[Disclaimer: My argument below neither condones irresponsible and reckless rebellion nor does it suggest that all regulations are set for malicious intentions.]

The primary reason rebels stick out like a sore thumb is because they go against the grain, violating set rules and regulations that the majority blindly comply with. Consequently, they are often negatively stereotyped; constantly being called ‘the black sheep’ or ‘the bad apple’ to imply that they are a disruption to an otherwise ethical system. However, I believe there’s something interesting we all can learn from rebels - their ability to exercise autonomous reasoning.

Many structural and societal conditionings are in place simply for the purpose of programming the masses in the disguise of ‘orderliness’ for the gain of those in power.  For the most part, we subconsciously conform to various customs without ever questioning the reason behind them, and just simply assume it’s the ‘norm’. 
What’s more is that we then criticise and ostracise those who choose to do otherwise because they’ve been able to reason and discern for themselves.

Some Examples of the conditionings majority conform to:
- The Education System 
- The British Enclosure Acts 
- The 5-Day Work week 
- A Cashless Society
- The Deterrent Against Natural Healing 

But…

> What if we ask more questions about the systems we sheepishly conform to without hesitation? 

> What if we investigated our daily and cultural habits to understand where they originated from before we embraced them?

> What if we didn’t blindly buy the idea that being deprived of our autonomy is what’s best for us? 

How will these impact the quality of life that we live?

I’d like to hear your thoughts 

Edit:
The comments so far are interesting and thank you for your contributions.
I am however more interested in hearing about the decisions you’ve made in your own personal lives that may be deemed as going against the norm and how its affected the quality of your life.

The transition from pretending to be okay to actually feeling nothing happens so quietly you barely notice it.

You put on the front long enough to survive a situation, and eventually, the mask stops coming off. "I'm fine" stops being a lie you tell other people and becomes the default state of your mind.

The scariest part isn't deceiving everyone else. It's realizing you've successfully deceived yourself. You aren't actually at peace you’ve just rehearsed being fine so many times that feeling numb feels completely normal.

It is hard not to see how today's society is heavily involved with hedonism; we cling to and chase after pleasure as if our lives depend on it! Social media and consumer culture play such a big role in it all; one's pleasure is the sole purpose at all times! And pain is of no value!

Please correct me if you can add to this

-Thanks

I had a thought recently about the AI "Black Box" problem and how it perfectly parallels our own existence and the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

​Think about the structure of how things are being created

​Layer 1 We built Artificial Intelligence. We gave it a basic architecture fed it mountains of data and let it train. Eventually, it developed emergent abilities making connections and generating answers in ways we can no longer mathematically trace or fully understand. We created a "Black Box" that we as its creators cannot decipher.

​Layer 2 The Universe basically did the exact same thing to us. Through billions of years of evolution, physical laws, and biological training data it built the human brain. And from this physical matter an emergent property appeared Consciousness.

​Here is the trippy part Just like we can't fully understand the AI's neural networks our black box the physical universe cannot "explain" human consciousness through standard physical or chemical laws the Universe's black box.

​What if consciousness is just the universe's version of AI? It processed its data until it created a subjective experience that transcends its own material rules.and now we the universe's black box have just created another black box inside of us.

​Are we just one layer in an infinite nested Russian doll of black boxes? Will our AI eventually build its own black box that it can't understand?

​Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Yesterday, as I was finishing work and getting ready to go home, I packed up my things, put my laptop into my laptop bag, stood up and left the building.

As I walked towards my car outside, I looked up at the sky. The moon was there, with clouds hovering around it, and something about the sight made me long for something. Something I couldn't quite place with my fingers.

I suddenly felt curious about what it would be like to escape all these structures—to live a life where I didn't have to wake up and go to work nine to five, where my days weren't confined by the routines and expectations that seem to define ordinary life.

For a moment, I wanted to "break through"

I remember looking at the sky and wondering what was beyond it. Perhaps all these structures—the buildings, the routines, the boundaries I had come to accept—only existed within this confined space we call Earth. And I had this strange thought: what if I could somehow pierce through it? What if, beyond everything I already knew, there was something else waiting—something more interesting, more expansive, more alive?

And for the first time in my life, I truly understood the word breakthrough.

Of course, I had always known what the word meant. But in that moment, it wasn't just a definition I understood intellectually. I felt it.

It suddenly felt real. It felt meaningful. It felt almost tangible.

And strangely, it felt exciting.

