To Be Immortal
What is it to be immortal? For our concerns today we will be dealing with the immortality of experiencing entities or processes rather than just processes as such. Well, it already seems like we have an answer intuitively from the subject we are examining. It is simply for an experience to continue. But what is an experience? Is an experience that repeats into eternity an experience if it is utterly identical to itself? Think of just the purest atomized now version of the current state repeating endlessly in both directions. Is there any memory or self to even recognize it is in its continuation? It seems to me not, for to recognize oneself in time there needs to be some gap where you can step away from an experience and recognize you had it, but if you just have the indifferent eternal presence of an experience with no heterogeneity from one moment to the next there seems to simply be no such recognition or self. So, a pure unchanging moment cannot make “I” or “you” immortal for there could be no distinction in the I or you for it to even recognize its alive in the first place. If anything, this state is closest to oblivion or death.
It seems then a continuation of life requires some degree of heterogeneity, but then we run into another problem. How do experiences become heterogenous to each other? It seems to be they can only be heterogenous if one experience is in some sense dissipated. But we already run into a paradox here, is the dissipation of experience not also a death? Experience seems to only be able to have distinction by its own perpetual termination. Thus, does not the perpetual process of terminating experience not then foreclose that “you” could be immortal as well? Where is the “you” in any given moment? Is it only your body, your thoughts? We seem to have an intuition of interior experience based on an attachment to our thoughts or body, yet there seems to be two problems here in saying these are “you”: one is the aforementioned problem that the body and mind must constantly perish from their static form to move at all, and a second of problem of which particularly applies to the mind that the very things like language or music you pass through your mind seems to come from something exterior to you, and in fact we come to only realize our body by experiencing it which requires it to be in some sense be externalized from the unity that would have you recognize it as “you” in your memory to create a sense of identification with it in the first place.
Perhaps I am being too hasty though. Surely, we remember some parts of our lives in a duration that does not merely eradicate it, do we not? I agree with this intuition, yet I think it has implications that are more interesting when reflected on than one might not immediately realize. First, this memory is usually at a distance, that is it is constituted in events that do not immediately proceed each other one after the other but rather can expand to distances going back half a lifetime or more in some cases. The resonances of a life within itself seem to constitute in one moment or even a series of moments, a rejoinder of far-reaching points to each other in their far-reachingness showing that a long gap of forgetting does not terminate a life if something (well anything perhaps?) from the previous moment can be retained. But what is retained here? As aforementioned it is yourself as an exteriority, your own experience of yourself as an experience. But again, who is you in this continuity if what is experiencing is withdrawn from the particulars of the experience? It seems to me nothing but the empty form of experiential receptivity itself.
Now this is where things get interesting, imagine if you will receptive experience continued but did not have any memories at a distance after a certain point. Would this not terminate you? Well, I think it is interesting because that can already happen just by the bare fact other people exist who presumably also experience that would exist in the future after your death. An experience ends, and another begins at a distance which does not recognize the last. But wait, cannot those of future generations also remember experiences of you at a distance? For example, if your sense of your arms being you comes from your own recognition of the arm as an experience, if someone saw your arm in the future, would not the arm continue as an experience if the arm (as far as it actually is real in experience) was say copied as an image and became another experience? What is functionally different from retaining a duplicate of an experience at a distance from a body’s memory and that of an exterior machine? In fact, does not this sort of recognition of self already require a sort of exteriority such as say language for example to continue in the first place as aforementioned? Or at least some sort of ball to bounce across the surface or your skull so you can resonate the sound of the smacking in between as you after the fact?
