Please point out the flaws in this argument

[pogo]

OK, this is probably going to be really long-winded, and I'll no doubt make it more complicated than it needs to be but I'll have a go anyway.


Suppose you have gone out for the night to see a hypnotist. The show (which let's say started at 8pm) is around 2 hours long, and right at the very end, he calls you up and puts you into a hypnotic state. He tells you that when he snaps his fingers, you will open your eyes but will have no memory of the evening.
When he snaps his fingers, you come out of the state with absolutely no memory of what happened. Effectively the last 2 hours of your life have been erased. You were fully conscious for the whole day up until you were hypnotised, but because you now have no memory of the last 2 hours, it is as though they never existed (from your point of view). There won't simply be a gap in your memory (such as remembering being conscious, but not being able to recall anything that happened), so as far as you know, it is still 8pm (or just after).

Now suppose the hypnotist had said that when he snaps his fingers, you will have no memory of anything that had ever happened in your life. Would your life pretty much start from the moment he snaps his fingers, because you have no memory of anything previous?

Now suppose that when we die, there is nothing and we simply cease to exist. When that happens, our entire memory is essentially erased. Surely if that was the case, we would have no present memory of being fully conscious at this very moment? Does that mean there is some form of afterlife, where our memory is preserved?


There you go; it shouldn't take too long to pick holes is that

 

[pogo]

There's the flaw. Why would it mean we have no present memory? Our memory hasn't been "erased" yet, as you put it.

I know but because it is going to be erased it the future, it effectively already has been erased that doesn't really make sense does it?

In the hypnotist situation, if you hadn't been called up to be hypnotised, you would still be able to remember the show. Everything happens exactly as before but the future events are different.
But if he hypnotises you, although you still saw the show, you have absolutely no memory of it, so to you, it never happened.


I know it's a stupid but for the purpose of this argument, let's just say that it is possible for the hypnotist to 'erase' your memory

 

[pogo]

OK, let's say you were at a party and got totally wasted, and the next morning you wake up with no recollection of what happened the previous night. When you try to run through the events, you skip straight from when your memories of the previous night end to when you woke up, as though the bit in the middle never really happened.

If when we die our memory is destoyed, even though it hasn't happened yet, our mind would try to skip ahead (from the point when our memory was lost) to a point when we become conscious again. But because we are dead we never reach that point. If that were the case, surely we wouldn't still be fully aware of being conscious at the present?




Well it made sense in my head