From your point of view you were born randomly in a universe in a random country to random parents. Yes. There is a story once you were born. But as far you are concerned you could have been born as anything in any Universe. There would always be a story backing it up.

But you are not a tabula rasa. You are made of a genetic code inherited from your parents, which strongly determines how you look and your body can do. You were clothed, fed, raised, cultured, taught by your family and others in their geographic area.

The self has a heritage even if the self refuses to accept it. You are your parents' child and not someone else, for the same reason you are also a human, a hominid, a mammal, not a fish or a tree.

If I am made of genetic code, why do they say I die and no longer exists even though the body remains?

Your genetic code shapes who you are and how you appear to others when you're alive.

If you're alluding to the existence of some transcendental self, can you at least accept it is inseparable from your corporeal self?

I think the corporeal self is an illusion.

Perhaps you are right, Neo. Perhaps we are in the Matrix. But you lack evidence for your position. How could you tell if you're a transcendental spirit, and not a brain in a jar suffering from last Thursdayism?

I have plenty of evidence that we're bags of chemicals wandering around a rock in space, and our consciousness is the results of electical signals passing through our synapses. If you wish to reduce the majesty of nature to "unknowable", you reduce your own position to unknowable too. If you're fine with that, I'm fine too, but I still like my position better than yours.

The only thing you know is you are aware. Rest everything mere appearances in the awareness. And that includes all the what ifs.

If CPUs are made of transistors, then why do we call them broken when they stop functioning even though the chip still remains?

Are you saying CPUs are alive as in how humans and birds are alive and have conscious experiences? What is that experience? Is it the body? Or something else ?

The problem here is that you're defined by the history of environments you've been in, which provides a reason to stay in them (and a reason why the phenomenon of culture shock exists). I could not randomly have been, to take a random person, Carmen Miranda, because I am not her to any extent, so for me to "be" her, in some alternate reality, wouldn't mean anything.

Who are you?

IDK, a strange loop? But a specific one.

Oh wait, you changed what to who, didn't you?

Does the specificity comes from beliefs that you think about yourself?

Kinda, but like they say, if you open your mind too far, your brain falls out.

> "if you open your mind too far, your brain falls out"

Boom, thanks, and ouch... I guess.

Is that also something that you believe or you know?

It's a maxim that reflects objective reality, according to me.

Do you know it or is that also a belief?

It's knowledge, and it may be false.

I grew up near a border; a border which changed a lot throughout history. Not to mention that the country I was born into didn't exist as such even a few generations ago. So yeah, I'd go with “randomly born in your country”.

Which is what we also call a "random forest".

You could have said "two people decided to have sex, you were not born randomly", and it would have had the same relevancy. The fact is that you had 0 input on where you will be born, so from your perspective, it was random. Everything else is just trying to play up a belief, religion, or some kind of woo as a ground truth.

Absurd.

Any decision I did not take; is random to me amd I am really mot responsible for it.