(Jul 14, 2026 08:45 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] What do you think it will be like?
It's long since been answered by the philosophers who compared what it was like to the blankness of before one was born. Or, setting aside the childhood amnesia of anything that happened before even age three or whatever, what it was like before a certain stage of fetal development.
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In 1690 famous empiricist John Locke’s famous work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding presented a theory of personal identity [...] Thus, he advocates that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity ... More explicitly stated, a present person is identical to a past one only insofar as she or he remembers, or it is possible for her or him to remember herself or himself to thinking and acting in the past."
But even if the internal relationship via memory of being "so and so" at age one is absent, there are still environmental records forcing that personally forgotten identity upon one.
But when it comes to speculative transitions outside the physical evidence of this world, no external information is around as a safety net to verify that Phyllis Diller was once a salamander. So if no memory is replicated from an internal or private perspective, then things are similarly blank, and for all intents and purposes, there is no longer an identity linkage to whatever supposed former entity.
A Matrix scenario or older oneirocosm situation is all one could hope for, where we either return to a prior-in-rank identity that still retains memories of this one. Or some mystical
storehouse consciousness of Buddhism beyond the
six bardos that holds data about former lives. But obviously there's no access to that when alive, so it's not really of any use in terms of linkage with and knowledge of other identities.