@Mason Mora Thank you for joining the group, Mason. Here’s my take on your most interesting question, in the form of a thought experiment: 1) imagine an empty glass on a table; 2) pour in some red wine and drink it; 3) now break the glass and pour the remaining red wine from the bottle over the broken pieces; 4) the wine spills over the table. Now we ask ourselves: what happened to the capacity of the glass to hold the wine? When the glass is broken, where did that capacity go? What’s the connection between the glass and its capacity to hold the wine? What we call mind is simply our capacity to “hold” things in terms of feeling, thinking, experiencing, expressing, etc. When I break down into pieces, I will no longer have that capacity. To the degree that the glass involves a myriad of things to happen for it to have that shape and that function (eg formation and collection of raw materials, design and manufacturing), the capacity of the glass to hold wine naturally belongs to the numerous capacities of nature. Likewise, I’m a product of timeless natural evolution and my mind — my capacity to think, feel, write, etc — is naturally a function of the universe as well. I call this a thought experiment not because one can’t carry it out in reality, but because one shouldn’t waste half bottle of red wine and a perfectly fine glass!

Isn’t it amusing that nature has no trouble whatsoever to assemble electrons and nuclei together to form atoms with magical electromagnetic force, and yet, when it comes to the inside of the nuclei, all of a sudden nature loses its magical touch and has to use droplets of glue to glue some broken pieces together to make the protons? Make a wild guess as to which one is the case: that nature is an incompetent amateur who can’t figure out how to use the same electromagnetic force to form the protons, or all the physicists are incompetent morons who can’t see the compressed electromagnetic force inside the nuclei? “Strong force”, “weak force”, as if the electromagnetic force can’t be at different energy levels. You can tell how stupid these physicists are by the way they name things.