I think some Buddhist concepts, like reincarnation and duality, can be interpreted as perspectives on this.

It does increase my sense of compassion for life in general, and I try to lean into that.

I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?

“Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.”

-- https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm

In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.

Think of any time when you've been unconscious, like when under anesthesia, or fainting, or knocked out for some other reason. You experience everything leading up to the event that knocks you out, but the only reason you can recall any of it is because you did eventually wake up and regain consciousness. Your experience of your current self now is only because a moment from now you can look back and remember it. Eventually though, you will die, and you won't be able to look back and remember, and for you, it's as if nothing ever happened. So given that we will all die some day, how is it we even have conscious experience at all? I might die 5 minutes from now, or 5 days, or 5 decades from now, but isn't all the same?

edit: another user commented and said this was "logically unsound 20th century positivism". Let me direct you to this quote ca 300BC from Epicurus:

> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

Is it neural activity that underlies all experience? Or is it neural activity which filters it?

Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.

Or perhaps the universe is just snapshots of infinite patterns locked in permanent static states and this entire progression of time, physics, etc is just an illusion created by the sub-process of consciousness that creates dynamic transitions from one state to another.

It's probably my inability to perceive the concept of infinity that my mind thinks about such things, either way we will probably never know.

I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the briefest moment, I was struck by the idea that in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, other versions of me failed to grab the rail and tumbled to their death. It was quite an odd moment, I didn't worry about the fact that I had nearly fallen, I just felt bad for all the ones that did.

The question doesn't make any sense.

If I smash you in the head with a hammer and you have brain damage which changes your personality, makes it so you can't access some memories, and can't control your body properly.. we accept that as literal brain damage- we have broke the machine (our brain) in some regard.

Everyone accepts the reality of that situation.

But when you die (i.e., your brain is completely shut off and non-functioning), we ask what is it experiencing? What does it feel like? It's literally a nonsensical question.

Your brain isn't active to experience anything from its senses, which in turn are probably not functioning to send any signals either.

"Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1]

In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem

[1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore

It's not even a good question unless they first prove consciousness can exist outside its physical support, AKA the immortal soul.

This is a different argument. It's not necessarily saying consciousness is distinct from matter. The panpsychist view (not sure if Chalmers is in this camp) is that consciousness is a fundamental property to all matter, from photons to the human brain. (This isn't to say a photon has experiences as a human does, but rather the complex human consciousness is derived from a much simpler forms of consciousness).

This is different from saying ""where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". This assumes consciousness is an emergent property, rather than a fundamental one. The "car" is emergent from the right arrangement of "car parts". Rather, the question "where is the mass/charge of the car when you take away all its pieces" is a better analogy, because the car mass/charge is derived from the mass of the car part's mass/charge.

>there's not enough evidence to test scientifically.

This aligns exactly with what Chalmers says, that explaining subjective experiences is the "hard" problem precisely because we don't have a way to gather data. Gathering data is, almost by definition, an objective measure and can't give much insight into subjective experience. To a certain extent, if feels like defining or measuring subjective experience can't be looked at with traditional scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, that can also lead to a bunch of quackery.

The closest survivable analog, in my opinion, is the "sleep" you experience when under something like sodium thiopental. When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant, from your own perspective. A bit jarring to lose hours or days like that. I assume death is similar but without the waking up part.

Regular old sleep doesn't involve that level of unconsciousness.

That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.

It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.

Indeed it does. This is why I try to remind myself that this kind of thinking can only torment me when I'm alive, and I should stop wasting time. Especially at 2am, which of course is when I have these kinds of thoughts to begin with.

My dad and I used to talk about this and decided that we lived forever, as a practical matter. "Before" and "after" just speculation.

It couldn't be pure black and emptiness, for example, because we no longer exist to experience it.

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov "

Dealing with the reality we do know, I comfort myself with the idea that, and this sounds cheesy, all is one. Not in some hippy, pantheistic way. More that our experience of ourselves as separate from anything else is itself an illusion. There are no things, not nothing but "no things". Everything is a giant process, everything interpenetrates everything else, nothing exists independent from anything else.

This is a somewhat Buddhist view. I'm describing emptiness in a way (the Buddhist term not nothingness or some sort of nihilistic viewpoint). It seems like a totally logical way to see things and, for me at least, comforting. It's all one process and it's all relational. It's relations all the way down. One Buddhist teacher I like put it this way. "All of reality is a vibrating verb rather than a bunch of concrete nouns".

So back to your point, this is tantamount to being part of that "infinite stream of energy" as you put it perhaps.

    And specious stuff that says "No rational being
    Can fear a thing it will not feel", not seeing
    That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   
    No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   
    Nothing to love or link with,
    The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Einstein: "I told you I was done with physics! Let me rest in peace already!"