By your “self,” I’m not referring to your physical body – I’m referring to your personal consciousness — what reincarnationists believe keeps coming back
If reincarnationists are right, I’m referring to your “soul”
While we all take our selves for granted, our selves are the very last things that we should….
Did you have to exist — ever???
Scientifically speaking, probably not — but even if you did, how likely is it that right now would be the time that you existed?
Where do our SELVES come from, anyway?
Is there a finite number of potential selves?
As far as I can tell, science doesn’t try to explain how that works – how our particular selves actually come to exist…
What is the physical explanation for DIFFERENT selves?
What is the physical explanation for YOU?
Whatever — the consensus secular hypothesis about the mortality of selves is that each of us can have only one finite life to live — at most
It could be that your particular self requires a particular sperm cell and a particular ovum
If so, if one of those were different, that fetus would have been your brother or your sister instead of you — and, you could never exist…
If the existence of your personal consciousness does require the joining of a specific sperm cell and specific ovum, and you can have only one finite life at most, the probability that you would ever exist is virtually zero
Here’s part of why
First, your Mom and Dad had to live at the same time, at some point near each other, produce the right sperm cell and ovum at the same time, have intercourse at the right time and do all the right ‘dance’ moves that time
And while your mom probably produced only about 500 ova in her lifetime, your dad probably produced about a septillion sperm cells
And then, all your hundred thousands of human grand-parent pairs had to do the same things!!!
And then, there’s your non-human grand-parent pairs — and the Big Bang…
The number of specific events that had to occur in order for you to occur may not be infinite, but neither is it countable
What’s more, there’s the UNLIKLIHOOD that NOW would coincide with all that
In other words, there’s no way in hell that your existence is the result of the combination of a particular sperm cell and ovum…
It could be that your particular self just requires the specific chemistry of your DNA – your specific “double helix”
It turns out that there are potentially 70,368,744,177,664 different human DNAs possible (or, at least that’s the number most encountered by my search engines)
(Though somehow, the very same number is given for the “Kernel power error” for Windows 10, or 11 – whatever the Hell that is!)
Whatever, I haven’t found anyone else on the Internet suggesting that you would be reincarnated if your DNA were duplicated.
And apparently, nowhere in history has anyone claimed to be in two places at once
And then there’s supposed to be at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in our universe – why isn’t some earthling self on other planets as well (our physical constants are supposedly universal)?
The only other way that your particular self may have come about (that I can think of) is that anytime a particular physical situation (animal life?) occurs, it naturally creates the “emergent property” of consciousness — which naturally includes a personal consciousness
If your existence was dependent upon that last explanation, the probability of you ever existing would be simply unknowable, but the probability of you existing right now would be even less than it would be the other ways — unless there were only a finite number of potential selves
How ever a particular self comes about, the probability that it would exist for only one finite time, right now, is approximately 1/googolplex…
In other words, the consensus “secular” hypotheses of human mortality is very likely wrong
