I just hoped maybe someone would try to answer these old questions given that they had such confidence in their beliefs.
This website has an entire two-year course of daily readings that precisely identifies which parts are open questions, and which ones are resolved, as well as how to understand why certain of your questions aren’t even coherent questions in the first place.
This is why you’re in the same position as a creationist who hasn’t studied any biology—you need to actually study this, and I don’t mean, “skim through looking for stuff to argue with”, either.
Because otherwise, you’re just going to sit there mocking the answers you get, and asking silly questions like why are there still apes if we evolved from apes… before you move on to arguments about why you shouldn’t have to study anything, and that if you can’t get a simple answer about evolution then it must be wrong.
However, just as in the evolutionary case, just as in the earth-being-flat case, just as in the sun-going-round-the-world case, the default human intuitions about consciousness and identity are just plain wrong...
And every one of the subjects and questions you’re bringing up, has premises rooted in those false intuitions. Until you learn where those intuitions come from, why our particular neural architecture and evolutionary psychology generates them, and how utterly unfounded in physical terms they are, you’ll continue to think about consciousness and identity “magically”, without even noticing that you’re doing it.
This is why, in the world at large, these questions are considered by so many to be open questions—because to actually grasp the answers requires that you be able to fully reject certain categories of intuition and bias that are hard-wired into human brains
(And which, incidentally, have a large overlap with the categories of intuition that make other supernatural notions so intuitively appealing to most human beings.)
This website has an entire two-year course of daily readings that precisely identifies which parts are open questions, and which ones are resolved, as well as how to understand why certain of your questions aren’t even coherent questions in the first place.
This is why you’re in the same position as a creationist who hasn’t studied any biology—you need to actually study this, and I don’t mean, “skim through looking for stuff to argue with”, either.
Because otherwise, you’re just going to sit there mocking the answers you get, and asking silly questions like why are there still apes if we evolved from apes… before you move on to arguments about why you shouldn’t have to study anything, and that if you can’t get a simple answer about evolution then it must be wrong.
However, just as in the evolutionary case, just as in the earth-being-flat case, just as in the sun-going-round-the-world case, the default human intuitions about consciousness and identity are just plain wrong...
And every one of the subjects and questions you’re bringing up, has premises rooted in those false intuitions. Until you learn where those intuitions come from, why our particular neural architecture and evolutionary psychology generates them, and how utterly unfounded in physical terms they are, you’ll continue to think about consciousness and identity “magically”, without even noticing that you’re doing it.
This is why, in the world at large, these questions are considered by so many to be open questions—because to actually grasp the answers requires that you be able to fully reject certain categories of intuition and bias that are hard-wired into human brains
(And which, incidentally, have a large overlap with the categories of intuition that make other supernatural notions so intuitively appealing to most human beings.)