Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)

But that example is unlike what we were discussing. If I were making the claim that some completely unknown and unknowable thing exists then your objection would be on point, but that is not what I am doing. What I am doing is challenging your claim that things like matter and brains exist independently of consciousness, because the evidence you have for that claim is tainted by the fact that the evidence itself is known only via conscious experience.

In many ways materialism is more like your example about unknowable fairies than anything I have said because ultimately it postulates that there is something called matter that exists independently of consciousness and yet is knowable only through consciousness. That concept of "bare matter" as a thing in itself looks a lot like your unknowable fairies.

People have different ideas of what this common idea of "nothingness" after death even means. I hadnt considered that. But it is perhaps irrelevant, within the framework of thinking I have about these things.

If there's nothing after death. That will last forever. This nothingness will be an infinite nothingness after death. Then, even if the experience of nothingness is timeless/instantaneous, the infinitude of this nothingness becomes qualitatively different. Because you can't have infinity pass instantaneously. Say there's some point after which there's infinitely no life. Then, and only then, this forever of nothingness is as good as experienced. A paradoxically instantaneous yet infinite time of non experience. Essentially a non experience, that we can't experience, forever. At that extreme it becomes akin to an experience. This is how I could agree one could imagine there is nothingness forever after death.

Still there remains the issue of whether or not this nothingness actually occurs. If it's the case that it does, how are we not there already? Almost surely, I'd find myself in the infinitely dead timespan of the universe rather than in the relatively zero sized timespan of the universe in which life exists. The infinitely unconscious tail end of the universe would be like an inescapable trap.

The idea that if infinite experience of any sort exists I would be experiencing it already also requires some justification. To me, I lean more toward the ideas of determinism, and that time isn't so absolute as we tend to experience it. The block universe, perhaps. I think that the theories of relativity lend credence to this seeing as they show us that time is very real but that there is no absolute reference frame from which time is ticking along at the same rate always for everyone within it. Add to these ideas that you could have woken up at any time in the past, as someone living hundreds of thousands of years ago, but did not. Equally, there's no reason why you didn't wake up as anyone in the future. Contentious, I know, but that goes along with my "b theory" belief of time. And we are living in the future, compared to those who found themselves waking up in the past. Why did you wake up into this particular body? Why not one of the past or future? Why not as anybody else? Why did I wake up as me? And then imagine, if ever I "wake", just as I woke into this body, into some experience that is infinite, then I will be trapped forever.