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..and Haskell lists cannot be infinitely long? So, take a second. We don't understand fully how the brain's memory system works. There are some people who have an extreme ability to recall autobiographical details about literally every single day they ever lived. What the weather was like, what clothes they wore, who they talked to, things that happened. That's far beyond most people. But that establishes that clearly the brain has both the capacity and wiring to this at some level, and it can actually be turned on. We only need to be open to the idea that perhaps all brains do this at some level, recording our whole experience at some level of fidelity, below our conscious mind. I say, "at some level of fidelity" because we don't really know how detailed our memories really are. If it was just a heartbeat counter, it would only take 33 bits (!); if it was a transcript of the words we spoke, it would fit in less than 100mb. Of course it is probably not a full dump of any kind, but a patchwork of cross-referenced, reinforced, compressed, maybe slightly damaged things. Sometimes just emotions. It really doesn't matter what format it is, because the following will always be true. At some point in your life, there will come a "midpoint" where more you have already experienced more before that point than you will afterwards. Before the midpoint, there are still more events in your future than in your past, so you are fundamentally not capable of imagining all the future events--not only their nature, but the weight of their existence. The fidelity of your memories really doesn't matter here; you cannot fully appreciate 20 years of experience when you have lived only 10. After the midpoint, one of two things is true: Either, 1. We cannot remember all of the details about our lives. We have a radically simplified and compressed form which pales in comparison to the real moment-to-moment experience (i.e. low resolution).
2. We can remember all of the details about our lives (i.e. high resolution), but we don't have enough time left to replay them all in full quality. Either way, our past life, in its full glory, is beyond our capacity to imagine. So that means before the midpoint and after the midpoint it is subjectively infinite; there is always more, even in our own experiences, than we can experience or re-experience. And that's just our own minds! If we aren't completely solipistic and believe all the rest of this vastly complicated world really does exist, then its doubly infinite, because every time we learn something new about how it works, we have to reimagine and reinterpret the complexities of the past with the new information. Like learning about people. Sometimes you seem them do things that make no sense; only when you get to know them later do you understand why they might have done that, and what they might have been thinking. Or looking at an old photograph you see someone you didn't know then but know now, and the past is even more detailed and rich than what you knew. So I don't know who told you that consciousness is a hallucination, and that it must be meaningless and trite. Maybe they just lived a boring life, because TBH you're missing a hell of a good show as this whole thing unfolds. Try LSD sometime. |