People seem to have a real issue with the idea that things are made of other things.
I have a piece of cake in front of me. It is made of flour and sugar and egg; or, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen; or, quantum probability amplitudes in spacetime, depending on how far down the levels of abstraction you want to dig.
The cake is no less real for all of this. I assure you, the cake exists. Not a lie.
I have a conscious mind. It is made of a pattern of electrical signals moving around a complex network of cells; or, if you go down the levels of abstraction, much the same sort of bits as the cake, but in a rather different arrangement.
The fact that we have some tiny bits of slowly growing knowledge about what our minds are made of does not make our minds any less real. Just like the cake. We don't need to posit separate magical entities to be minds for us. It's OK for them to be made of what we can see. They won't go away.
I have a piece of cake in front of me. It is made of flour and sugar and egg; or, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen; or, quantum probability amplitudes in spacetime, depending on how far down the levels of abstraction you want to dig.
The cake is no less real for all of this. I assure you, the cake exists. Not a lie.
I have a conscious mind. It is made of a pattern of electrical signals moving around a complex network of cells; or, if you go down the levels of abstraction, much the same sort of bits as the cake, but in a rather different arrangement.
The fact that we have some tiny bits of slowly growing knowledge about what our minds are made of does not make our minds any less real. Just like the cake. We don't need to posit separate magical entities to be minds for us. It's OK for them to be made of what we can see. They won't go away.