There is no unchanging, separate self.

Sorry that I didn't start this debate. Way too much going on in college.Some very interesting arguments you put out there. Let's have a look, shall we?In the first philosophical argument, Con argues that it is concievable for an individual self/soul/consciousness to exist without a body, or for it to transfer from body to body. This argument supposes that because there is the perception of a body, there must be a soul/self/consciousness that somehow inhabits the body. If there such a being that inhabits the body, it is concievable that this being could inhabit a different body, or no body at all. Notice that we must start from an experience to posit an experiencer, because we cannot externally experience a self/experiencer; we can only internally experience an experience/conscious state. Consider the scientific fact that the entirety of your present human experience, which is composed of your external senses, your internal body sense (proprioception) or capacity to feel one's own bodily position and sometimes the movements of the innards, and your internal mental sense which can be described as the awareness of thoughts, mental images, and intuitions, must, even if they are percieved by something separate from the body, are certainly generated within the body. In other words, if you, the experiencer/self, were to be disconnected from the body, you would not see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or think anything (yes, you need a brain to think thoughts and concieve of things!). You would be a subject with no object, and your ignorance would be infinite. This is to say that, independently of experience, there is only ignorance. Ignorance in the sense of complete unconsciousness. But wait! Can you imagine what it'd be like to be completely unconscious? No! It's not "like" anything to be unconscious. If it were like something, it would be consciousness, not ignorance. As far as I can tell, we can only say one thing about the essence of a subject/self/consciousness: it's like something to be it. Ignorance cannot have any essence as it is completely empty, or lacking in substance. Therefore, your being depends on your experience. If there is no experience, there is no experiencer/being/self, and vice versa. There is only emptiness, or nonexperientiality.This is not to say that nonexperientiality is somehow more real or natural than experiencing. On the contrary, it isn't! ;)It's just a thought experiment that proves that you are not a self that HAS experiences. You are the experiencing itself! Everything happening around and within you is part of you, and not for a single moment of experience does it stay the same. You are in constant flux! So, when you die, you won't know a thing about it. Experientiality will simply continue to evolve, never to remain in place, for its very nature is change. Time to tackle physicalist determinism. Or maybe just turn your argument on its head.... If you were an unchanging self, separate from your body and surroundings, how would you control your body? You would have to do some kind of physical work to change your brain states responsible for motor control, but you're separate from the brain! So, are you material, then? If you are, then you're a changing part of the changing material world. Really, the separate, unchanging, monadic self can do nothing but watch. It will merely observe brainstates as they pass by, unable to act or think for itself. Just because there is no unchanging, separate self does not mean that every desire is compulsory and none are rational. Consider that the brain may be divided into many basic modules that perform simple functions like seeing, smelling, feeling pleasure, etc. which are integrated into more complex modules that perform more complex actions such as identifying phenomena and "things" as me or mine, listening, talking/thinking, visualizing, and more. The brain may, with practice, integrate even more complex networks that do things like be persuaded by an argument or compose a symphony. We have no ground to suppose that an instrument as beautifully complex as the human brain cannot synthesize a (relatively) rational thinker with all of its integrative processing power. All that consciousness would have to do is watch thoughts, feelings, and perceptions rise and fall without interacting with them to realize that the self is constructed through a complex chain reaction that results from the identification with any particular volition. The "self" (and all thoughts/objects within consciousness) could be brain created objects of experience made of integrated information (or complex networks): the substance of experientiality. Now for NDE's If you listen to the content of Eben's speech, you'll realize that he had experienced "ego death" and felt as if he were completely one with his surroundings and that there was no separation. The world became more and more interactive and real to the point at which this "nondual, transcendent realm" was such. I imagine that the description of the world as he tells it is beyond inadequate. The report, however, does not even suggest that there is a separate, unchanging self, and even seems to agree with the hypothesis that what is fundamentally "real" and infinite is the experiencing itself.