I occasionally have mystical revelations but then when I try to write or speak them I realize that I'm too retarded to live up to the job.
I have a fascination with anesthesia ever since I was put under - not the full kind for body surgery, but the kind that knocks you out - for wisdom teeth removal. The way anesthesia works is that it prevents memory formation, so your body IS feeling everything and thinking, you just don't recall it.
What struck me was that when I sleep, I do feel time pass. I've tried to tell normalfaggots about this before and they don't seem to get it, they may be genuine NPCs that just zonk, but even when I don't remember my dreams I do recall a passage of time that stretches and squishes (in some parts of sleep time is sped up, in some it is slowed down) through the sleepy state. Yet, when I was put under, what happened was that in one instant I was in the chair and in the next instant I was elsewhere. It was as if I had teleported, completely qualitatively different from anything I had ever experienced and exhilirating.
For a time I took this as an understanding of death, because to me, I had for all purposes been dead - dead in the only sense that matters, dead as the cessation of experience - in that time. But eventually, I realized that was faulty logic, because I still woke from it. That's the problem of death, isn't it? How do you rationalize the complete cessation, permanent, of experience.
Well, one thought I took out of this was that, if the mind was operating and it was just the lack of memory that made it feel like nonexistence, then a comparison might be made to the difference between photographs and film. A photograph is a static moment, film is made from the passing of many photographs rapidly so as to create the illusion of movement. It is, however, an illusion. And the brain does have to have some kind of "resolution," some max speed at which signals can fire off, but I think it is fair to say that anesthesia demonstrates that if the flow is ever disrupted, the consciousness ceases. So consciousness is a flow, I know that.
Combined with some of my thoughts on philosophical zombies, I came to the conclusion, intuitive to me but unprovable, that all consciousness is an unending flow that branches outwards, like a river's delta, or a river watershed but in reverse. New consciousness stems off of old consciousness, I think as epiphenomena of reproduction (if new physical life is created, new consciousness is created at the same time. It could perhaps be possible for consciousness streams to merge or loop back on themselves, but I don't see a reason to assume that happens. And if it were traced back to a single source - if that's possible - then we might call that original, trunk consciousness God. I do have some conviction that people who are very close can become consciously linked. I also believe in the supernatural in that I believe the world has structure built into it that can be perceived and enjoyed but only if you don't look for it. We already know from quantum physics that literally observing - in a mental sense, not a physical sense - effects physical matter.
I am 100% a non-materialist as regards the nature of the mind. The mind is epiphenomena of physical matter, but it is not the same thing as the physical matter's activity. There's been enough research into Near Death Experiences to show that there are certain cultural universals that show up in most of them. Stories about "I died and went to Hell and met Satan and Hitler and then came back" are probably either bullshit or delusions. The usual story is some stuff about a white light, feeling of immense peace, hallucinations of relatives, that sort of thing. That too is epiphenomena of matter - there are scientific explanations of how a dying brain could generate that up - but I don't see that as disproving the reality of it.
Hell, the subjective feeling of time can stretch and squish, we all know that in the sense of time flying by when having fun or dragging on when bored, or in the research done into parts of sleep and how time moves faster or slower. Dreams that feel like hours, or hours flying by but feels like minutes when sleeping. Maybe THAT'S how death works. Literal clock time marches on, but for you it slows, and slows, and slows, approaching a limit, that you really can live forever in your dying dream because time can be made as arbitrarily slow as it needs to keep it going.
