When people like Asimov expressed their view on death--nothingness--they probably meant the same thing this Author is trying to say here.
I would say when most people say death is nothingness, they don't mean there will be a remnant of them expericing nothingness, they just mean nothingness.
I feel this author is just intentionally misinterpreting people's words.
People have different ideas of what this common idea of "nothingness" after death even means. I hadnt considered that. But it is perhaps irrelevant, within the framework of thinking I have about these things.
If there's nothing after death. That will last forever. This nothingness will be an infinite nothingness after death. Then, even if the experience of nothingness is timeless/instantaneous, the infinitude of this nothingness becomes qualitatively different. Because you can't have infinity pass instantaneously. Say there's some point after which there's infinitely no life. Then, and only then, this forever of nothingness is as good as experienced. A paradoxically instantaneous yet infinite time of non experience. Essentially a non experience, that we can't experience, forever. At that extreme it becomes akin to an experience. This is how I could agree one could imagine there is nothingness forever after death.
Still there remains the issue of whether or not this nothingness actually occurs. If it's the case that it does, how are we not there already? Almost surely, I'd find myself in the infinitely dead timespan of the universe rather than in the relatively zero sized timespan of the universe in which life exists. The infinitely unconscious tail end of the universe would be like an inescapable trap.
The idea that if infinite experience of any sort exists I would be experiencing it already also requires some justification. To me, I lean more toward the ideas of determinism, and that time isn't so absolute as we tend to experience it. The block universe, perhaps. I think that the theories of relativity lend credence to this seeing as they show us that time is very real but that there is no absolute reference frame from which time is ticking along at the same rate always for everyone within it. Add to these ideas that you could have woken up at any time in the past, as someone living hundreds of thousands of years ago, but did not. Equally, there's no reason why you didn't wake up as anyone in the future. Contentious, I know, but that goes along with my "b theory" belief of time. And we are living in the future, compared to those who found themselves waking up in the past. Why did you wake up into this particular body? Why not one of the past or future? Why not as anybody else? Why did I wake up as me? And then imagine, if ever I "wake", just as I woke into this body, into some experience that is infinite, then I will be trapped forever.
Imagine a star trek transporter was a real thing. In that show, I think the common explanation was that the transporter didn't send you places, but merely created a copy of you somewhere else and destroyed the original.
Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.
Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.
If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.
And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.
But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.
But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.
But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.
That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?
My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."
Would many people really be totally fine with getting disintegrated and a copy made immediately, if they knew that's what was happening? Even if it's instant I think that if you told someone they would be killed and an exact clone of them could get a free trip to Paris there'd be a very low chance they'd agree to it.
