Do you believe in free will?

[Perhaps]

So the conscious mind is the Magic Pixie. The "mind" is a term of rhetorical use only. And "conscious" is terribly difficult to define. There's simply no evidence that anything exists separate from the brain; but why should it, any more than digestion should exist separate from the stomach?

The very idea that there would be physical evidence for a non-physical entity is confusing at best and contradictory at worst. To object to materialism is not to believe in magic; rather it is simply to believe that non-material things do exist, and in some circumstances have causal interactions.

1. How can a conscious mind exist separately from the brain mechanism when without the mechanism there would not be any ability of awareness and therefore no consciousness?

2. By what mechanism does this non-material aspect of consciousness able to interfere with material causation and still remain independent of it?

3. Once again, is the ability to make decisions on a whim an expression of free-will, whereas a reasoned and considered decision is not?

1. To exist as a non-material object does not require that it exist independently of material subjects. When the material brain ceases, so too does the conscience. This doesn't invalidate my original statement about the conscience's effects.

2. There is no mechanism, it is outside of the material realm, just as some would argue numbers and time exist outside of the material realm. We know numbers exist in so much as we have utilized them in a material sense to enact physical changes, but they are not tangible nor do they possess mass, volume, etc.. We know time exists, but we have no physical way to obtain or measure it - aside from our arbitrary choice of movement relative to other objects. More simply, the non-material conscience can effect the material world, but it is not independent of the material world, in so much as its existence relies on a material entity - the brain.

3. The ability for the non-physical conscience to effect the material world is the action of free will.

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Memory, for one thing.

One of the fundamental ideas in quantum physics is that aside from state, two instances of the same atom are indistinguishable. Molecules are interchangeable by transitivity. In your brain, replacing one protein with another identical protein will not change anything, and so over time the encoded state is maintained even though the medium encoding the state changes.

The idea of "temporal continuity" is interesting because it can either be arrived at by a system with very good retention of state or by very poor retention of state. We see a movie ticking past at 24fps because our brains are just not quick enough to process the frames. It looks smooth and continuous, it's just a disjoint collection of images. And so our identity is just that hysteresis, the fact that we retain an after-image of ourselves that smooths over the joins - not because our brains are awesome, but because they're actually very very slow.

Does someone who suffers from complete amnesia after a horrific accident maintain their identity? Similarly, if a person is declared dead, then resuscitated with no remarkable changes to their brain functioning, do they retain their identity - even if their temporal continuity has been interrupted by a brief instance of non-existence (death)?