[John_KZ]

>What is it about life that makes us want to value it?

That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.

However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness.

My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?

[manifestsilence]

Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great, and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.