u/spinningdiamond

Certainly we have no credible evidence of "Napoleon like personalities", bundled with their memories intact, surviving the death process. And of course, materialism, taking memories largely on a "computational storage" model, deems such a state of affairs pretty much impossible in the first place.

Nevertheless, the somewhat neglected strand of Western philosophy offered by Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead in particular has always offered a somewhat different picture of memory. In their picture, the past is not this infinitely thin slice our current paradigm imagines it to be, and into which "storage" must take place if anything is to endure.

Rather, endurance itself is fundamental. The past is folded into the present and there is an "inherited" accumulation in all moments. The present, as it were, has a "thickness" which entails its inherited past.

We are familiar with this idea mostly from genetic inheritance. But in Begsonian-Whiteheadian terms (henceforth "B-W") genetic inheritance is not the underlying principle, but one expression of this deeper behaviour in nature of the present to inherit the past.

In general terms, it is evident that nature does not do well at inheriting *individual, specific* memory between lives. If it did, then genetic inheritance would not be necessary. The very fact that it is necessary to have elaborate gene transmission to sustain the general properties of a human body consistent and intact is more than enough evidence for this.

And yet... there ARE anomalies which seem to sit better within a B-W picture, than within a materialist or computational storage/ network-real-time picture. Terminal lucidity is among these, especialy the more radical claimed instances of it. So-called organ memory transfer would be another. Stvenson-Tucker "reincarnation" cases yet another, even if that is not literally what they are. NDE so-called "life reviews" another. Each of these seem to demonstrate, or at the very least suggest, a kind of temporal thickness to the self-similar organism that is more robust than the infinite slice of the present. Bergson in particular argued that the organism has access, *in principle* to all its historical states, which become objectified upon completion and that the general purpose of the brain is to limit or constrain this access so that a sharpened point of action can work in the world, for creaturely purposes.

Thus, when the brain is compromised, under dementia, near death trauma, psychedelics perhaps, this narrowing action starts to unravel, as does the organism's ability to have a "point of action" in the world. On the other hand, at least in "near" death circumstances, it seems that consciousness may be gaining or regaining access to its full historical objective existence, its accumulated history on B-W terms.

Now unfortunately, this does not infer that an agent with capability survives. Indeed, in usual B-W terms, the bundle of occasions which constitutes "you" becomes unbundled at death, sort of like a collection of balloons blowing along in the wind, but held together for a while by string, until the string breaks. During a dementia or near-death circumstance, however, that bundle is arguably still largely coherent. So access to a larger width of memory at near-death, alas doesn't instruct us that there is anything still there to "access" it some hours or days after death.

This is where Zuboff comes in. If instead of a single, material kind of inheritance, we have a general principle of the past accumulating into the present, as suggested by B-W philosophies (in one way or another) then even if you don't literally transmit or "reincarnate" as a personality, your general tendencies, achievements, or learned dispositions might now be available for general inheritance in the human pool. Since Zuboff's view is that bare consciousness is the same everywhere, this means that sooner or later (in our terms) a being that is "somewhat like you" is going to come into existence again. and subjectively that will be experienced as "you". It won't carry specific memories from a "previous life", because under all normal circumstance nature does not have a process for that, but as lived from within, on its own terms, just as your life is lived now (on its own terms), you will seem to be as you were.

Every single person who has ever lived on this planet has died. And there is no sensible intelligence or input from any of them. If there is a stronger possible empirical fact indicating that they are gone, then I don't know what it could be.

Of course, you can't tell this to spiritualists and believers of various stripes because you generate "but, but, but..."

So, though, if not individualised being of any kind, that basically leaves only non-individualised being as some kind of abstract possibility (hive mind, non-agentic mind of some kind, so-called mind at large, whatever). But the question about THAT becomes what are we talking about, and is it empirically distinguishable in any way from the non existence of consciousness outside of biology altogether?

One can't just simply lean on "the hard problem" as if it is some kind of positive evidence in response to this. A non-biological agency would presumably still have at least SOME of the markers discernible of agency. And if, in fact, non-agentic, then again what are we talking about? A dirty dishtowel thrown into a corner is also non-agentic. So far as we can tell (and it is a *reasonable* supposition) it isn't conscious. So once more, what is the difference? What does the cosmos or reality show forth (*outside of biology*) which would indicate that it is generally conscious or mental in quality, because I am not seeing it.

It may be that there is a disposition towards consciousness in the cosmos, but this is not the same thing as saying that the cosmos is conscious or that reality is conscious or mental. The ocean has a disposition towards waves but there aren't actually waves until the surface is disturbed (and so forth).

Omnijectivity is a view of consciousness (and form) which is a little different from either materialism or Idealism. It is a version of neutral monism, though I do not greatly prefer that term because it imagines a null point between two existing real categories. Omnijectivity posits the opposite of this: a true fusion of what we interpret to be those two categories (mind and matter) is the only thing that is actually and unconditionally real. Subjective and objective are daughter ontologies of omnijective patterns and action.

Imagine an illuminated crystal hanging, like a lamp, in the centre of a room with white walls and floor. The illuminating light, in the heart of the crystal is bluish-purple. It casts a purplish shadow onto the white wall alongside the crystal, and a bluish shadow onto the white floor beneath the crystal. Both the shape and color of the “crystal” as seen in these two shadows are different. And these shadows, loosely speaking, are what we refer to as subject and object.

The shadow analogy has its advantages, but it is misleading in a certain way. Those shadows are separate from the hanging crystal, where in reality (in this scheme, of course) subject and object are incomplete perceptions of, or aspects of interacting with, an omnijective pattern. It’s as if you had one sensory organ which enables you to perceive only the vertical face of the crystal and another (separate) sensory mode which allows you to perceive only the horizontal face of the crystal.

Omnijectivity would hold that an aspect of consciousness has been in nature all along, though largely in what I tend to call a “vegetal” or somnambulistic sense, much like Schopenhauer’s blind will, or Jung’s unconscious, especially in Jung’s later ‘unus mundus’ musings.

It would not be strictly correct to call consciousness physical or ideal in this kind of framework, as it does not arise or emerge in a hard sense from some inert physical base (there is no “inert physical base”) nor is it a separate animated thing which interacts with the physical.