When you turn your computer off the RAM is erased, the state is lost. Our brains are running on RAM.
Perhaps we have persistent, non-volatile storage too, but we have no way to access and continue running our conscious, outside of our brain.
There’s nothing to fear about that- it is the world we’ve always lived in, and the state after your brain stops processing is no different from the state of the universe before you were born.
I agree there is currently no known way to transfer the state of a human brain, like there was no concept of RAM back when religions were started
Why do you say that? We have mountains of experimental evidence that animals of all kinds experience consciousness to a degree that rivals our own. We’re better at some forms of consciousness and they are better at others.
when I think of human consciousnesses and souls the first thing I notice is how unalike we are to other animals, it is uniquely human, and the comparison with other animals begins and ends there
I'm probably quoting someone somewhere sometime with "our bodies are vessels, driven by souls, enroute to infinity", but I think this is the closest approximation to what I mixedly believe about life and death
evidently we are unique in our animal kingdom for having this soul/consciousness, whether it be planted or evolved, created or random
I like to toy with the ideas among civilisations of the belief that their afterlife can be envisioned here on Earth, passing on to a pre-imagined place
I live in the hope that those I love are reunited in death, on some remote-but-familiar plane of existence. the problem with this is that memory must be preserved to some degree and transcribed, as it would be odd e.g. to reunite with my father in his infancy. but problems and their questions such as these rest more easily than the cliche answers to the broader "what happens when"
at first I was hesitant to quote Iron Maiden lyrics here but then remembered a discussion from the other week on rap music, and the beautiful refrain seems poignant, so here goes "I will hope, my soul will fly, So I will live forever. Heart will die, my soul will fly, And I will live forever."
I'd say I'm roughly half afraid, half curious about what will happen when I die, but will never be persuaded it is nothing, so long as I live..
ultimately hope, belief, and online pondering are of little value, just more locks on the door to the unknown