Something something consciousness/self, a brainstorm

So, I've decided that I've thought about this for long enough by myself* and that it'd be more productive to see what you lot can add to it or pluck from it.
^{(* - it gives me a really fuzzy feeling that I've got someone to develop it further, thank you <3)}

This is a particularly mind boggling idea while at the same time being one I'm strangely perfectionist about. Honestly, if I keep waiting to think of the perfect angle for this I'm going to go crazy. I'm going to just kind of dump stuff here and hope for the best. Also as I said in my introduction I know a bit about a lot of things but not at much depth, so feel free to correct me in any way. Here goes nothing:

---

I've heard that the ancient greeks originally didn't have a word for consciousness, which is why when artists created stuff they credited it to muses or the gods. I've looked into it a bit and that doesn't seem to be exactly the case, but the muses stuff seems to be right.

Some time ago I was listening to a conversation between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett about consciousness and free will that seems to be related to that kind of thing. Sam is a philosopher/neurologist that has this rather (old and) controversial idea that free will doesn't exists. Here is what the wiki says about that: "Harris's practice developed from Vipassana and Dzogchen. He states that the key aim of meditation is to enable its practitioners to see that the self is an illusion". Vipassana, AFAIK, is a kind of meditation that supposedly allows you to be more aware of your thoughts. I've seen it recommended for adhd, creativity and all sorts of things. Harris says that if you get good enough at it you'll notice how your sense of self is a justification produced after the fact, that that sense of "you" is just an artifact of having a single point of view or something like that.

(edit: I should point out that this is not only sam's views but also of zen buddhism afaik and probably lots of other more interesting sources we could use)


Here are some links related to the subject I had already collected:



I'll edit more link as I find them or as people submit them.


_{Also, this is somewhat related to the tulpa thread, but also possibly much bigger than so I'll leave it at that and share resources between the two.}