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“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
—Dr. Francis Crick, Human Genome Project
It’s this “no more than” that is important, I think. Under this view atheistic worldview, you don’t exist in a meaningful sense at the level of personal identity and free will—it’s just your nerve cells and molecules doing their thing. What seems to be like your free will and personal identity is an epiphenomenon floating on that basis. Ie, everything that happens in a living system is fully determined by what happens at the lowest physical levels.*
*From a talk by GFR Ellis.
With love, always
-Lucas AKA “BQ”