How "reincarnation" might work?

[robvalue]

When it comes to issues of the self, and consciousness, I feel I'm in a paradoxical position. All I actually have are experiences of "being me". Yet my scientific analysis would strip this identity away in any meaningful sense.

I'm left admitting that my subjective viewpoint, and the feelings it causes, are too unreliable to be of much use when determining objective truth. The notion of "self" is most likely just an emergent property of the brain, a way it copes with and processes things.

So scientifically, if you clone me, "I" am both things. Or perhaps, it's more correct to say "I" am not any of them, that it's an unscientific concept in the first place to assign identity for anything other than convenience.

Yet here is my seemingly special personal experience, and it's the only way I have of learning anything. It's really hard to get my head around. I can see how woo ideas develop if you're not careful and rigorous.