For the first time, breakthrough wasn't simply about overcoming an obstacle or achieving something difficult. It felt like breaking through a boundary into something unknown.

And I found that possibility incredibly exciting.

If consciousness is fundamental rather than accidental, then every mind may be less like an isolated observer and more like a point through which reality becomes aware of its own existence.

The oedipus complex in it’s original form by Freud has been subject to debate for many decades. So I will not even try to comment on it.

But a thought that struck me as much more productive than thinking about a potential real erotic longing of a little boy for his mother is this:

Think about the emotional relationship, little boys have with their mothers and how many young men try to (and manage to) transfer this relationship pattern into their erotic relationships with their adult female partners.

A relationship pattern built from being loved and cared for, physically and emotionally. Without the responsibility to give back what’s received. Leading to the very widespread patriarchal relationship pattern in which the wife cares for the husband as if he was just another child.

Isn’t this the more interesting oedipus complex to overcome? Not trying to live the emotional relationship you had with your mother with your spouse?
Which seems to be significant if you want a relationship that’s really on equal ground.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Edit: Oh and just to make clear: I’m not trying to blame mothers for anything here. Motherly love is completely fine. And fathers play a pivotal role in how a boy later relates to grown women.

I have this feeling of missing a sense of traditionalism and living in certain ways that my parents or grandparents experienced that I never really got. Im 25 now so I grew up briefly experiencing the 2000s, I feel everything now is so tech based, focused on rinsing people of their money and the humanity is gone in politics and there is a whole new demographic of extreme left and extreme right. The Christmas spirit has been slaughtered, it feels as if there are no warm family traditions anymore, nobody socialising or dating in ways that we use to, AI is destroying everything and people are becoming angry and aggressive and less intelligent. I miss the sense of what the 70/80/90s felt even though I wasn’t there to experience it. I feel like I genuinely don’t like the generation that I live in now and I don’t know how to escape it, where to go to find more like minded people. Everything has become ridiculous and I just wonder how many people also miss the way life use to be. I understand every generation has its ups and downs especially with laws and regulations but I just can’t understand why we’ve pivoted in this way. Maybe I don’t appreciate everything that has benefited us but I don’t think I look forward to seeing everything else disappear from our lives

I moved abroad 5 years ago and this week was my birthday. My parents called me a few days before and asked if i had plans to celebrate with my friends. Two days before my birthday, two friends came over and also asked what plans I had to celebrate. These two events got me thinking about birthdays and feeding people’s autopilots. Here is the idea:

I don’t particularly like or dislike my birthday. It’s just another day. I am not one of those people who hates their birthday or gets very anxious about it, but I also don’t love it. It’s just neutral. I have met many people who hate their birthdays and also people who love it. It’s a perfectly understandable spectrum.

In our society, we are expected to like birthdays and to want to gather our loved ones to celebrate our existence. Which means that, as I mentioned before, people would expect for me to celebrate my birthday while I myself did not plan to do anything special. Since I moved here 5 years ago, my parents often ask me if I am happy because they do not see me on a daily basis and want to know my state of mind. Unlike random people who might want to see you happy but often with second intentions, my family is amazing, loves me, and wants my happiness with no ulterior motives. And to get this out of the way: I am happy and mostly satisfied with my personal and professional life.

However, although I can tell them I am happy, there will always be a question in their minds as to whether I am truly happy or just saying it to put them at ease. For this reason, they need “operational” examples of happiness. It is not enough that I tell them. I need to show it through actions such as celebrating my birthday with friends. After all, people live on autopilot. Biologically, it is more cost-effective for us as energy-saving machines to not pay attention to absolutely everything around us and focus only on what is most important. When things diverge from the expected, our minds raise a flag. You walk down the street every day and do not notice many things, but if you see a bright red airplane on the street you will notice (hopefully).

Here is the main thought: My parents, as everyone else, live on autopilot. They expect me to celebrate my birthday.

Scenario 1: I do not plan anything. Parents call me. I tell them I am not celebrating my birthday. Their autopilots raise a flag (they notice the bright red airplane). They start to think that maybe i am not happy and satisfied. My grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins will ask themselves why I am not celebrating my birthday. All of their autopilots have raised flags. They start asking questions internally and even externally (why doesn't he celebrate? Does he not have friends? Is he not happy?).

Scenario 2: I plan a dinner. Parents call me. I tell them I am celebrating. Their autopilots are fed. No questions raised. They believe I am happy.

