Yes, I agree. But for you, personally, it is nothingness. Actually it not exactly nothingness, because you cannot actually experience nonexistence since you don't exist. But yes, everything else chugs along without you.

Religiously, the soul is "breathed" in by an Angel after 120 days. Which is strikingly coincidental of when doctors say there is brain activity.

But to each his own. Then, what is your definition of the mind/consciousness? Would like to know.

Consciousness is that annoying time between naps.

i think that pure experience doesn't necessarily require a self.

Consciousness has to do with awareness. Being aware of your existence or being aware of thinking/feeling/etc is consciousness.

When we are talking about souls, we are treading into an area that we don't have concrete answers for. I can't prove humans don't have souls, just like you can't prove human have souls (unless you consider the Bible proof, but..)

My opinion on humans not having souls is a belief. Just like religion. That's a belief. You can't prove beliefs with science or reason. Atheists/Agnostics understand this concept a little better than religious folk tend to.

I understand. Why I started out with saying religiously not scientifically. Referring to my own belief.

If something like panpsychism or Strawsonian physicalism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Strawsonian_physicalism ) is correct, where there is some sort of microexperiental state of particles or fields or whatever, then any pure experience could be called a "self" at the smallest/most fundamental possible level, I think.

But honestly nobody knows at this point.

i've read Strawson's works as far as you've linked them to me. panpsychism really seems like an obvious solution to me when weighing how qualia fits into the world.
however, when it comes to the basic nature of experience i'd like to pull in the phenomenological idea of intentionality, that consciousness is always a consciousness of something to the consciousness itself - there is always something that is experienced - regardless of whether it's consciousness itself or something external to it. so for the self to be at the most basic level, there has to be something for it to experience - even itself. a what-it's-likeness must always have its' it. this would mean (akin to Sartre's views about an "opaque self" or "the transcendence of the ego" and Stirner's "Creative nothing") that the self is an object to the self. so even at the most fundamental level this self would simply serve as a localisation for pure experience rather than a "self", as something that is totally unitary, as for the self to be a distinct being it'd have to reflect upon itself.

this self would become a self only when pure experience is localised and constricted by something to be unitary - and the intentionality of consciousness means that it can not be truly unitary to itself. so pure experience would be even more fundamental than the self that it creates - or that the the self is possibly an illusion (or a necessary illusion) created by pure experience.

i'm drunk as fuck so i might be talking out of my arse for a change, lmk if i'm not making any sense at all.

This post was edited by Gastly on Aug 5 2015 03:33pm

A great man, diagnosed with terminal cancer, once said, “The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on—only henceforth in my absence. (It's the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.”