chapotraphouse

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

Pure materialist response:

'You', your consciousness, is not a thing, but a process, produced by mainly your brain, along with your sensory organs and nervous system.

Because it is a process, it is always changing, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically, and is never really exactly the same same as it was 10 years ago, or even 5 minutes ago.

Death is when this ongoing process of being conscious ceases, permenantly, totally, due to the failure of the biological systems and processes that produce your consciousness.

It is a total termination of the process of 'you', of your consciousness.

Even if some set of conditions somehow allowed for your exact body, brain, nervous system, exact electro chemical state of all of them that would give rise to the exact same memories, whatever, even if all of that was to somehow reconstitute themselves, that would not suddenly be an awakening, a continuation of your previous consciousness.

It would be an independent copy, which, depending on whether or not it had somehow been constructed in sufficient detail as to share all your memories up until your death, still would not be you.

It may believe it is you, but it isn't.

'You' died.

...

The teleporter in Star Trek kills you and makes a reconstructed clone of you, with your memories, when you use it.

Even if your pattern is capable of being stuck in the frame buffer and saved or lost, if it is saved, the thing that walks out is a very convincing and very convinced copy of you, despite this way of thinking being largely, but not entirely, stigmatized in the societies of the show.

The actual 'you' was obliterated upon being energized, but the illusion of this not being the case is socially normalized... somewhat comparable to how individual car ownership and usage is extremely normalized in the US, despite the well understood dangers and costs of this.

Everything 'just works' if you go along with it, and if you don't, it kind of demands a reformation of much of society, and makes people think about a lot of things that they would rather not.

...

Infinity =/= everything

Even if the universe has an infinite lifespan (unknown) that does not in any way imply any possible outcome will occur. So there is absolutely no reason to expect a body like yours will be recreated. Even if it was, it still wouldn't be you it would be your clone.

I don't think given an infinite amount of time the universe would produce an identical me. That's such a specific combination of matter and chemical processes it just feels silly to assume it would happen. Even if I agreed that it would inevitably happen, I think there's an implication that a very large number of almost but not quite mes would also come into existence (because if I understand the premise, it's basically "on a long enough timescale every possible thing will happen") and frankly that's more disturbing than ceasing to exist (which, to be clear, is very disturbing to me).

I'll also say that a clone of me with my memories is still not me. Such a thing could exist simultaneously with me and it wouldn't reduce my desire to personally remain alive even slightly, it's a different guy, but with a lot in common with me.

What is this "rebirth"? There'll be many births, perhaps many similar to previous ones, but what makes "re"? Right now, everyday on earth (perhaps on other worlds) there are many births of people who are quite similar to you already, why do they constitute any less a rebirth than someone a thousand billion years from now?

My lot isn't with "me" and me being eternal or me reborn. I'm part of the totality.

We tend to define physical objects in a way that have spatial and temporal boundaries. That means if I point to a particular physical object, you can usually draw a rough border around it, as well as talk about when it came into existence and when it goes away. The boundaries are never really solid and there's usually some ambiguity to them, but it's hard to even know what is being talked about without these fuzzy boundaries.

For example, if I point to a cat and say "that's a cat," you generally understand the rough shape of a cat and thus have a rough outline, and this helps you look for where it's located. If there is a water bowl next to the cat, you immediately know the bowl is not the cat and is not what I'm talking about because it's not within those borders. These borders are, again, a bit fuzzy, if you zoom up on a microscopic scale it becomes less clear where the cat begins and where it ends, but these fuzzy borders are still important because without them, if I said "look at that cat over there" you could never figure out what I'm talking about because you would have no concept of the border of the cat at all, which is necessary to locate it.

It is also necessary to our understanding that these boundaries evolve continuously. If a building was demolished, and then a century later someone inspired by it builds another with the same plans, even if it's in the same location, we would typically not think of it as literally the same building, because they did not exist at the same times, i.e. their temporal boundaries do not overlap as there is a discontinuous gap between them. If a cat is located at one position and then later at another, its boundaries have moved, but this movement is continuous, it's not as if the cat teleportation from one point to the next.