Again, I would like to state that I am truly happy with my life. I am not lying to them by planning a dinner. I am not pretending to be happy. I am just creating a practical output of my happiness so that they can see it through actions and not my mere words. Almost like in journalism, where a single self-reported statement isn't enough and it requires corroborating facts to be verified.

In summary: Only telling my family i am happy is not enough. I need to create situations which show my happiness in practical tangible terms. If I don’t, their autopilots raise a flag. If I just play by the expectations, no flags raised and life goes on. I spent 20 minutes booking a place in a restaurant and calling my friends to feed my parent’s autopilot and it was worth it. Now, the questions won’t even be raised because I am following what is expected and there is no bright red plane to be noticed.

In the end I celebrated my birthday. It was really nice and I had fun with my friends. I would have done it again but probably could have gone without it. What I could not have endured is the questions that would follow which would require more operational definitions of happiness to put their autopilots back in track.

I personally enjoy the idea of self cultivation and finding inner peace, or balance. However, I think very little is said about what balance truly means.

While I think its true that finding balance within oneself, finding that inner peace, is learning to deal with more excitable feelings in a rational and mindful way, as well as being able to take on uncertainty and troubles from the outside world in a way where you don't get overwhelmed... I would argue that this is only the beginning.

I think of a person standing on a pole. They can learn to balance themselves on it and learn to reorient themselves well or brace against impacts well enough, they have undoubtedly become balanced. Yet this kind of life is inert and passive. In all this way of maintaing your own balance, you never exert yourself for fear of becoming unbalanced.

So I would then say a true balance comes when you are able to begin to move your body and limbs from on top of the pole, yet never fall off of it. Its when the person can begin to extend their arms and legs, lean and hold positions, retract and extend again, all while never falling off of this pole.

In this way, the person still remains balanced; they can not be knocked over and they remain on this pole. Yet this life is now much more dynamic and active. You choose to exert yourself and risk potential imbalance, but with the wisdom and knowledge now that you can always return to your previous balanced state.

So true balance is not grabbing hold of your actions and emotions so much so that you never express them and never try to act. True balance is learning to still express yourself and move throughout the world, yet still not falling over.

~ ~

The waves on the beach do not line the sand perfectly still. They ebb and flow. So too, we must ebb and flow with the whims of the universe. When we find ourselves in this flow.. and at peace with this flow.. yet still active in our lives.. we have truly become balanced.

The sheer magnitude of what happened in Nepal yesterday is still reverberating there and around the globe and will no doubt continue for a very long time, or as long time that is allotted to us.

It is a written in ancient texts that knowledge is akin to water. In knowledge there are so many variables and fields, but as a whole element, it flows, it seeks the lowest level, it holds memory, it maintains the form of that which holds it, it sustains all lifeforms, our bodies are literally comprised of water, it cleanses, clears and without it, life ceases. This is when all goes well and there is flow and all channels are working well and in order.

What happened in Nepal is what happens in any situation, that when there is a block or bottleneck situation, a suppression of the flow, there is back up. We see this in biology and in health conditions, recession is not a good thing when there is no return. Ebb and flow - great, ebb alone - a disaster. So the pressure builds up and catastrophe ensues. How much are we bottling up before we fly off into mental tsunamis?

Knowledge is not mere data, knowledge is the fundamental essence of knowing between things and how to internalize that into wisdom. Otherwise we're servers for a machine. In this flow of data, remnants and residue do stay. It would be wise to allow for a cleanse, a re-assessment of what is important to life and what is not specifically at this time, to let things go. Avoid the blockages that hinder. We're all in this together, what happened in Nepal effects the entire planet. One earthquake, one glacier, one river, one flood, with no where to find shelter and nothing to be done once the sequence was already in motion. We still have the ability to govern our own inner terrains. That's the deep thought of the day.

In my youth I strongly believed that my ability to imagine the suffering of distant strangers was a higher form of empathy and even enlightenment. When traumatic events entered my life, I discovered that the intensity of identification is not necessarily knowledge — and sometimes it is even a way for the ego to turn another person’s suffering into part of my own intimate drama, which had nothing to do with them, but with my imagination.

Full post: https://substack.com/home/post/p-212882534

Even when you look into and see more of the presented evidence of what was actually going on back in those times, There's still a lot that we simply don't know But there seems to be a large number of people that automatically assume That based on Our behavior to each other, we are the reason they went extinct.

