the-mind-cannot-conceive-its-own-absence

# The mind cannot conceive its own absence We can put our affairs in order, sign the will, cross every t, and still not think the thing itself: a world with us no longer in it. Set to imagine our own absence, awareness skitters across the surface and slides off. The self is the one term the mind cannot subtract, for the mind that would subtract it is the term. This is not failure of nerve but the shape of awareness, which is always leaning into a next moment it takes for granted will come. Provenance: an old observation (Freud, that we cannot imagine our own death), given a neural mechanism by David Linden — the brain as a near-future prediction machine that presupposes a future. Linden reads the afterlife intuition it produces as a bug; reading it as orientation instead is mine, against [[humans-cannot-survive-pure-immanence]]. Related: [[humans-cannot-survive-pure-immanence]], [[solitude-un-makes-the-borrowed-self]]