Every day that I go out, I think “It’s just not believable, that people are this way”.
What’s believable is irrelevant.
Hmmmm.
OP: In fact, you don’t doubt the default at all. You’re making that claim, but doubt is in fact not one of your available options.
You just don’t enjoy knowing what you know.
Doubt means the evidence looks conflicted to you. And the evidence doesn’t look conflicted to you.
Sure why not.
I suppose, as a matter of definition, it’s up to everybody to figure that out for themselves. So tap yourself on the shoulder and ask yourself your opinion. Maybe talk it out over coffee or something.
Yes, if you think existence is horrible suffering, just wait. In a hundred years, you won’t think that anymore.
I remember that you have posted this thought experiment before, and I was so impressed that I used it as the basis of a fictional religion. In an infinite universe there could be numerous examples of entities that are momentarily identical to your current state, and some of them might persist for an arbitrary period. So some sort of continued existence is possible; even if it isn’t actually ‘you’, the entity that persists has all your memories and characteristics.
The idea in the OP is the opposite of that; the entity that is ‘you’ persists, but inherits no memories or information from your previous state. It is as if you were to suffer complete amnesia, including all language functions and other physical attributes. Is this a valid form of reincarnation? If the reincarnated person carries with it no data whatever, in what sense is it the same entity?
The concepts of anatta and anicca in Buddhism might be relevant here; non-soul and impermanence. Rather than persisting for ever, the self changes and forgets itself constantly.
Me, I think either the simulation hypothesis or many worlds interpretation covers the possibilities that “I” will exist beyond this single lifespan. I’m hoping in this particular simulation I’m in that they discover radical life extension soon…just a note to the programming and operations staff. 
That sounds really unpleasant, living the same life over and over again. Also there are endless trillions of conscious entities out there. There have been 100 billion humans, but other life forms (mostly social mammals) seem to have advanced consciousness too. Does the entire universe exist just for one individual consciousness for each run around the circle? Does each conscious entity get their own universe?
Have you seen a movie called ‘The Discovery’ on netflix? You might enjoy it.
I don’t need special concepts to reveal to me the idea of a self that’s constantly changing and forgetting. It’s everyday non-controversial reality for me.
Maybe discussing attributes that are conceptually separable from the self itself (:)) is a mistake. Maybe the important concept is that the separability is illusory, and that the thing about a self is that it can’t be separated from its attributes, not even in principle, because they aren’t attributes anyway, they’re identity. Or something.
Maybe I don’t possess consciousness because maybe “possessing” is not a trick that selfs can even do.
I was going to suggest Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome but to each their own.
Stranger
Watch it - you seem to have stepped in a quagmire of self-referential definition-rejection. Hand on for a second while I go get a rope.
It seems patently clear that people are, indeed, conscious, and do have thoughts, feelings, memories, and so on. It’s also the case that these thoughts, feelings, and memories are fluid over time, so it’s not particularly sensible to try to define any part of that as static and permanent. The physical engine on which the mind runs, too, is variable and impermanent - both in terms of gradual change, and in terms of how at some point the blood is going to stop flowing and decay will set in.
Impermanence is an inherent part of a human’s conscious mind.
This scares some people - though I’m still not 100% sure why.
I know I’m conscious. I just don’t think that necessarily means that there’s a separate “Me” who owns “my” consciousness. Maybe my attributes are my totality. Maybe beings have no core of existence. Maybe reincarnation of beings is, like reincarnation of the wind, a nonsense concept that’s simply fun to think about.
I’m of the opinion that consciousness is not an object, but an action - it’s something that something does, and not something that can be separated from the doer. Sort of like how you don’t have the act of cooking without a cook to be doing it. So I would say that my consciousness, my thinking, is something that I (my physical brain and body) is doing.
Thus, a proper reincarnation would involve the cognition process resuming as though it hadn’t ended - like a second cook stepping in and picking up where the first cook left off when he died.
But it’s not like there’s a cognition particle that the second cook takes from the first cook - it’s a process, not a thing.
The idea that the self is a distinct thing exists mainly because people want to take it, wrap it up with a bow, and mail it to heaven (or someplace warmer than heaven) to be unpacked and start existing there. Or, I suppose, to be mailed back to the start, scrubbed clean of all memories and identity, and placed back in the infant to start over again.
I have to give the OP credit for one thing - it has a novel conception of where souls come from. Usually they’re posited at having been created by some god at some point in the past to continue existing eternally thereafter. But the Op has them being created ex nihilo in a stable time loop - that is, each soul has its own stable time loop! Gotta give him credit for originality.
