this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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chapotraphouse
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i think these questions are really uninteresting if you're gonna insist on being purely rational materialist about it, but i think it gets more interesting when you're willing to play with what reality might be a little more. There are religious motifs that repeat in many cultures about the eternal reocurrence. This idea that earth is made and destroyed in countless infinite, repeating cycles.
What if you and I have been going at this for a while?
But if you want the answers science can give right now, probably not
Well if none of your memories carry over it's certainly not you anymore.
Do you think so? I think what we are internally isn't fully dependent on memory and reference, there is some element of us that just is, for at least as long as we're alive. Behind your eyes and resting within your interior is a spark of something that has existed continuously since you were born, that little "I" of awareness may never change.
It's always you imo. You can go through mk ultra style brainwashing, lose your sense of identity, find yourself under a new name and with new interests, but between who you were and who you are, are enough commonalities that I would dispute the notion we're just electrical signals in wet gooey meat endlessly referencing the past to navigate the present and anticipate the future - but that's me.
I mean what you're describing is an innate soul that cannot be experimentally observed, similar to cissexist metaphysical sex but for broader identity. It's an inferior concept of the self than one based off memories, language use, behavior/activity, and ego-image. I suppose even total amnesia can leave behind subconscious behaviors from prior, but this is "memory and reference," so...
If you're talking about the "I" of continuous stream of consciousness, this can be hijacked by multiple entities and even cut off entirely through dissociative barriers. And arguably it's not of the same quality at a young age anyway.
And you’ve done it. Independently arrived at the truth of no-self. You don’t have to agree, but if the truly discontinuous that is reality can appear continuous, perhaps this consciousness could appear continuous with another life (I am in no way denying the laws of cause and effect).