I think that you agree that...
You should know by now that starting off a post like this is going to get you a lot of well-placed criticism. Gaslighting your critics has never been a good debate strategy, and you're pretty clumsy at it to boot.
1. Consciousness naturally entails a self,
No, this vague comment sounds suspiciously like "a self" is just another euphemism for soul. Materialism doesn't have anything like a soul in it. The sense of self in materialism is a property, not an entity.
2. A perfect copy of your body/brain would not reproduce your particular self -- there would be a difference between the two selves.
The sense of self is not particularized or individualized in materialism. You've been given examples of other non-individualized emergent properties, which you comically tried to argue weren't properties. "Reproduce your particular self" is therefore meaningless as far as materialism goes.
"There would be a difference" is your ongoing point of equivocation. We've called you on it several times before. The only difference is that you would have two organisms, not one, which you allude to below. There would be no discernible difference, qualitatively speaking, between them. You insist on conflating cardinality with identity, and your critics rightly don't let you do this.
3. This difference would not be the result of body chemistry -- the chemistry of the two bodies would be exactly the same.
4. The bodily difference between the two would be in location and specific molecules.
You are the only one talking about "chemistry." You try to deflect materialism toward certain specific disciplines such as chemistry and genetics, so that you can use boundaries of those specific disciplines to try to restrict the problem or draw artificial distinctions such as between human organisms and mountains. But we do agree that the only difference between the original and the copy are those that pertain to cardinality. They would be otherwise indistinguishable.
5. We have no idea if, and how, these differences would determine "who" the new self would be.
No. Under materialism this is patently false, and we've told you this enough times that I feel confident saying that if you claim we agree on this point, you are just flat-out lying.
Materialism dictates that all that can be attributed to an object is in some way produced by the matter of that object. There is no magical property that somehow exists outside that universal rule. The car going next to me on the freeway is not exhibiting some sort of different "going 60 mph" simply because the car is one lane over. Under materialism, the copy would be exactly the same self as the original. It would
have to be. If I scoot my office chair back, I don't suddenly have a different sense of self because my molecules are not where they were a second ago. You are
really grasping at straws here.
6. The who/self to which I'm referring is the thing/process/experience that reincarnationists think returns.
Putting "who" in quotes above and putting slashes between dissimilar words doesn't magically fix your argument. And since your critics are all familiar with these tricks, it's disingenuous of you to keep trying. It's downright rude to declare that people agree with such a mashup of equivocal language. Materialism does not agree that the sense of self is an entity, for example. And you want "experience" to include all the things you've stapled to it, not just the observed data.
You don't know anything about reincarnation. It's essentially a lie to say we all agree with your invocation of it.
Where, exactly, do we run afoul?
Aside from my statements above -- which have already been repeated ad nauseam and ignored by you --
here, as you well know. And also as you well know,
here is the post where you concede you have no answers. The question then becomes why you think you have any mandate to continue this debate.
You lost. Man up and admit you lost. All you're doing is repeating your original claims and foisting the fantasy that anyone agrees with it.