Of course there may be a reason that’s an unused idea - it’s bloody nightmarish. Forget your consciousness for a moment and think of your poor soul. It has to live through the same seventy years (or whatever) over and over and over again with no chance of escaping, ever. And it can’t change anything. It has no freedom. It has no escape. There is no sweet release at the end, to either heaven or oblivion - it can only sit down and watch the same sequence of events over and over and over and over and over…
In Groundhog Day Bill Murray was able to change things, to a degree, and he was still trying to commit suicide by halfway through the film. If they have even the slighest awareness of their eternal-yet-finite existence, we can be confident that souls in Marcus Flavius’s worldview are completely, utterly mad.
I get that. I’m saying maybe the “action” of the first cook is all there is to the first cook’s existence, and that the first cook’s perception of himself as “having” an existence separate from his actions is a mistake on his part. Maybe we are consciousness; maybe this is what consciousness looks like. Maybe the corpse of the first cook after he dies is no more his “remains” than are the remains of what he last cooked - maybe my body is just leftovers without any cosmic significance.
Well I dunno about you, faceless source of messages over the internet, but I have a physical body and a brain, and there’s scads of evidence that the brain (with backup from the body) is causing my thoughts. Things that happen to by brain effect my thoughts, in the same way that if you get the chef drunk he don’t cook so good no more, and if you sedate him his cooking goes out like a light. We can look at the physical/electrical activity within the brain via MRIs and such and broadly correlate types of brain activity with types of mental activity. And of course if you do something like cut off blood or oxygen to the brain its remaining actions and apparent thoughts all seem indicative of cognition shutting down, until it becomes completely unresponsive.
By all apparent evidence, the brain is the computer that cognition runs on. Simple as that. No magic involved.
And as for cosmic significance, nothing humanity has done has had cosmic significance. Given time we might blow it up yet, though.
Is death “the other side”?
It is “the undiscovered country”.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
Stranger
I think it’s incredibly shallow, a “knee-jerk” reaction. People assume that when a person dies, because they can no longer interact with us, or we can no longer interact with them, they have simply ceased to exist forever. People don’t consider the possibility that the dead do go on existing, just not in our time, or that the body is simply a vessel for something else.
It doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere. Your awareness is trapped in your ‘circle of time’ and cannot escape from it. Neither can it disappear, otherwise it would never have existed in the first place. Nor can it come into existence, because it always was.
Our ordinary view of time, including life and death, is quite false and subjective.Due to severe limitations in our psychic apparatus, we can only perceive time in a linear sense.
Awareness exists independently of the brain. We can observe that plants have awareness, even though they do not posses a brain.
Of course, there can be no “hard” evidence for this view. We do not, and will never no for sure what happens, where we go after death. But this view fits with the space-time model. The space-time model shows us that all moments of time eternally exist. So, when considering the subjective experience of the dead, we have every reason to suppose that they might still be existing, only their existence - everything that they are experiencing - is occurring in what we, the living, call “the past”.
The soul is made of “finer” matter/energy, and is beyond the direct investigation of science. The existence of the 'sou’l is inferred by certain phenomena, in this case, ‘life’.
People do consider it. Most atheists I know, by far, have grown up with theist parents. They’ve not only considered it; they used to believe it. I don’t think you actually believe there’s a knee jerk reaction to believing that when you’re dead, it’s lights out.
You didn’t explain why being too transitory makes what ‘seems to be the sensible “default” rational assumption’ false.
Lots of claims there. How about some evidence for all of those claims? I’d appreciate more info on my ‘circle of time’ and evidence of it too.
Not the sort of awareness that can be compared to human consciousness. Can you show that plants have awareness when they’re dead?
You’re talking about something else here than in your OP:
- The bottom of the circle represents birth/death. In this model a man is born, then goes round the circle, eventually coming back again to the point at the bottom of the circle. Upon death, ‘you,’ that is to say, your awareness, does not vanish into “nothingness.” It has nowhere else to go except back to the beginning, back to your conception.*
In the OP you were clearly talking about after death. You weren’t talking about every moment you’ve been alive being eternal. You said awareness doesn’t cease after death and it goes back to the beginning.
Later you said this:
*‘Awareness’ is something intangible, it can go back and forward in time, unlike our physical bodies. *
How do you know this? Are you saying matter and energy are the same thing? How can something be made from energy?
No, it’s not. See, I can make claims too.