Tarski wrote:
For example, perhaps consciousness is an eternal connected reality in which we participate in a way that if understood would make death seem more like an ascent to a higher Self than descent into "oblivion" (whatever that is).
I should mention that my view of time (inspired by spacetime physics) make death a bit less monstrous.
Could you elaborate on that? Or start a new thread?
Well, I would be dishonest if I said that such speculations represent my view but.....let's let our imaginations go a bit:
In cognitive science, as well as in the common understanding, consciousness is associated with various abilities that allow us to navigate the word, to be aware in the sense of being able to deal with and talk about objects and situations in the world. This is, in principle, explainable in totally functionlaistic/physicalistic terms: brains, neural computations, language, etc.
On the other hand, there is an intuition that there is some basic aspect of consciousness that is not reducible to such considerations.
I think the intutions is that consciousness is a basic aspect of reality just as matter is a basic aspect. (personally I think our intuitions about material "stuff" are just as naïve as such intuitions about consciousness).
In any case, if one were to take the view that there is such a fundamental aspect of reality, "basic consciousness", then one could speculate on its forms. In some Hindu thought, the consciousness associated with individual human (or animal) egos is a certain state of this basic consciousness somehow separated out into individualities like droplets separated from the ocean. The Higher Self is like the ocean; it is a Self that we all somehow share and originate from --sort of like all matter originates in some primal eruption from some vacuum state. This is very fuzzy and wooly thinking in my opinion but it has a certain intuitive appeal and enjoys a popularity with newagers and even some scientists.
As for the thing about time, I was referring to the fact that in relativity theory, it is difficult to come up with a principled way to separate reality into a global future that hasn't happened and a past that has already happened. The set of all events, past and present is often treated as a whole atemporally existing real manifold. For each individual thought, action, or speach act of an individual person, there is a "past" (already partly in memory) and a "future" not yet in memory. For some reason, not well understood there is a sort of arrow of time which makes it appropriate to say that an event may cause what is on the future side but problematic to say that it causes what is on the past side (Tsuzuki would disagree). Causality is thought to point only in the so called "future direction" of the spacetime manifold. But, on the microscopic scale, we see no such preferred directionality. Past and future are on a more equal footing.
This "block universe picture has everything existing all at once so to speak. We might say that we don't stop existing when we die, it is just that our future selves are only in informational contact with the past part of our physical carreer--where now this whole carreer is the reality. This might be thought to create the illusion that something, our existence, is somehow escaping us.
But the block universe picture puts time on a more equal footing with space. So a smart ass might ask why should the fact that my physical being doesn't extend forever in the forward time direction be anymore disturbing than the fact that my physical being doesn’t extend forever in the upward direction (I am not infinitely tall!).
But this block spacetime picture makes it look like we are all fated--the future is already there. But then so far, I have ignored quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics determinism seems to disappear in some important ways. Combining (general) relativity with quantum mechanics is something not yet achieved in physics so maybe this issue of fatalism in the block spacetime universe picture will be alleviated in future science or future philosophy.
So what is the take away lesson? Relax a bit about this death thing.