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This totally misses the wood for the trees!

Either: your consciousness/personality is an emergent phenomenon resulting from the community of cells that make up your body - think like how countries can have a character, or toxic bitcoin maximalists - in which case without the cells there is nothing.

Or: consciousness is something originating outside the body and maybe 3D space itself, you might use the term “soul”, in which case they voluntarily elect to constrain themselves inside physical bodies for some purpose - some say just to experience the universe, or experience struggle and hardship, perhaps to provide more meaningful existence.

Notice how in bitcoin we voluntarily constrain ourselves down from the huge scope of the Wild West internet, into this very limited system, because it gives our interactions more significance, so much so that we can use it as money, the foundation layer of society…

HoloKat 2y ago

You seem to be very certain about something nobody is certain about. I can’t have a coherent discussion with such arguments.

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owenkemeys 2y ago

You can get there by piecing together the fragments.

Start at the bottom layer: cells are intelligent actors that communicate and cooperate toward higher order goals - biologist Michael Levin, eg https://lexfridman.com/michael-levin/ but any video or pod he’s on will work.

owenkemeys 2y ago

From the other direction, spiritual folks have had the concept of the soul since forever, but it’s obviously hard to put into scientific terms. However-

1. On that Lex podcast above, Levin describes a feature of death that seems to make no evolutionary sense - beings will give up and die when their situation seems hopeless, but in identical situations when they still have hope, it demonstrates they have plenty of energy to fight (example experiment with rats trapped in water, some taught that if they hold on long enough they get rescued). Why ever have ANY instinct to give up if the goal is to perpetuate your genes, surely any cost is worth paying? That does sound a lot like a video game player resetting the game, though…

2. Excellent book by a full skeptic neuroscientist who investigates spirituality/psychic phenomena/pseudoscience mumbo jumbo, and is ultimately brought to accept the evidence suggests the physical plane is not all there is: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58977909-proof-of-spiritual-phenomena

Could add much more but I’ll leave it there for now