I personally believe in extended mind theory. I would consider your distance to me the only real thing that prevents your mind from not being accessible to me. But the people around me they go have their own life experience, and then I probe them for their perspective when I require it. Sure I don’t have access to their entire mind, just like I don’t have access to the entire internet (for example, it would be impossible for me to watch every YouTube video) yet I can still answer virtually any question I have through researching via this extended mind. Your personal thoughts like what constitute your identity or your feelings towards a girl aren’t really useful to me, so it’s not so bad if they get filtered before reaching the societal mind. But the people around me I would certainly consider their minds, at least what they are willing to communicate to me, as an accessible part of my own mind. But that muddies the boundaries for my self concept. But my self concept still remains, whether it’s boundaries are muddied or not, I still will use terms like me and I, and that is just a concrete fact that this mental system exists. The illusion is that these boundaries must be set where we have traditionally set them. I am of the opinion I have responsibility to maintain not only my own life, but the life of the people I care about. If my best friend were to die, it would genuinely feel like a part of my own self died; like I lost a piece of my own mind. When I dropped my phone in a lake while kayaking, I lost a part of my mind, many ideas I chose to store on it rather than in my brain or on the internet, and now they’re gone.

Yeah, I agree with this take. The self is just a mental conception that is used by the human animal to set a boundary between what he is directly responsible for and what is the outside world. While the self is a real, definite thing that all humans construct, I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment, yet it is optimal to operate as if that is the case for survival.

You seem to redefine free will here. Even a ‘weighted calculation’ wouldn’t amount to free will. That’s just another bias our brains would use when making calculations. Free will would require that against all odds, you still possess the ability of choosing your future out of multiple possible futures. That the responsibility of the situation you’re in lies mostly on yourself. That at any point in your life, you could have made a decision differently via unbound will. If you replayed a choice in your life like chocolate vs white milk at lunch, say you chose chocolate, determinism would say that you could replay infinite times and you would choose chocolate every time. With your suggestion of the weighted calculations based one random quantum probability, if replayed, and the quantum probability was like 70% odds chocolate, 25% odds white, 3% odds strawberry, and 2% you don’t take a milk, then when replayed an infinite amount of times over, your behavior would match that spread. Where is the free will in that? It happened according to a mathematical function that existed well before and after your existence. Just laws of a universe much bigger than the individual self.

I don’t see how random deviation of atoms would cause free will. It would break determinism, but only so to cause random behavior. Not any that is freely willed. I genuinely don’t understand why people are always trying to fit free will into their theories or philosophies, like it’s some innate thing that is self evident. I have seen videos where otherwise very intelligent people explain some mind blowing physics concept and then they’re like “well, that would be the case, but we know it’s wrong because it leaves out free will.” I thought it was just an axiom for the theist, but why then do scientifically inclined individuals still hold out hope for the discovery of free will? I just don’t understand it, and it seems frustrating.

I mean when you say you’re ‘in love’ what that really means is that your brain is being constantly exposed to chemicals that before it wasn’t. You are now on drugs, when before you weren’t on drugs. Any artist can tell you that doing drugs changes the content of their work.

Also from my personal experience, being depressed comes with identifying as depressed. You will engage in behaviors to maintain this identity. In order for me to move past being depressed I had to allow myself to die. I had to create a new identity for myself and completely drop my old self. My personality is still in tact, as that’s how personalities work, but I no longer carry my depressed view of my self. I started listening to podcasts more, when previously I would listen to music 24/7 and I started exercising more and caring about my health in general a little bit more. You’re a new person now. The depressed person you identified with can’t be you, because they weren’t in love, and you are in love. Remember your past self, and love them even, but don’t try to revive them. You could also look at it in the inverse. Maybe this is your true genre interest, but your brain on depression was the state more akin to being on drugs, and therefore your depressed brain was the one reading odd books, and now you’ve reverted back to your nature.

Lol I first imagined the Toy Story spider baby head toy thing. This satisfies that concept. Thank you