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In most versions of reincarnation mythology, you can't remember your past lives, and the goal is to attain a peak and cease to rebirth.
Neuroscience is fairly certain that souls don't exist, and rhat consciousness is just an emergent property of a brain.
No one has any idea of whether consciousness is emergent or not. It’s unfalsifiable. Emergent consciousness is just speculation.
When consciousness observes reality, reality will change its behaviour, or seems to, and that would suggest that maybe reality is emergent from consciousness. But again, unfalsifiable, cannot be proven nor disproven.
Point is, no one anywhere has a solid grasp on what consciousness is. That’s why it’s called “the hard problem of consciousness”
Whichever way you look at it both are equally absurd.
In order for that debate to even take place, it has to be proven that "consciousness" exists on some special level.
There's no proof that there is some special sauce that is "consciousness" beyond just synapses, hormones and chemicals.
In other words, It's very likely that consciousness falls under the category of "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck..."
My answers aren't dictated by an awareness of self; they're dictated by a chemical hormonal soup that we pretend is some grand concept of self-awareness.
Uh, unless you're a philosophical zombie, you have direct proof that consciousness exists. On a level that isn't directly explainable from our current understanding of the brain.
I don't have any proof that anyone else is conscious. For all I know, it's possible that everyone else is just a biological automaton. (although occam's razor suggests otherwise)
But I do experience my own existence and awareness. So because of that, I'm 100% certain that consciousness is a real thing, more certain than I am of literally anything else existing.
I'd like to clarify that it doesn't mean that free will exists, and doesn't suggest whether consciousness is emergent, separate, or universal. But it definitely exists beyond just being some observable collection of behaviours.
Yes you do. we all do. But is your self-awareness of that fact merely a function of your synapses responding to stimuli in a predictable way?
In other words, is "I think therefore I am" just another biological response to stimuli rather than something philosophically greater than those "observable collection of behaviours" as you describe them.
I'd argue that no, it isn't.
We are "aware" for the same reason that we pull our hand away from a hot stove burner; neural response to external stimuli.
It's not that we are "programmed", as you describe. It's simply that (I believe) our self-awareness is a biological function, not an existential one.
I concur