Guess what, his consciousness is you and you will close the game and walk away. In a consciousness dimension your character can't even imagine.
This is absolutely unrooted parable, except that consciousness remains a mystery. What does it hide? We don't know.
There's always the reductive argument of "Well, we could be running in a computer simulation and when you die here you're perfectly recreated in another simulated universe."
But, we're not.
What distinction are you claiming exists between your own subjective experience and that of a video game character? (follow-up question: why do you believe this?)
I agree with you. However, we both have to give serious consideration to the objection that our brains are a necessary but not sufficient condition of consciousness.
We do not know, as of yet, that our brains are not merely some sort of wireless router for some higher existential consciousness. I don't think it is, but intellectual integrity demands that it's seriously considered.
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it. While your memories and feelings are in the body, your subjective experience of them may not be.
This isn't a one time affair. Every human carries DNA explaining exactly how to create more intelligent conscious creatures. It doesn't take "special conditions." It happens in squalor, mud huts, ice, desert, famine, over excess—everywhere. We are self-replacing nanomachines looking like individual discrete entities on a macro scale.
Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it.
Nope. Not possible. You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.
Clearly I am only a portion of my brain since if you remove some of it I am still me. But then, if you start killing the neurons in my brain one by one, at what point do I stop being me?
You cannot reasonably claim to know this. Of course, your parent comment cannot know that "no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience" either, as long as he only has access to his own subjective experience.
Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so?
If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective experience, are you then going to argue that "While your memories, feelings, and subjective experience are in the body, your X may not be." What would X be?
On the other hand, having "uncaused effects" has been found in quantum mechanics, but it's too much of a leap to suppose that your consciousness controls your body through quantum mechanical probability. Although there's something eerie about the waveform collapse having to do with conscious observers.
Fortunately, it doesn't. Any measurement of a system constitutes an "observer", conscious or not.
It's exactly the same for us, making the observation - from our perspective we observed one result or the other, collapsing the wavefunction. But to an outside observer we entangled our own state with that of the cat and the sample, and we're in a superposition of (observed cat dead, observed cat alive) - and will be until they observe us, at which point our wavefunction will collapse to one or the other. And so on.
None? Ever? Consciousness could just be a free floating quantum mechanical genie attached to my back?
Hogcock.
We are only brains. If your brain gets squished, you don't really care because you'll cease to exist in this light cone.