But this is precisely why people find the teletransportation paradox difficult to grapple with. What if the cat did teleport from one location to the next such that the original cat is destroyed and its information is used to reconstruct it elsewhere? Is it still the same cat? How we define objects is ultimately arbitrary so you can say either yes or no, but personally I think it's more consistent to say no.

Consider if the teleporter succeeded in reconstructing the cat, but due to a malfunction, it failed to destroy the original cat. Now you have two. It seems rather obvious to me that, if this were to occur, what you have is a clone and not the original cat. They are obviously different beings with different perspectives of the world as they would each see out of their own eyes separately. If I cloned myself, I would not see out of my clone's eyes, so it is clearly not the same object as myself.

If the teleporter clearly is merely cloning the cat when the destructive process malfunctions, then I do not see a good reason for this to change when the destructive process is functioning correctly. Let's say the destructive process malfunctions only a little bit so there is a second delay in the destruction, that means two cats exist for a second before one is destroyed. Would the cat that is reconstructed therefore be a clone for one second, then suddenly turn into the original cat after a second has passed? That just seems very bizarre to me.

It makes more sense to me to say that all a teleporter really does is clone. That means the original object is always destroyed, and the new object created is always a new object. It is not the same object as the original.

Why do I bring all this up? Because I would be inclined to thus say the person who exists "countless eons" after you died would at best be considered a clone of yourself and not actually yourself. Your temporal boundaries do not overlap, there is no continuous transition from the "you" of the past and the "you" eons later, so they are not the same objects. They are different people.

Sure, if we assume the universe can exist eternally (a big assumption, but let's go with it), then if enough time passes, a perfect clone of yourself would be certain to exist. Yet, if we're assuming the universe can exist for that long, why not also assume the universe is spatially infinite as well? We have no reason to suspect that if you kept traveling in one direction long enough, that you would somehow stop discovering new galaxies. As far as we know, they go on forever.

Hence, if you kept traveling in one direction far enough, you would also eventually find a perfect clone of yourself, which would actually exist at the same time as you right now. If we were to accept that the clone of yourself in the far future is the same object as you, wouldn't you not also have to conclude that the clone at a far distance from you is the same object as you? I find this to be rather strange because, again, you do not see out of your clone's eyes, it's clearly a different person. I would thus be inclined to say neither are "you." One does not spatially overlap you (exists in the same time but a different location) and the other does not temporally overlap you (could possibly even exist in the same location, but definitely not at the same time).

It thus seems more consistent to me to say both are merely clones and thus not the same object. It would be a different person who just so happens to look like you but is not you.

Somewhere between now and the end of time my pants will be shid

this just tripped me out real hard, my tiny brain can't comprehend

i feel like whats missing in this discussion is the effect of quantum mechanics on consciousness. there is some research that shows that randomness introduced by quantum particles can affect synapses, and theoretically consciousness. and I think that even on infinite scales you can't really get the same exact quantum patterns, they will never repeat, or else it wouldn't really be random.

The thing that's helped me understand this argument is that there are different forms and sizes of infinity. let's say you add 1 infinitesimal (1/infinity) every given time interval. Even if time is infinitely long, you will never surpass 1. So you will never produce 100 or 1000, or any arbitrary number greater than 1.

Similarly there are so much variables required to form your conciousness that even in an infinite amount of time it can never be reformed spontaneously. The size of infinities involved in producing a given person's conciousness is orders of magnitude greater than the infinity of time.

Nothing will cause a new "you" with your current memories and personality to be recreated, but new blank slate subjects are being created all the time, which we all started as.

https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity

Real question is if a Boltzmann brain can really even exist or if it's just an antiquated mechanical materialist view on consciousness inconsistent with dialectical materialism.