Marken :
There’s a view that’s sort of like this: the panpsychist view. In short, consciousness is like the fundamental layer of the world, and the matter that exists on this layer experiences in its own way. A rock is not any less conscious than a human; it’s just that humans have evolved to interpret sound waves and light through our eyes and ears, and this information is stored and processed in our brain. If you remove the eyes, the ears, and the memory, you’re not really much different from a rock. The consciousness is still there; there are just no sensors or cognitive systems to process experience and emotion in the way humans do.
I personally take a more materialistic approach to my beliefs. I believe that there is no self. This basically means that there is no more of “you” when you are alive than when you are dead, because there was never a “you” in the first place. Outside of human perception and the way we objectify things, life and death are not fundamentally different. The distinction exists because we perceive ourselves as separate, persistent individuals, but there is no fundamental self underneath the physical processes that make us who we are.
There exists no free will because there is no one to will it. There is no independent entity inside us that makes decisions; there are simply physical processes unfolding according to the conditions that produced them.
If you were to make an exact replica of me, atom by atom—a clone that is identical in every way—and you kill off the original me, my consciousness would not be lost, because there is no fundamental “self” that is connected to this particular body. The replica would be just as much “me” as the original was, because neither of them contains some separate essence that makes them the real me.
We are a byproduct of nature, constantly evolving and changing as time goes on, and death is a part of this process. Death is not a loss of self, but rather a change in form. You did not die because there was no one to die in the first place. There is nothing to will and there is no one to will it.
2026-09-14 21:57:28