Why am I me?

[solja247]

We have all been dead. We each have been dead for billions of years.

To die means that one has existed. We have been in a nonexistent phase for billions of years, not dead, just nothing.

I see our existence as nothing more than a taster, a taste of what it is to exist, to look around and wonder. We will have to give it up whether we like it or not. I find the idea interesting that everything we see and understand will one day have no meaning to us. Whether we do good or bad, death is equal to all.

I see this life as a trailer for the next. The next life is going to be so much better.

I will be less poetic and say you are you simply because your brain has been wired to perceive a collection of stimuli that corresponds to your physical body, you feelings and your thoughts as a discrete, highly preferred entity; and this wiring was in place long before evolution added to your brain the additional features that enable you to wonder why this is so, what alternatives are there for you other than being you, what happened before you began, and what will happen after you end.

The longer story might be that once matter has been organized by evolution into system potentially capable of thinking, it was likely advantageous for that system to be able to conceptualize itself as something distinct from everything else. This is because harm to any part of the system harms that system's overall ability to reproduce itself, so a thinking system that includes circuitry which separately conceptualize "self" and "not self" when planning its own actions would enjoy advantages in dealing with the world compared to another thinking system which treats its own left foot just like another rock its right foot could tread on. Hence progress towards circuits that give you your concept of self would be preferred and over time this preference would steer the ancestor of your genes towards organizing circuitry that give you yours sense of self.

I think the famous evolutionary biologist said it well: ‎"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason fo...r supposing my brain to be composed of atoms." - J.B.S Haldane

Because of evolution.

You dont know that.

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Because you're a recursive pattern machine. You're a series of historically related patterns in patterns that refer back and forth to one another. You can easily get rid of this with powerful drugs.

The problem with reductionism it doesnt answer the question; Why are things bloody complicated?
A machine shouldnt question their own existence or anyone's else existence, we should analyse, but we are more complicated than that.