After death - what's next? (Pt II) Lent 2024, Day 35

OK, so having split the question of "can consciousness survive biological death", and having answered (at least to my own satisfaction) with a "yes", I now return to the question of the Individual and the Collective.

The ego does not survive death; it dies with the body. The ego is the objective 'me', it's the human being that you can see. The ego is how we project ourselves out into society. Ask ten people to describe me and you'll get ten broadly similar descriptions. But the ego is not consciousness. Consciousness is the subjective 'I'. No one can with any accuracy describe my subjective conscious experience, what it's like to be me. Any attempt would be little more than a guess. And similarly, dear reader, I cannot describe your subjective conscious experience. 

Subjective conscious experience is at the very core of who we really are as individuals. And as I mentioned in earlier posts about the nature of time, the present slips into the past with terrifying speed. All we really have to back up that sense of who we are is our memory; memory of events and memory of experience – the two being quite different. 

I may no longer be able to recall what I had for breakfast last Tuesday week and what I did afterwards (an event), but I can easily summon up a memory of my conscious experience of eating breakfast before school as a teenager in our house in West Ealing. The sound of the breadknife cutting through a wheatgerm loaf, the taste and consistency of Alpen with Sainsbury's strawberry yogurt, the warmth of a mug of milky tea in my hands, the smell of bacon frying, the appearance of our kitchen as it looked back then. 

Right now, I have just emerged from having had an intense qualia memory experience, or induced flashback, from the mid-1970s. Fifty years ago, and yet there it is, captured vividly. I have experienced it again, an experience congruent with the original feeling of actually being there. [There's only one human being alive out of the eight billion on our planet who can also conjure that specific conscious experience, and that's my brother.]

So memory of experience is central to one's identity. Lose your memory, you lose your identity. 

When you die, does all your memory dissipate? If you are a materialist and assume that consciousness is local, located exclusively within your brain, then that's it. All gone at the moment of death, for ever.

Qualia experiences can be summoned (like the one described above). They can be triggered by sensory input (the smell of bacon frying, for example). Or they can come to you spontaneously, neither summoned nor triggered. You're doing something, focused on it, an suddenly a qualia memory pops into to your stream of consciousness. (Stream of consciousness as distinct from train of thought.) PAFF! There it is. With practice, you can learn to pin down exactly when and where you had that spontaneous, congruent subjective conscious experience, matching precisely what you felt back then. This sensation can be called déjà vu. I have been logging some of the ones I most frequently experience under the blog post headings Qualia memory compilations (here's a sample).

And now here's the most intriguing thing. All of my life, since early childhood, I have been getting such qualia memory flashbacks to experiences, feelings, from a time before my current biological life. They are less frequent fainter, nevertheless they feel just as real and meaningful as those from my childhood or adolescence. They feel similar, and inform me of a past America, from the 1930s to the 1950s. 

What do these anomalous qualia experiences feel like? Qualitatively, they feel exactly like memories of qualia experienced in my childhood, except they can't be traced back to my childhood; they are clearly extraneous to one's current-life experiences. Many I remember having had in childhood; they keep returning. These exomnesia events happen to me a few times a week; they are consistent, familiar and pleasant.

And as well as anomalous qualia memories (exomnesia or xenomnesia), there are also dreams, far less frequent. These I call the canonical past-life dreams. Unlike normal dreams, which are always an illogical, inconsistent, mish-mash of places, people and worries, these past-life are consistent in time and place and action, and strongly memorable. (Here a list of them.) They always refer to events rather than just being re-experienced subjective experiences, as the flashbacks are.

These phenomena, deeply personal, speak to me of a continuity of existence, though the mystery remains; metaphysically, are we all individuals, or are we all One? 

More (questions than answers) tomorrow.

Good luck has occurred.

{{ I woke up yesterday morning around 6am, with one word in my brain, rattling around like a loose nut in the boot of a car. 'Mozzle'. In my drowsy state, I attempted to not to lose this word by remembering it as a mix of the words 'muzzle' and 'nozzle' – successfully, as it turned out. As soon as I was up, I checked it on Google. "Mozzle (noun) (Australian English, informal) luck; fortune, word origin late 19th century: from Hebrew mazzāl ‘star or luck’." I did not know that. I did, however, know the Hebrew 'mazel tov', which translates as 'good luck' – a description, not a wish – an acknowledgement that good luck has occurred. Which I believe should be linked to gratitude. }}

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Altered states - caffeine and alcohol

Lent 2021: Day 35
The science of coincidence

Lent 2020: Day 35
Soul and Body