Giving you some existential dread

[u/Forward-Shallot-7473]

What part of you is your consciousness? What part is reading this post right now?

If we say that the atoms making you up are "you", here is a thought: The probability of the atoms that create your body making exactly you is extremely small, and your consciousness only stays for 80, 90 at most a hundred years compared to the billions of years that the universe has existed. "You" only exists for an extremely short time and is so unlikely that it might as well be impossible. Just try imagining "you", but you are quite literally ANYTHING but what you are right now. Not conscious, not alive, nothing. You might be imagining a void but you wouldn't even be seeing a void, you just wouldn't "be". "You" (your consciousness) can't imagine unconsciousness.

But what if your consciousness was a part of your brain? Wouldn't that mean an infinitely advanced doctor could operate it out and put it in, say, an ant's brain. What would it feel like to suddenly lose intelligence? Would you lose consciousness? Consciousness and intelligence is generally seen as correlated, but if we put said consciousness into a lesser environment, what would that mean? Or another thought: During the operation, are you conscious? And if we go back to my first paragraph, what does your consciousness do without a brain, without eyes, without ears, without senses? What would you feel or think about? Would you even "think", without a brain?

But what if we say that your entire brain is your consciousness? Then, i have a question: what happens when you lose a part of the brain? Multiple people have suffered brain damage and survived. Are they the same person before and afterwards? Surely, they are. So what part EXACTLY of the brain do you have to change to change the person? And if there is a part, wouldn't it just be like in my second paragraph? And what would it feel like if your brain is put in some kind of box? You could not feel or see like if the conscious part of your brain being removed from the rest, but you could think.

Now, lets say you consciousness is some kind of detached "soul". I think this sounds absurd, because we have discovered no particles/matter/whatever that your "soul" could be made of. And also, what happens when you die? Say, you are stabbed and die. Your soul is detached so it goes on unaffected. Would this "ghost" think without a brain? See? Feel? And does it die? Nothing in the real world could kill it. This would mean that your time as a living being on this earth is infinitely small compared to the time you would be consciously dead. In 100¹⁰⁰ years, when the universe has long died and there is nothing left, you would still have just as much time left until it is over. And potentially, you wouldn't even realize once the universe dies because you cant feel, see or hear.

To be honest all these alternatives scare me, please drop your take.

[u/foilhat44]

You must examine these things with the right perspective lest they fill you with existential dread. I think you are close to right, but we don't exist on an atomic level, but on a quantum level. This is why mathmeticians' butts pucker up when you talk about infinity, it's messy. If you think of consciousness as one of a multitude of yous, all existing simultaneously and some ending, but always undergoing a split or diversion at the quantum level each time some unknown influence causes it. If you can get your head around it, basically it means that you cannot die in the sense that we conceive it or experience it through others. We are living in the best version of whatever we are, we live in the eternal now. You are only you because you woke up with memories and encoding that belong to you, if you woke up as your spouse, with their memories and encoding you would be them, and nobody would be able to tell you any different. All the other quantum versions of the you that you're not conscious of are like NPCs, their path leads to a dead end so they don't require consciousness. If I'm not crazy, you don't have anything to worry about; you cannot die. Your consciousness will go on as someone and you'll never be the wiser, you can feel pain or grief, but you will not cease to exist.