Here's another question, what does an experience have to be like to be regarded as a memory of your “life” in the first place rather than an experience of something novel? Does it have to be an exact copy of the experience? Well, if it was an exact copy then it would not actually be a memory of the event because for an event to contain itself in a moment without any relation to other moments in the first place would have to be infinite regress of its own recognition immediately. But what would the regress even be of there is no distinction in the moment across time for it to distinguish what is regressing in it? So an event would not if it is an accurate copy retain itself in its complete reiteration for the event would not have happened inside itself yet to be remembered after the fact, so in the very accuracy of your recollection the memory or duplication of the event fades away. Perfect copies thus cannot communicate with each other in the first place to create a resonance that could be called a life. Thus, every memory we have of something is at least some degree an imperfect copy of that which it remembers in order for it to even be a memory of an event in the first place. What then do we copy from an experience if it is not the whole thing? It seems like it requires at least enough reduction to give space for its realization as a distinct happening such that the realization is distinct from the event and perhaps enough to contrast it with a current or even other previous experiences for it to be seen as memory rather than as copy. I think it right to say that memory can only be a reenactment of the past in partiality with some strains of mental or physical experience. I say physical as well as it does not seem to me that the learning of the danger of touching a stove need not always be an exact call back to the actual touching but is rather remembered in the heterogenous lack of touching which can come as instinct.
In fact the more we would touch the stove again (even as image) intuitively to me seems to be a failure of memory of the event given no mitigating factors as well if I remembered the stove hurting me and really remembered the pain it caused, the resonance of that pain would actually be in every act done to mitigate its copying rather than the inverse as if the pain was forgettable enough to not be avoided again then we would naturally encounter similar pains due to not caring to keep track of the characteristics that caused the original pain. Circling around pleasure by contrast as the opposite extreme seems to operate on copying rather than memorizing as it cannot be sustained by a simple relationship or habit to that which is repeated but must rather reincarnate the original experience as much as possible in its tangibility and actuality. Anyone who has a favorite food or show knows that simply substituting the original with something similar but not quite it will lead to disappointment unless that which is substituted a leaves a mark unique in its own right and becomes a memory.
It seems then the continuity of life exists more on a continuum of the memory of pain rather than the copying of pleasure because as aforementioned a world which merely endlessly copies experiences would be an oblivion of moments unable to communicate with each other in a state that more or less is a model of eternal death, while it seems by contrast pain in its reiteration in its very forgetting is a model of perpetual life. Pain as that which allows one to move through by moving past, while pleasure is that which makes someone sink in by standing still. Pain is the sense that moves to act, pleasure the model of complacency. It seems clear then that as far as a self is constituted by memory rather than copying, that immortality or the perpetual self is on the side of a type of memory of a pain while eternal selfless death is the infinite copying of pleasure.
Is this a moralistic condemnation of life then to say it more like pain if memorable and death if pleasurable? Only if pain and pleasure are seen in inherent moralistic terms. In the most general sense, there is no particular sense or even set of senses that on its own is painful in the sense of something we condemn. In fact, a pain when copied infinitely would be identical to a pleasure copied infinitely as there is no heterogenous self to come and condemn or appraise the feeling one way or the other. In that sense pure pain and pure pleasure is completely innocent in a state of death and only comes to be judged by the reflection the heterogeneity of life’s moments allows. From the perspective of reflection, or the communication of heterogenous point in time is the only point on which something like a moral evaluation can be put on a stage. From my understanding there are at least two types of evaluations that can be put upon sense, one which sees the sense as something to remember and thus ceases to copy, a creative or dynamic evaluation; or an evaluation which sees the sense as something to copy and thus reiterate and saturate future experiences with itself and never be remembered. I call this first type of evaluation the overcoming of sense or over-becoming, and the second type of evaluation suffering quite simply. Memories and thus our activities come from a combination of these two evaluations of over-becoming and suffering though rarely if not ever solely one or the other.
