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Showing posts from July, 2021

Consciousness and Death

  Consciousness arises in the physical brain but is not a physical process. It is a “program” that runs in the brain. And this program is not linked with the brain/body in any fundamental way apart from the fact that it runs on a particular brain situated in a particular body. This may sound something simple, but the implications are profound. And that explains a lot of the struggles of us conscious beings. Consciousness is not so much a biological evolutionary process – it does not degrade with age as the brain/body does (the degradation that happens in old age is again due to degradation of the hardware). It is an abstract thing – not physical – so there is no such thing as degradation. Prime numbers do not degrade over time, music does not degrade over time – the physical instantiations surely do, but the abstractions do not. So, consciousness, as an abstraction, does not have “degradation” built into it. But the brain/body does. And therefore death i.e., death of the physic...