I am not academically trained in philosophy. My background and way of thinking are closer to those of a technician, and I approach consciousness from a broadly materialist perspective.
I would like to submit an idea for criticism rather than present it as an established theory.
The starting point was personal, although the argument itself does not depend on those experiences.
When I was around six or seven years old, I woke up one morning with the very strong impression of becoming conscious. I do not mean that I had forgotten what came before. It felt more like there had been no previous experience at all, and that I was suddenly present.
Much later, I also experienced several recurring dreams involving a familiar place behind my father’s house. In the dreams, part of the garden and surrounding land had become a paved area, with parking spaces, houses and a road. Many years later, before which no such development had been announced, houses, parking areas and a road were actually built there.
I do not consider either experience evidence of anything supernatural. Childhood memory is unreliable, dreams can coincide with future events, and memories can be reconstructed. They were simply what led me to think about recurrence, consciousness and time.
The initial idea
My first thought was that perhaps, after death, we begin our lives again.
But this immediately creates a serious problem: what could pass from one life to another?
I do not find the idea of a soul plausible. Consciousness seems to me to be produced by the functioning of the brain. When the brain is destroyed, the present conscious process ends. Memory, personality and subjective experience do not continue somewhere else.
There is therefore no obvious carrier capable of transporting a self or its memories from the end of one life to the beginning of another.
This led me to a different possibility:
Perhaps nothing is transported because nothing needs to be transported.
No surviving subject
The present conscious instance genuinely ends at death. It does not travel, wait or wake up elsewhere.
Non-existence is not an experience. Before our birth, we did not experience billions of years of darkness. There was simply no subject there to experience an interval.
If the same complete physical and mental organization existed again, it would produce the same first-person experience without receiving anything from a previous instance.
This resembles repeated executions of the same process. No material from one execution needs to enter the next for the same organization and behaviour to appear.
That comparison raises the familiar problem of identity. Would the resulting consciousness be the same consciousness, or merely a perfect duplicate?
From an external perspective, we might count two physical instances. But from the perspective of either conscious system, each would say:
“I am me.”
If the two lives were absolutely identical in every physical, psychological and phenomenal respect, what would justify saying that there were two conscious subjects rather than one conscious structure instantiated or counted twice?
From repetition to circularity
The usual language of repetition may itself be misleading.
To say that life happens once, then happens again, assumes an external sequence:
life 1, life 2, life 3, and so on.
That sequence immediately leads to the question of whether there was a first occurrence.
I wonder whether the circle offers a better model.
A circle has no naturally privileged first or last point. We can choose a place from which to begin describing it, but the circle itself does not begin there.
Similarly, a conscious life could be understood as one complete structure that has no first or last occurrence.
From within the life, time is experienced linearly:
childhood, adulthood, old age and death.
But the complete conscious existence might be structurally circular. Its end would not cause or transmit anything to its beginning. The two would simply belong to the same closed totality.
Nothing would cross the boundary between death and birth. There would be no soul, no memory transfer and no hidden surviving observer.
There might also be no series of separate copies.
There would be one unique conscious life, without a first or final occurrence, experienced locally as a singular and linear present.
I have been calling this idea the circular uniqueness of consciousness.
What the proposal does not claim
It does not claim that an individual survives death.
It does not claim that consciousness exists independently of the brain.
It does not require reincarnation, a soul, supernatural memory or a traveller moving through time.
The present conscious process still ends completely when the brain ceases to function.
Nor does the proposal by itself explain unusual dreams or déjà vu. Those experiences may have ordinary psychological explanations. In a strictly circular model, they could not straightforwardly be memories transported from a previous cycle, because there would be no previous cycle as a separate event.
The central question
The proposal therefore depends on a problem of individuation:
If two conscious histories are physically, psychologically and phenomenally identical in every respect, what makes them two numerically distinct experiences rather than one conscious structure described as occurring twice?
A critic might answer that two identical processes remain two processes, just as two identical computers remain two computers.
But consciousness creates a first-person difficulty that ordinary objects do not obviously present. There is no observable additional property corresponding to “which copy I am.” Each instance contains the same complete self-location and the same experience of being the unique present subject.
My questions are therefore:
- Is there an established philosophical position close to this idea, beyond eternal recurrence, eternalism or open individualism?
- What criterion would justify counting perfectly identical conscious histories as numerically distinct subjects?
- Can a circular structure be meaningful without a causal link carrying information from its end to its beginning?
- Does the proposal confuse qualitative identity with numerical identity, or is that distinction itself questionable when applied to first-person experience?
- Would a block-universe interpretation make circular recurrence unnecessary, since each conscious moment would already exist as part of one complete structure?
I would be grateful for references, objections or reformulations. I am especially interested in arguments that could show exactly where the reasoning fails.