It seems that this evaluative move is part of an experience’s communication at a distance, as there are plenty of things we do not remember in these moments of communication (or at least speaking for myself), and I understand this evaluative aspect of an experience to be part of why we remember experiences in the first place. It seems that immortality understood as a type of perpetuity of experience is connected to an evaluation of an experience that over-becomes and iterates new experiences. Even the judgment of whether an experience is part of “me” or something I do not see as part of me seem to only have bearing in the continuation of a heterogenous evaluation of the experiences. You are thus this very evaluation in a certain sense. The “self” is thus the effect of a series of creative or complacent evaluations that occur in experiences. A perpetual life or immortality is thus a perpetual evaluation of experience. (Not the evaluat-OR but evalua-TION, the evaluat-“OR” is merely the most recent evalua-TION of all previous evaluations of experience.)
If there are experiences and evaluations of said experiences between each other then it seems that life continues in the reflective sense. As aforementioned experiences can only be constituted by the constant perishing of previous experiences. If life is constituted in any experience and an afterlife is simply the continuity of experience after said experience, then it can be argued that all life in a sense is afterlife. As aforementioned, the constitution of selves are the constitutions of evaluations in experience, thus if an experience evaluated as “me” is judged or appraised by an evaluation, this will be the character of that section of experience. We are thus in a certain sense saved or damned in the here in now by how a current experience is constituted by the effects of previous experiences in an evaluation. Or rather all hells, heavens, and purgatories are the evaluations of experience immanently dwelling in themselves.
But to return to a previous point that will be one of the cruxes of my writing today experience will happen and is happening (unless one is a solipsist) regardless if it is coming from “your” receptivity receptivity as such will continue. “You” will only exist in the experience at a distance where receptivity becomes evaluation. Evaluation like experience will also continue and is continuing without your “particular” receptivity (and this is a fact I will not bother to argue). A conclusion one could come to from what has been stated so far throughout this piece is that if we ignore this necessity of a constant evaluation of every experience in succession (which we already do much of the time when we forget things) then it can be argued that “you” are alive in every evaluation in relation to evaluations made before them that is on a trajectory of continuous experience or evaluation regardless of which perspective the evaluation iterates from. To be put far more straightforwardly you are nothing but a series of memories of memories that exists regardless of where(“who”) the memory is coming from. Life then extends as far for a person as much as the extent of their memory touches the world of experiences. The closeness one gets to immortality is thus how much one can come to paint memories across the universe, however as previously stated memories are the opposite of copies, immortality then is a life which reverberates indefinitely throughout time without (or maybe at least despite) any attempts to copy it.
I will come close to wrapping up and getting to the main point with a question now: Does the ultimate hover lonely in just one perspective or does it rather diffracts into indefinitely many forms and shapes? If the latter does not, then it suggests experience across many perspectives is more ultimate than experience dwelling in one? Does not the diffraction of perspectives speak to memory as the heterogenous element of connection at a distance as being something which spills across history like a water flowing its abundance through many channels? If one’s basic life is simply the reiteration of evaluation in one perspective is not the ultimate iteration of evaluation in an indefinitely many perspectives? Is thus not evaluation needed for immortality one that paints all the names of history onto oneself, an evaluation of memory as such rather than in particular becomes what you are?
Would this be heaven or hell? Purgatory perhaps? An evaluation that diffracts in glory for many and barbarism for others will have as many afterlives of different types as complex as the effects of the lives that preceded them. The state beyond salvation and redemption is the evaluation which simply is continuing the thusness of pain in a judgement without judgement, an evaluation so transparent to the senses that they pass through its foreground and background in an absolute and full texture of power. When life becomes life and nothing else this is a fractal microcosm of eternal life which is merely the empty form of heterogeneous memory itself in perfect continuity. A life that has forgotten it is a life remembers all lives in the movement of its particularity united by nothing but the invisible light which glimmers across perpetuity in its glorious silence. A life LIVED is already immortal…
But does immortal life walk without fanfare among the rabble of the masses? Of course it can, but does not life that can sink into the sea of memory still in every step it takes not be able to take its steps in a way that would dance others into its silent song? Is the purity of life the antagonism or the compliment to a life which descends back into the particularities of its day only to bring them to the sky of life in ever extending orchestra shuttering from the beauty of its rises and falls? I will leave that for you to decide.