Quote:
Originally Posted by Iscariot
I'm well aware how the brain works (well to what extent modern science understands it) i've been reading about that for quite a few years. I'm not sure what that has to do with what I originally quoted though.
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What I'm saying is that there is nothing constant about the brain. Nothing which can be found at birth and also at death. It will be in one state now and another in the next, for the rest of your life. Similarly, whatever we use to describe our personality is far from constant, becuase it is found, as you said, in this same organ in our skull.
Building on that, I say there is no reason to believe we are in any way continuously existing. For all we know, our life span is only a few seconds: it could be that the being which is experiencing this very moment in your body will die (cease to exist) in the next while still passing its memory to the next being created out of the next brain state. I'm not trying to push pseudoscience here, all I'm saying is that the only thing we can identify as the core of a person is not even stable, so there is no way to prove that we are living in a continuous stream, as opposed to a set of frames instantly occurring and dissappearing so rapidly that it appears to be a moving stream. Since memory is retained from this experience, it makes no difference even if we are trillions of entities being generated in an electrical impulse and dying as the impulse fades.
I mentioned above that this is irrelevant in the end, because it wouldn't change anything about the way we live our lives. It only means that for a soul to exist, there would probably have to be one for each of these moments in which we exist, which, I have to stress, are distinct entities from each other.
In summary, our consciousness is an illusion created by rapidly successive(and brief) states of self-awareness spanning our lives. This does not help the idea of the soul being a singular, constant element.