Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[Hatshepsut]

But bring them to the table without anything more to support them?  You've got to expect some disagreement.  We all have our own flights of fancy...But jumping to magical solutions may just undermine your pursuit of those fine questions.  Your choice of course.  But no one who respects the questions is going to be content to plug in your fanciful, just-so story.  Good questions are not nuisances to be swatted away....But you may be missing out on better answers by jumping the gun this way....It doesn't seem too likely that an atheist hangout is the most likely place to find kindred spirits in this regard.

Well, rather boring if everyone agreed with me. Never underestimate magic, however. Perhaps the one thing where Australian Aborigines and ancient Egyptians were a little smarter than we. While a lot of mental and material benefits were gained by our discarding magic, we paid a price for that.

I don't think I gave any "just-so" stories in my post. At least not intentionally. I certainly hope I wasn't swatting at questions as if they were flies. I was arguing that explaining subjective consciousness as an epiphenomenon or as an emergent property of complexity is too facile. These two explanations are popular, I see them everywhere. But neither of them proposes a mechanism. I was under the impression that mechanism is central to any scientific theory. Explanations that don't include a causal mechanism are usually considered unscientific. Yet the privacy aspect of consciousness seems to make it impossible to find a mechanism for it.

I don't bump into many kindred spirits anywhere I go. While belief in deity may not be the best answer, neither is the denial that a deity is possible.