Consciousness
I cannot see out your eyes. You are not me. I am not you. We are separate. And yet. We read the same language. We might share similar interests. How different is your consciousness from mine? How do your memories differ from mine. What scars does your flesh suit hold?
Imagine it this way. Just as two objects are separate, we each individually are separate. Its a matter of interconnectedness. The experience of being an eye is what sight is. Look at your nose. Become your eye. You see its position within the skull, the lips look like a sand dune from here. "I" feel i am my eye because "I" am connected to it. nerves transmit information and connect one place with another. "I" in this case because the whole human body. The experience of opening and closing your hand, that is what consciousness is.
The more points of connection between points, the more those thing become a whole. The human body is a dense area of these connections. A localized area of connections. The only connection outside the body are transmitted through body position, speech, smell, the senses. The skin becomes an extension of the world. Touching a surface means becoming conscious of the surface, in a way, becoming the surface. The experience of being a brain and being a surface becomes joined. This analogy becomes more apparent when talking about speech. When you listen to a person talk, you take on what they have said. You become the part of them that is transmitted through the air. The more you know about a person the more you become them. Share their interests, share their emotions. The more points of connection you have with another human, the more you become them.
Now, the experience of being a brain is reality hacked to an extreme. We are able to store experiences in the brain and relive them at a latter point. Creating a connection through time? XD In a sense. Simply, the experience of a memory is what it consciously feels like to be the nerves witch trigger that memory. "You" become that area of your brain which remembers. Memories are physical entities remember. They do not exist in some separate spirit realm. Physical trauma to the brain results in memory lost. You become conscious of that part of the mind. Just as you may not notice a cut finger. The eye is not aware of the finger, you temporarily stop being the finger. The finger becomes a separate entity. Just as you may cut off a limb. The limb is separate from the brain, and thereafter forgets itself. The limb does not remember the past in the way that the brain is able to. What it means to be you is what it means to experience your body and its environment.
Just as two apples are actually separate we are two separate consciousnesses. Physically two apples can be separate. Physically two experience become separate. Take the apples and turn them into applesauce. The form becomes less distink. Less sharp. There is a sharp wall between you and I is our inability to connect our bodies together to create a new entity. The reason you an I are separate is not because our meta-view-points are separate, but because the bodies which create our egos are separate. My memories and experiences create what we can call "me". An your memories and experiences create what we can call "you". Can we call this body-ego? This could be why consciousness seams to be localized. Because our brains allow us to recollect awareness of yourself. Our brain allows us to record existence and play it back. Memory is the meta loophole that human evolution has happened to stumble upon.
The past is not real. Memories, skelitons, and remains record the past, they are not the past itself. The things that exist, the universe, as it is, and what it has recorded, is the only thing that is real. I am the "ego" which remembers itself. The thing that records what my body is, and what it experienced, a physical memory in the brain. "I" am the experience of a memory of "my body".
We are the experence of a memory called ego.
There is no point at which we become a spiritual being outside the body. The body itself is what creates the ego, the person. Without a body, there is not chemical system to create memory. You duought this idea? We are simply just to connected with what our body is, the food it has eaten, the hormons in its vaines. Change the body, change the ego. When the systems which keep those memories in physical space fail, those memories, stored experiences, will crumble. A hit to the back of the head, tramatic brain indury. Think of the times you fell asleep. What is it like to not remeber? Is there a person without memory? The body will decompose, and the brain that would call itself "myself" will become something that can no longer speak, no longer remember, no longer move. The nerves which conjoin that mass of atoms will fall apart. The universe as it experiences that corpse will be of different sort from what it was when it was "living". The universe experiences a pile of dirt. A colony of mushrooms. The roots of a tree. A river as it cuts through stone. The ego will fade away as the struture which upholds it turns into somthing else.
"I" am not afraid of death. "I" will not be there when it is gone. When the memory machine starts to fail, and the final recursive memory is created... what is that like? Sleeping. Deeeep chaotic dreaming truns into a mush of dirt and electricity. Soil and grass.
I do not belive in reincarnation. "I" only exsist in the body i have. My body is me. Once this body dies, it is no longer "me". The pile of dirt does not know my name, it does not know where i went to school, it does not know my childhood trama. Just as the bird i'd get "reincarnated as" would not remeber my history, my memories, i would not be that bird. "I" am my memories. Change the memories, change the person. In the same way, i am not the body i had 10 years ago. That was a "diffrent person". There is no constaint form of self throughout time. The body changes, its ego adapts to and learns new information.