Quote:
Originally Posted by Onkel Neal
Where does consciousness come from? Does your consciousness exist before you are born? If so, where is it?
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Consciousness is a funtion of brain activity.
Automatted behaviour and reaction is instincts (which again get processed partially in the brain, partially directly in the peripheral neurons).
Whether there is a mind, or as I called it: spirit, without matter structured in a brain, is a metaphysical speculation - knowing for certain we do not anything, many however believe in claimed answers.
Atman and Anatman: Buddha said no individual Atman/ego (or mind) survives death, but there were the real, the non-ego (anatman) pointing to a quality that is bigger and beyond the individual existence. "Show me your true face that you had before you and you mother and father were born" is a famous koan in Zen.
In the end the miracle lies in that things, that all this even exist. Why do they? Why isn't there just nothing? All we perceive however is not what things, existence, cosmos really is like, because we perceive according to the individual design of the physical sensor used. We can conclude the sensor is what it is becasue it follows a physical need that dictates the form: but where did this proces start, and why? We do not deal with reality, but our imagination/interpretation of it. We deal with our own model - not with what the model is claimed to describe.
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less
gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is
all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
E.A. Poe