pseudourinidine on Nostr: Well, really I appreciate you taking the trouble to set all that out and explain your ...

Well, really I appreciate you taking the trouble to set all that out and explain your view. However if I'm honest I find it impossible to follow with the effort I'm willing to put into it. There are many concepts that have no meaning to me, and statements that I cannot connect to my understanding of reality without doing more work than I'm willing to at this point (also I have no particular beef with the mainstream account of gravity and such). I hope you don't feel it's been wasted - maybe I'll return to this someday.

To pick up something else you said (about living in a simulation), one reason I would not be inclined to devote a lot of energy to this stuff is that I don't really see any point in taking one view rather than another. The entirety of scientific enquiry reaches a dead end when you ask the question: "how do I know what I'm seeing is real". There is no answer to that - at least none which can be reached with the scientific method, which relies on the notion of objective truth, which can easily be shown not to have any logical meaning.

So where I got to with science is that basically there is my consciousness - essentially just a viewpoint from which I perceive things, including my own body and feelings - and that's all that can be proven to me using science.

The interesting stuff is then what describes or explains my consciousness, as defined. I'm interested now by ideas of whether consciousness is inextricably connected to my physical body or not - and, if not, what context it exists in, and whether other consciousnesses are connected by that context.

Things like near-death experiences could be taken to suggest that consciousness is NOT limited to the physical body, and does not terminate at death.

My hypothesis for this is that there is, let's call it, a 5th dimension (speaking extremely loosely) on which consciousness exists. It connects in some way to physical bodies but the connection is not strictly necessary or permanent. And perhaps consciousnesses can interact directly when they are not connected to physical bodies.

All of that seems consistent with the science I know - and cannot be disproven. Nor is it provable, or falsifiable, but I've been down to the bottom of physics and it seems to me that isn't either! So if you're going to carry around a non-falsifiable view of existence it might as well be a mind-expanding one that allows life beyond physical existence, and communication between consciousnesses on a non-physical plane.. ..and which seems to be roughly shared by the majority of humans who have been born!