Processing our mortality

[bennyboy]

It did; thank you.  You explained my angst better than I did.  It IS that broader paradox that frightens me.  It's not so much about a world, or an earth without me (as people have graciously, and correctly reminded me that my memory will live on in those I've loved), but this notion that crossing from existence into non-existence, from the experiencer's POV is indiscernible from not ever having experienced existence in the first place.  Some day I will not even have been a blip on my own radar, because there will be no radar. The utter intangibility of it is...as you said, mind boggling.

Sometimes I feel that not only is existence a mistake, but that consciousness itself is an evolutionary abomination.  How cruel is a trait (is it incorrect to call consciousness a trait?) that gives us, and only us the ability to comprehend and consider the cessation of our very existence?  Or the ability to ponder existence at all?  

I have a couple more ideas about this stuff. One is whether the child "me" is dead, non-existent but not exactly "dead," or exists in an evolved form in my adult state. What exactly is it that gives the sense of continuity from moment to moment? One might for shorthand just say "memory," but I don't think just remembering past similar states really is identical to the experiential sense of continuity we have.

In discussing the idea of an "eternal soul" or something, I'd suggest there are two kinds of eternity-- one in which you really have time stretching forward forever in this Universe, i.e. in which you are a god; but a different kind wherein time is meaningless-- for example for a photon, or for a black hole, or for the Big Bang singularity and MAYBE for ideas/events/etc. which aren't forced by consciousness to march in an ordered set from moment to moment. After all, you can only have an end to things when time is defined. It seems to me plausible that since everything is connected, that "you-ness" is more pervasive than it seems when you look at it through the eyes of a confused monkey stepping through moments in life.

I know this may be mocked for wild woo speculation, but it seems to me that losing and gaining consciousness might be something like the experiential equivalent of entering/escaping a singularity: everything is undefined. . . until it IS defined.