NB This post will be mostly stream-of-consciousness. Sorry if it seems disorganized.
As I may or may not have mentioned on the site before, one of my chief anxieties relating to death (along with not having lived a meaningful life) revolves around the concept of eternity. Whether I think about the possibility of an afterlife, or the lack thereof, I find that what terrifies me is really the fact that either life or death must last forever. Ultimately, people fear what they don't or can't understand, and I have no way of conceptualizing infinite time. I think this realization, that it's the eternal part of death, not being dead, that scares me, may have contributed to my rejection of Christianity after being raised Methodist. The concept of eternal life, of course, resolves the fear of being dead, but not of eternity. So I've been grappling with that for a couple years now.
Enter Doctor Who. A couple weeks ago I was watching S2E1, New Earth, in which (slight spoilers?) the last "true" human, Cassandra, shows up, and inhabits the bodies of a few people before agreeing that it may finally be time for her to die. At this point, the Doctor takes her back to the last time someone told her that she was beautiful, and she observes the moment before passing. This led me to realize something -- if we treat time like space, looking at it like there's a bunch of universes that all exist, and the reason they don't collide is that they're temporally separated, then it's sort of like everything always is as it is in this moment. Of course as a human, the first thing I did was try to apply this realization to my own situation, and I realized that I will exist exactly as I do in this moment, forever-- but only sort of. And for whatever reason, this realization, that we all have a kind of eternal life, didn't scare me at all. I found the idea of an everlasting now profoundly comforting.
Anyway, just wanted to share that. Feel free to comment with your thoughts ('cause I know you have them :))
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain I recommend you pick up a copy of Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe. He makes a fairly compelling argument that the universe is a gigantic equation and everything we experience in it, including the experience itself, is one complex wave function. By that argument, "you" are an infinite combination of dependent variables playing out in an intricate enough manner that you have self-awareness. You cannot, therefore, "die" so much as be undefined at points before and after your existence. Of course, everything you are made of is also just an expression of the same equation and as such, it's all a big interconnected system. The uncomfortable aspects of this theory include free will as illusion, consciousness as falsehood, etc but hey. Makes more sense than the transhumanists.
There's a good scene from Waking Life on that topic, it seems the original clip of it on youtube was taken down, but there's separate uploads with the video and audio:
>The uncomfortable aspects of this theory include free will as illusion I disagree! Free will is an emergent property of not knowing the future. I don't see determinism as an impediment to free will. Anyways, everyone reports the ability to make decisions, just because the process of making a decision can be modeled mathematically doesn't mean a decision was not made.
Another one of the many reasons why I enjoy watching Dr. Who. Hey maybe after you die you can go back to a moment in your life and experience it for an eternity, who knows. I sure don't. But its fun to think about it at least. I love what-if scenarios, I ask my friends the weirdest questions just as random what ifs for fun. What if everyone always had cheetos powder covering their fingers at all time, what would the world be like? Might not be quiiite as deep as what you're thinking about but the thought process is the same to me. Makes things interesting!
The passing "now" moment is an illusion created by the fact that we cannot remember the future and forget the past. It is biologically advantageous to experience a now moment, but it is not at all defined by physics. Time dilation means every object has a different perception of whether events are simultaneous depending on their relative movement, making it impossible to declare any two events as absolutely simultaneous (or more importantly, not) because there is no single timeline to compare against. Therefore, there is no such thing as "now". It follows that every spacetime position is equally real, for all eternity. Yaay for relativity! Einstein realized this, he has a lot of quotes about how relativity removes the grief from death.