Yeah, but you’re still thinking of it as a moment continuing - like it has to continue on some sort of alternate timeline where it is experienced or be taken out of the current timeline. Just imagine the timeline that you’re on - and you hit a brick wall and can’t move further. You can’t move to the point of your own vanishing.
No - I’m not saying that experiencing continues or is timeless. I’m saying that because our consciousness does not continue on the timeline - from our perspective we do not end - time ends.
I don’t think it requires a new theory, really, just thinking through.
If JFK is experiencing that moment forever, then at least there is no pain or pleasure or subjective perspective of any sort occurring, since the only way that I can see for this to be true is for the subject to step entirely outside the perception of space or time, which would include cessation of sensation.
Hence, I don’t really see anything about the scenario which is more pessimistic than any other scenario I’ve heard. Experience requires movement, or space and time. So if JFK is locked forever in that moment, it’s only as a non-conscious non-entity.
I freely admit my knowledge of space and time is rudimentary and perhaps sophmoric.
Well, no, I’m not. I’m thinking of “moments” as things to which “continuing” is a term that cannot be meaningfully applied; a moment is a single frame, a single instant of spacetime. Those terms only become meaningful applied to a plurality of those moments along the timelike curve. That curve is a function of the relationship between the moments composing it.
And Achilles can never move to the tortoise.
My position is simply that consciousness is expressed in (not necessarily is produced from, but is expressed in) particular configurations of spacetime. When those configurations are not present in a given reference frame, consciousness is not expressed within them.
If consciousness can have a perspective of time ending, then consciousness is not of time. It is timeless.
Between C2 and c3, the precise configurations of spacetime that allowed the expression of the sleeper’s consciousness were not there. Then they were again.
From my perspective, the moment simply is NOT–until there is a next moment. Starting and ending are things that simply are not there without other moments in relation to them.
This talk of what consciousness does or does not do when you sleep or die is completely arbitrary. We cannot yet measure consciousness so we do not know what it does when we sleep. For all we know the sleep timeline could be:
----------------- (meaning, consciousness is bullshit)
or it could be
CccCcCCCCccCCCCcc (dreaming, resting, all happening in random jumbles)
perhaps at some point we’ll understand this (and on a sidenote Francis Crick, the double helix guy, is trying to do just this at the Salk institute for biotechnology), but until that day, you can’t assert anything
All right. You’re getting hung up on the moment thing. Because you think this is basically a calculus problem. You think I’m zeroing in on some infinitely small amount of time that can be isolated. I’m not saying that either.
Let me put it this way: it’s not just that the moment doesn’t end from your perspective - your life doesn’t end either.
I’m assuming your talking about “unconscious” or “dead” moments. But those moments exist on a timeframe that’s completely irrelevant to your consciousness. Your consciousness exists on an entirely different timeline from its own perspective.
So by referring to those “unconscious” moments, or post-last-moment-of-consciousness moments, you really are hopping to an alternate timeline - which is what I’m saying is a fallacy.
So you’re saying that if C2 has nothing to follow it, it doesn’t exist? That can’t be right. Then what about the moment prior to C2? Does C1 cease to exist because C2 can’t exist because C3 never came? and on and on to your birth?
Well that would be because I was using it as an arbitrary example. We know consciousness exists because it thinks. I posit it ends, because i don’t believe in god. I also assume all that time I didn’t notice passing when I slept was time I was unconscious. Therefore it’s pretty safe to posit that some form of C—C exists and that’s all I needed to make my point.
Descartes says “I think therefore I am”, Nietzsche says Descartes was wrong, but that perhaps the “thought” is what exists and merely “comes to” the ‘thinker’. Who’s right? Point is we don’t know, so to simply say “We think therefore consciousness exists and that proves blahbalh” is faulty… but forget that for now
If it’s always CCCCCC, that is, that consciousness never ceases while we live, merely becomes apparent to us at times or does not… In other words, perhaps consciousness as we think of it is our reaction to electrochemical activity in the brain, “thoughts” or complex reactions racing through the neural pathways as soon as encephalization occurs. If this is the case, when we die, these electrochemical activities cease, no more consciousness. No more moments, no more infinite living in that last moment, no more perception, no more nothing.
(nervous first post-but I am itching to have a say…)
Well,personally I fail to see what difference it would make at all. I mean, I could have been stuck in this particular moment for 3000 years, if I myself perceive it as an instant, in what way does it last forever?