When does 'you' stop becoming you, before you die, when you undergo certain events?
I believe that the real you (or in my case, me) is some kind of metaphysical observer stuck inside an automaton. The automaton is obviously human, but without
you in there, it would be a
philosophical zombie -- an empty shell that eats, breathes, claims to feel pain, ages, maybe even evolves, but there's nobody at the wheel.
If there's nobody at the wheel, the human/automaton must always act according to some program, and this is known to be problematic. The person's overarching operating system or algorithm would be faced with the
Halting Problem. It would sometimes crash and therefore have to be periodically rebooted... by something else! But by what? Reset circuitry is not foolproof either -- it's still part of the system. What if that gets stuck in an infinite loop and the whole thing has to be rebooted? There could be a long chain of reset circuits, and they
all get stuck in a recursive loop! Therefore, at the end of the chain, there still has to be something else -- some conscious being that is capable of breaking the loop by being
illogical.
Thus we can safely reject
Physicalism and continue searching for that "something else", which is you.
If we look into
Kurt Goedel's work and his incredible understanding of the language of mathematics, we begin to understand the limits of science. For whatever model of reality we work with, 1) there must be something outside of the model, 2) that
something can't be explained inside the model. The link ^^ goes for the god/deity angle to explain that something, but with a little bit of effort I think it can equally be interpreted as
the real you.
I find it fascinating that depending on how you look at the world, you can be either infinitely small or infinitely big. If you trust your senses and take their inputs as gospel, then you're just a tiny little consciousness, stuck inside a biological being, crawling on a mediocre planet, in a generic solar system, in some galaxy floating around in a vast universe. But if you don't trust the empirical evidence of your senses,
you are the only thing you really know exists, and the entire universe is just a bit of imagination housed in your mind.
Reincarnation?First there would have to be 'death' -- that purported phenomenon that happens to lots of other people, assuming that we take the empirical evidence of our senses as gospel. It's pretty obvious that everyone else dies, but how do you know you're not just imagining everyone else? Perhaps death is what happens to your body when 'you' head for the exits?
There would have to be 'birth'. As far as I'm concerned, my birth was an infinitely long time ago. I don't even know if it really happened. Maybe I've always existed? It seems preposterous that something could 'create' me, let alone a mundane biological mechanism with blood and guts everywhere!
There would have to be something that survives biological death, and gets "plugged back into the Matrix" at some time around birth or gestation. However, in addition to that, those 2 entities would have to be somehow connected. Overall I think the jury is still out on that.
Absolutely fascinating read! Definitly some interesting things to think about.
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