Reincarnation of the consciousness is inevitable

[Angrboda]

Well, as noted, both P1 and P2 have problems, but I'd like to concentrate on P2 and what I see as problematic.

The first problem is equating what can happen with what you can imagine happening. Even if time is infinite, there are unlikely to be any square circles. Likewise for other things, if the laws of nature do not permit something, even if its impossibility is not obvious to us, it will not occur.

The more problematic is the sliding from can happen to will happen. It's entirely possible that under, say, Penrose's CCC scenario or Hindu cosmogony, that the universe repeats itself, but each time that it repeats, it repeats itself the same exact way. So while certain states are reachable, certain states are not in fact ever reached. (And while it's probably not proper to use the concepts of probability here, one might conjecture that such a state of affairs occurring is highly improbable; however, according to the rules of your hypothetical, even the most improbable will occur. Obviously, you've got some modal difficulties to iron out.)


One final point. Even if my consciousness were to be recreated in another container in some other time, there are some questions of sense involved. Would that container remember being me? It's not entirely clear which would be the most appropriate me for it to be. I don't remember having lived before, so if it remembers having lived before, then it is not me. Likewise, if it does not have my memories of this life, it also is not me. So the very real question is, what do you mean when you say that "I" am reincarnated. It's not immediately clear you can even make sense of it. (This problem also occurs in other contexts, including Star Trek. It's hypothesized that one day we will be able to digitize the relevant aspects of a person and broadcast that information to distant stars, where it will be used to create duplicates of ourselves. What the 'personhood' of those duplicates would be is unclear. Let's suppose we need a lot of technicians, so we create 1,000 copies of the best technician's template we can obtain. How do we treat them?)