>>11109464Still, it might be fair to say that language is only another mechanism that moves consciousness, like a programming language.
I personally think that consciousness is most directly tied to memory and our ability to cross reference current experience with it in a way that becomes inevitably recursive.
You have a memory of sitting where you're sitting a moment ago. You experience that you're still sitting in the same spot. You're probably the same being. If you consider how much you have stored in your brain in terms of memory and how many little subconscious comparisons like this are being made at any given time, I think it becomes easier to see how a phenomenon like consciousness might form around that. So I think it's reliant on a basic sense of identity at least (one even animals might have regardless of lack of self-awareness) and is felt continuously so long as a mind approximately and historically resembles its prior states.
The reason I said this seems kind of Platonic to me, and how this relates to the afterlife, is based on that final explanation. If consciousness is the product of physical processes and more or less follows a flow of memory (through abstract mechanisms like language and sensation, which notably construct memory), then it's kind of like a constant information transfer.
This is intriguing because information is reproducible and is not fixed in space. Like, if you have 45 oranges, and then you eat 5 of them, it's true that you now have 40 oranges, but the number 45 didn't phase out of existence. You just don't have the oranges to represent 45 anymore.
