You had me up until,
Wait, what? Are you invoking the supposed eternal return? Because thatâs just silly.
The idea that the universe (or rather, just reality, since there are probably infinite universes) has always existed and is beyond time, is logical. But the idea that somehow we as individuals have existed in the past or will be resurrected, does not follow.
What does follow is that there will be other beings who will exist after we no longer exist, just as there were other beings who existed before we existed. Where is the supposed connection between me right now and another person who exists 1000 years in the future? Only in terms of lineages of genes, culture, etc. But to say that âIâ will really be resurrected somehow is a totally different claim, and I can see no justification for thinking that.
Even within the context of an eternal return, if another universe exists a trillion years from now and it just happens to mirror this current universe almost perfectly, and in that future universe there happens to be someone who is very much or even totally identical to the me and I am right now, there is still no connection between the two and no sense in which it would be accurate to say that âIâ was âresurrectedâ. It would be more accurate to say that a similar or identical copy of me happened to be created at some distant future time, perhaps only because of statistical inevitability given the realities of endless time and endless numbers of big bangs.
Or maybe you mean that time itself is looping over and over? That is an interesting concept I read once in a physics book, basically that the physical 4D universe (3 spatial dimensions and 1 time dimension) is really a 5D universe that exists as basically a frozen sculpture with every arrangement of matter at every time from all of history to all of the distant future already existing as an aspect of that sculpture. So as energy or potentiality travels around the sculpture it lights up whichever stuff it is passing over, causing that to think it is alive or real in that particular locale. But in the end nothing really changes and every point in space and time that ever was and ever will be simultaneously and always exists just the same way as this very moment right now does. But we are only aware of this moment, we have no way to see the sculpture itself.
Also, saying that we can be a giraffe in the next life, is just silly. Unless you have a theory about how what âyouâ are as a mind, being, consciousness, self, memories, physical body, etc. would somehow reincorporate into a giraffe in a way that meaningfully retains the original âyouâ from now. Itâs a silly think to suppose, especially without providing some kind of theoretical framework of explanation for what you really mean by saying it.
