Endings

 Our mind changes in subtle ways each day. The people we interact with, who we fall in love with, who we see and admire, change our perception of self ever so slightly. No one exists in a vacuum of culture, no one exists as a completely separate entity from everything else. Our ancestors live on in our lives as subtle traits passed on from our parents, extended family and biology, through subtle currents that exist throughout our collective human experience that show themselves quite plainly in opportune moments.

How long has it been since we last thought of a horrible breakup, as time passes our mind finds other concepts to attach to. How long has it been since we thought of a loved ones passing, we find other people to fill the void. These events still linger, and are brought up in strange ways through subtle reminders. No one is truly gone, we all send ripples of causality throughout our lives that echo and reverberate throughout the world. When I am gone, what echoes will I leave behind that collect in strange places? 

 The conscious subjective experience of self might altogether become oblivion, but where does the self end and where does it begin? There is no single atom in my body responsible for consciousness, rather my sense of self is a collective agglomeration of an uncountable number of processes that somehow all together form my own subjective experience. Clearly there is a strong connection between this higher conscious experience and my brain and extended nervous system. When it turns off, all the neurons stop firing and the same cycles of processes that have been occurring my whole life end, will it be from my own subjective experience like turning off a computer, a sudden blank screen for all eternity, or the slow decay of senses until there's nothing? 

What happens to the atoms in my body after this? Will they decompose somewhere and change into new forms of life or permanently exist as inanimate matter, until the sun dies and the earth is enveloped in its glow? Eventually after a finite but large amount of time, will the atoms that were once my body find themselves in new forms, to be rearranged into a new sentient form of life on some newly formed planet around a completely different sun trillions of years in the future? Will it merely be like waking up from a dream, if our atoms came from a different sun billions of years ago, perhaps they were part of another life form just as conscious as I am at some point, but still we have no memory of other lives like this one?

Forgoing all possible scenarios in which the atoms of my body in some far distant future somehow manage to rearrange themselves into some sentient form of life, perhaps the universe is in fact cyclic. Eventually the pull of dark matter presses everything back together in a singularity and another big bang occurs, and billions of years later, here I am again typing these same words having the same experience, living an unending cycle of birth and death of the universe. What is the subjective experience of this from a singular conscious perspective, I don't know. I think it's a common concept to think of, there was billions of years before I was born and I existed, there will be a large scale of time in which the same occurs. Yet I still exist, and so being dead will be just like before I was born, but we don't really know what this was like.

A dualism notion of consciousness might argue there's something more to consciousness than just the physical processes we can empirically measure. I don't ascribe to this view necessarily but I also don't think the book is completely closed on what happens from a subjective conscious experience after death. Our minds can't comprehend oblivion - and yet it still exists somehow. It was our state before we were born, it will be our state after we die. Since we don't know where our conscious experience begins and ends perhaps after our passing we exist as echoes, reverberating through space and time. Ghosts, echoes, existing in oblivion but still influencing the world through the ripples of causality we've left in our wake. In this way, we live forever in the memories of others.

 Our mind changes in subtle ways each day. We exist more as a shared experience than one might think. It's hard to truly pin down how to breakdown the boundary between separate conscious experiences. Maybe, but unlikely, there is some process in physics that hasn't been discovered yet that might explain  consciousness. Working within the current paradigm of thought in which this is not the case, I still think the mystery is not completely closed in terms of subjective conscious experience post death. Maybe it will all be like waking up from a very vivid dream that you can't really remember but can feel glimpses of, momentary flashes of deja vu of another life that we've lived or just strong feelings regarding certain experiences that you can't really explain vividly. 

We change slightly every day, until eventually you don't even recognize the person you are today. Until you've been swallowed by oblivion and your dancing on the shores of eternity as pure nothingness. And yet, a sense of who we are, is imprinted throughout the layers built on top of one another, the bedrock never goes away.

Or maybe I'm full of shit who knows.