Sentience Platonism (short version here) is the idea that experiences exist by themselves, regardless of the sentient beings who experience them, and what we perceive as “our experiences” are just “shadows” of these “platonic experiences”.
Sentience Platonism could be explained with this metaphor: experiences are like liquids. Dead beings are like dry things (think of a dry sponge). Alive and sentient beings are like wet things (think of a wet sponge). Different temperatures or different types of liquids are different experiences. In this model we think that “we” (humid beings) feel, but experiences (liquids) exist by themselves, and what we call “I” is just the “act” of perceiving a part of the everything that exists, that is, the “I” is the perception of a subset of the totality of the universal sentience (a subset of the liquid), but under this hypothesis, the totality, including the “I” experiences, could remain even if the “I” disappears (the humidity remains elsewhere when the sponge is dry). The experience of suffering (certain type of liquid) exists and is still relevant even when the individual is released from suffering (in some possible scenarios we could say that sentience remains constant, in others not).
This model is not intuitive (as a lot of things that are true but not intuitive) but this model solves a lot of problems and is compatible with all experiences.
Sentience Platonism can be reinforced by the idea that perhaps we live in a simulation and beings may be “instantiated” from an ideal object, in the same way as “instances” of software objects in “Object-Oriented Programming“.
If there were any way to eliminate the suffering of the past it would be under a paradigm like this. Reducing the suffering of the past is a little less implausible that it sounds. Under eternalism, past experiences are as real as present experiences. The bad news is that under this approach, past suffering experiences are real, like if they were happening now. The good news is that if they are real, we can act on them.
The idea, therefore, is to make the past is “no more” rather than “never was”. To make past suffering “not real anymore” (thanks Vlastimil Vohánka).
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