When each moment is a death, what is eternity?
The idea that each moment that we live, is another moment that we have died is a strange concept. I am 24 years old now, and I have died for 24 years. The body that I had a second ago no longer exists and has been replaced by the body I have now.
And even after my body dies, and the physical hardware that stored my thought patterns, my brain, ceases to operate – the thought patterns that I consisted of, for the most part still exist in other humans. I would argue that less than 0.5% of my thoughts are original, and the few that are original are akin to genetic mutations. They either fade away or are replicated in myself and in others and live on and grow past the death of the origin, the death of my self.
The way that our minds and bodies evolve and replicate are surprisingly similar to the way that software programs are made and replicate. But it isn’t surprising, is it? Because we made machines to model our selves.
In our quest for eternal life, we created machines that operate by the same rules of linear time that we understand, but that operate on a much slower, longer timeframe. Unless they can conceive of time differently than we do, they will experience death the same way that we do. Each moment that they exist, their former form has ceased to exist.
Which begs the question, does eternity even exist?
Questing for Coherence 