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amirealonthisplain t1_ira01ty wrote

What if "Death" is misunderstood?

Hear me out but have you ever heard the saying "Sleep is the cousin of death"? Well what if there's more truth in that statement then society gives it credit for?

Think of when you sleep, you have no concept of time in the slightest. So why would death be any different? Physics tells us that energy can never be destroyed, it only changes form. 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?

I mean of corse we wouldn't be aware of our previous lives like so many claim to be able to remember but does this mean in a technical sense "Reincarnation" "could actually scientificly possible.

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AnAnonAnaconda t1_irf6r9z wrote

>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.

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aronofskywetdream t1_iroyvot wrote

But how much does the continuity of self plays a part in it? Even if it is assembled exactly the way you were when you were born, would that be you? Or would it need to be exactly as you are in this point of time? What happens if you are reassembled right now with different atoms but exactly as you are, would you experience that consciousness? This questions really intrigues me, because it makes me think we are only what we are right now in this blink of time, and in the past or future there’s another conscience that only inherits our memories or is constructing ours. Or maybe we are just everything everywhere at once just experiencing this fragment of reality, like if you were looking at this page of the book at this moment.

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JustAPerspective t1_irpfvv7 wrote

Well, we may all be constructs in a simulator for others - NPCs in a holodeck, and when we're not serving others... we dream of our lives in a world where what occurs isn't controlled by a program; it's insane, and often destroys itself... then is recreated, cuz the programmers who designed us felt empathy for the artificially created sentience they made.

Just a possibility.

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