None of this has Any relevance to my actual life, nor, I think, to anybody else's except as an alternative to playing "Angry Birds".....
Without conscious awareness all those billions of years would be less than the blink of an eye in duration.
Maybe it’s not so much a question of whether we have a soul but rather who or what it is that has conscious awareness. IMO our sense of existence as an individual body is an illusion.
This illusion is demonstrated by the mental condition known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder, where various personalities might be exhibited by a single body. None of the personalities is the correct one—they are all equally illusional.
Also consider that the sense of self is heavily dependent on memory. Memory is notoriously unreliable and subject to going away.
You can lose your memory and still experience conscious awareness. In deep meditation yogis are unaware of their bodies and have no thoughts or memories. They are in a super conscious state.
I lean toward thinking that reality itself is conscious and that our bodies are nothing but robotic instruments.
Thank you for your analysis. If we have memory, which is notoriously fallable but creates our only sense of self, we must also consider the nature of the entity that is remembering. Is it pure consciousness? Can it interpret differently so that actually we have multiple selves, even when we are in the body. Certainly we remember being different at different times of our lives, but these memories might be just illusions. So we get to the issues of what is memory, what is remembering, what entity is remembering, & are we not one "self" but many selves?.
It's like the problem of reincarnation in Buddhism. What is reincarnated. It is not the ego, which is related to brain functioning & stops when the brain stops. Buddhist scholars say it is the karmic forces we have set in motion. Karma is the law of cause & effect. While we live, we set in motion various forces for good or ill which continue in the great scheme of things. So reincarnation is something like one billiard ball hitting another & sending it in a certain direction. It is not the self that is reborn but the karmic forces that continue.
Maybe it is not that our bodies have consciousness, but that consciousness, which is the ultimate essence of being, has our bodies.
@Remiforce We are on the same wavelength and I greatly enjoy your posts.
@WilliamFleming William, Thanks for your support & encouragement. It gots lonely out here being a thinking human being, or trying to be
It isn't necessary to type in all block caps and indeed it makes it difficult to read.
Sorry, I did put the origional in different type & used very effective paragraphing, but it might have been too long. When it went up, it got all squashed together. But I believe the insights are worth reading.