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>You have zero control over what you will sending to the brain. I agree. I never said that ??? is "me" here. To be honest, I've come to the daunting conclusion that the metaphysical self (as opposed to the psychological/physical self) is an illusion, resulting from our brains' memories. Consciousness wise, the me of tomorrow, or one hour from now, or one hour ago, etc., is just as distant from me now as you are from me now, or as a dinosaur millions of years ago is. And when you or anything else suffers greatly, this is just as much a concern as if I were to be told I will experience the same suffering in the future. Although my primate brain (thankfully) does not allow me to experience quite as much angst over others' suffering as my future self's. As to how I come to this conclusion, just as most of us here would agree that we do not have eternal souls, since elements of our personality, memory, and so on, are by all indications stored inside our perishable brains, by the same line of reasoning, and applying Occams's Razor again, we should not have a separate "spirit" (even of the barest form) since our impression of our lives being individual and continuous is the result of the same brain structures. Shedding the idea of the "spirit" also has the nice benefit of solving the various paradoxes of Star Trek teleporters, atomic scale cloning of people, and so on. There is also no reason to presume that our time exists at the level of consciousness, and the fact that general relativity precludes the existence of a canonical time ordering for the universe (Block Universe) also points me in that direction. |