The Fortunate Man

[onefamiliarface]

At some point, in the distant past, something happened which created stuff. Eventually, through all kinds of weirdness, that stuff became life. Life became sentient. Sentient beings had babies with each other in the right order until they had me, you, and all the people we know. Most importantly, for this story, is that one particular sperm in

Comments

sperm + egg = eternal soul part un

[zigmazag18]

It's a funny thought, the me-ness of a sperm and egg combination. I really have no idea what to think of it. I can reconcile everything about the universe, including theories about how universes can be formed in the first place in ways which escape the trap of an eternal past. I can reconcile intelligence, all human accomplishments, how a brain works, forming memories, thought processes, the nearly infinite recursion of our idea of self, and how THAT fundamentally is our continuous idea of self. But I can't reconcile qualia. I can't reconcile how we seem to have souls, for lack of a better word. 6 billion automatons writing music, poetry, and landing on the moon I can get. But the actual experience of things I don't. I understand the processing, but not the experience

sperm + egg = eternal soul part deux

[zigmazag18]

I find the arbitrariness of imposing continuity on our souledness to be comforting, in the sense that time not existing is comforting. If there is no continuity in our man under the hood, behind the curtain, then the question of "where does it go when I die" vanishes, because it was never independent of you, it wasn't even with you from birth to death and everywhere in between, it's just a moment to moment phenomenon. It's our artificial sense of self which worries for death then. And in time that'll be uploadable anyway. And who knows, as plausible as anything it might well have qualia