Hey Jabba! This is my very first post to this topic and I'll admit I haven't read the whole thing since it's very long. I expect this means I'll be repeating something that someone has already said, but it sounds like this conversation has been looping around itself anyway so I feel like I'm not doing any harm.
I just wanted to clarify something I don't really get about your position:
10. I shouldn’t be here right now because there must be an infinity of potential “selves,” and only 7 billion existing selves. So, the odds of me currently existing is 7 billion to infinity – or, virtually zero…
Okay, so if I understand this (and some related parts) correctly we have a problem. The scientific understanding on consciousness is that it's an emergent property of our brains. I would agree that any specific consciousness could in a certain sense be looked at as being really unlikely if you were predicting it ahead of time.
So we can call that X for now (don't worry if this conflicts with letters used elsewhere, I'm just using two variables in this post anyway). X includes all the materialistic things that have to happen in order to end up with any one particular consciousness.
Probability of a specific X happening in the future = very very small.
Okay and then we have the other theory, that there's some non-materialistic self (this would typically be called a soul, but I understand you may be trying to avoid cultural baggage.
So we'll call that Y. Because there's more than one soul (or whatever you want to call it), right? And clearly it would exist separate from the materialistic stuff of X since a soul is by definition non-material.
So now we need to think about if this makes it more or less likely. Well, a person will still have all the materialistic stuff, right? So we still need to calculate X. That's their DNA, and all the variables in the developmental process, etc.
And then we need to figure out the probability of Y. I would guess at a minimum there's one soul for every person alive, right? (Hopefully more so we don't run out, but who knows!) So if it's like 7.5 billion that's... well it's really small.
Probability of a getting a specific Y = very small.
And like I said, we're talking about a material person WITH a soul, so we would need to multiply the two probabilities together. X*Y would give us, by definition, much smaller odds than either alone.
So you're comparing X to X*Y.
And we already know which one is more likely because it's fairly basic math.
