcutt
>Once passed, you'd have no conscious self to keep track of "time" so even though it would take an unimaginable amount of time to happen, eventually in the cycle of the universe all the elements that make up us would surely come together again at some point and we'd experience what we know as conscious life again right?
Indeed; and this is how I've thought about it for a while. I don't believe that the dead consciously experience anything at all, including the passage of time. And any passage of time that we don't consciously experience, even the history of an entire cosmic cycle multiplied by the largest number you could imagine, is squashed down to zero time from such a perspective (really, the lack of a perspective, or no point of view). We literally have eternity to wait for the right conditions for nature to happen to produce us again, and no matter long that might take, it will subjectively be no time at all.
From a first person subjective point of view, I imagine it going something like this:
your "final" conscious moment -> blink -> you "first" conscious moment all over again
Since you're newly formed at that point, and memory seems to be mostly or entirely neurological, you'll never remember any moment of conscious experience prior to this. But maybe during the course of your life you'll hit upon the the idea that you might've experienced this all before.
For two current cyclic cosmologies, see Roger Penrose and Paul Steinhardt.
amirealonthisplain t1_irzuooy wrote
You get what I was trying to say! Thank you for commenting.
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