I’m not trying to develop a “new, empirical science.” I’m telling you that the simplest answer is usually the right one, and the simplest answer is: the world is what it is. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt, and when you die, it’s over. Personalities are indeed just part of your chemistry. Even animals have personalities, and differ from one another. I have three cats. They have different personalities. They don’t have souls.
It's possible quantum entanglement and superposition play a role in the brain's function. Pieces of matter can be very far apart but function as if they occupy the same location. Electrons move about in an unexplainable fashion as if they are being influenced by forces outside the known universe, and can pop through insulators taking a mysterious route. We don't know how it all works yet. Reducing consciousness to just chemistry is oversimplifying the mystery.
snip: I’m telling you that the simplest answer is usually the right one, and the simplest answer is: the world is what it is. You make the best of the hand you’re dealt, and when you die, it’s over. Personalities are indeed just part of your chemistry.
Spirited: The simplest answer is not a belief predicated upon a need to explain away man’s soul, mind, conscience, and free will.
The simplest answer is the one embraced by the Founders, which they defined as “self-evident” truths. Self-evident in that man really does know that he thinks, makes choices, and feels guilt. There is no way except by willful self-delusion that man cannot know these truths.
At bottom, both rationalist materialism and pantheist vitalism are alternative salvation systems. Salvation is not BY God the Father but FROM Him. It is had by either explaining away or denying the existence of mind, soul, conscience, and free will. Scrooge was a rationalist materialist. When Morley appeared, Scrooge tried to explain him away as indigestion caused by a bit of bad meat.
America and the West are even now experiencing an occult revival. Some of the world’s most powerful leaders have spirit guides. The UN has become a veritable temple of spiritism. Occultism always signals the end of a civilization.
Very dangerous times lie ahead. Your denial of a spiritual reality will not save you from its effects, or from the forces behind them. They are there whether you believe in them or not.
Your "simplest answer" — "the world is what it is" — is a non-answer. To me, it indicates a refusal both to apperceive or explain. You aver, but do not show any evidence in support of your assertion — except perhaps evidence that you have set yourself up as the measure of Reality in your own mind.
Evidently on your view, human beings reduce to their chemical composition — that's all there is — and the "world" is a matter of opinion, which differs from person to person. Although how can there be an "opinion" if all a human being is, is his chemical composition? Do chemicals "think" or "opine?"
But the Reality as measured by you is evidently grotesquely reduced to what can be known by means of direct sense perception. This is the positivistic Cartesian/Newtonian reduction, which envisions the world as a mechanism — i.e., the so-called machine metaphor.
But this machine metaphor, which evidently gave such comfort to Pierre Simon Laplace (the French mathematician and astronomer who authored Mécanique Céleste [Celestial Mechanics]), is ultimately self-defeating for two reasons: (1) All machines are purpose-built; and (2) All machines operate by means of a set of instructions, or "software."
So to invoke the machine metaphor does not get rid of the problem of "non-observables": purpose (whose purpose?) and instructions (information). Since these are examples of what has been called non-phenomenal reality, they are indetectible by sense perception in principle. It takes an act of the mind to explore these realities — a willingness not just to "perceive" (the processing of sense data), but to apperceive (the relation of sense data to each other and to the larger environment in which they occur, which is evidently structured by universal laws which are not themselves direct observables).
As the poet William Blake put it,
We are led to believe a lieIf find it rather amusing that atheists and others of scientistic bent classify the soul as "the ghost in the machine." But I thought these folks didn't believe in "ghosts!" That's another non-observable in principle. How can they use this term without involving themselves in yet another self-contradition?
When we see with, and not through
The eye.
It seems to me (FWIW) that atheists and others of scientistic bent of mind are either totally irrational, or guilty of intellectual sloth....