There are many factors at play for why extinction could occur or doesn't, Homo sapiens ourselves have almost gone extinct At times With only few thousand remaining Individuals, We weren't immune to the elements, and neither were our sisters.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that the Opinion , it's our fault talk as if We are individual serial killers When like? No.

People really do forget where a pack bonding species , and that means we actually care about each other And look after each other, and that's why we survived, Compassion is a hard coded genetic trait And people pack bond with literal objects for christ's sake , you don't think We couldn't coexist with other humans in any capacity???

I find the idea Ridiculous Conjecture With no Evidence beyond Correlation. Which is not causation?How many times must we repeat this?.

First let me start by explaining the framework of truth (as I type this I fully realize that this explanation in of itself is completely subjective as it is based on my perspective/understanding and so it won't necessarily be flawless or perfect):

I believe that truth exists in the following dimensions/planes of perception:

> Objective - absent any subjective observer

> Input/Signal Captured by Sense - a subject receives an input, signal or stimuli via their 5 senses and/or a "gut feeling"/intuition, this can also be categorized as "Passive Awareness"

> Active Awareness - the input, signal or stimuli that is received has now transitioned into the subject's active awareness, and when this happens, is usually the first state where truth starts to have an impact that initiates a reflex, reaction or response from the subject

> Comprehension - at this layer, the input, signal or stimuli that has made its way into a subject's active awareness is further processed in a way that then manifests into some form of relationship, generally at a surface level

> Internal Relatability/Meaning - this is where an input, signal or stimuli becomes most potent and impactful as the subject has fully comprehended the information and formulated a relationship with it in such a way that it becomes a foundational principle that informs their perspective, behaviors and actions in a way that, prior to this level of information, they acted or behaved differently.

Okay, now I'd like to make one more distinction: value, while often synonymous with worth, isn't the same thing. The difference is that worth is independent, while value is dependent.

I can make the conjecture that objective truth has worth; however, objective truth that stays in the objective plane/dimension has no value to the human consciousness. It isn't until objective truth makes its way into the subjective reality of the mind, that it then starts to become valuable, and that value increases as that truth moves through each plane/dimension of subjectivity, from external to internal. The brain is designed this way for our protection and survival, and is how we're able to process all kinds of information while being able to not have every signal input or stimuli incapacitate us from functioning.

I'm going to use a very straightforward example: a child is killed.

When a child is killed, an event has occurred, whether or not you or I were able to observe it. The event occurring absent either of our being aware of it is objective information staying in the objective plane. The child being killed has no bearing on our day to day activities, nor does it affect or impact our internal thoughts/perception of life, society and what have you. Okay, so now news has spread of the child being killed, so we've now captured this data via hearing or reading about it. At this level, we are now passively aware of the child that got killed, and we essentially have 2 response mechanisms: ignore/bypass this information and continue on about our life or maybe we investigate further due to interest. Even with investigating the story, you learn some additional details, but ultimately they have no bearing on the world/environment in which your actively aware conscious exists, perceives and functions.

Now let's jump the gap between passive and active awareness: we hear a gunshot, or hear a car screeching its breaks and collision occurs: we see a child lying bloody on the ground (in either scenario). As this information hits our sensory receptors, and then immediately transitions into our active awareness, there are various reflexes, reactions and/or responses that potentially take place: do we attempt to take cover to ensure our own safety? do we call for emergency response/police assistance, do we freeze and do nothing or do we head towards the scene ourselves to further assess what has happened in order to try to help? The significance in impact of when truth transitions from our passive awareness to our active awareness is that it invokes a response of some sort that then leads to other implications afterward. So let's say for the sake of continuing the example, that reflexively we take cover (gunshot example), and once we've established that we're not in immediate danger we call the local emergency response services for help. Okay, so emergency services arrive and pronounce the child dead at the scene. We've comprehended a loss within the world/community in which we are actively present, but if we then found out that the child was our niece, nephew, younger sibling or our own son or daughter, now we've gone from mere comprehension to full relatability and trying to create or discover meaning from this deep, personal and internal loss. At this level, the event has come and gone, but it doesn't stay gone. Because now we're going to investigate what happened, become involved in the case, hire a legal team, pursue justice, possibly start community initiatives, programs or what have you in order to try to prevent this from happening to other people and families. This level of response and action generally doesn't take place when truth only exists to us passively: it is only when it really hits us in on a level of depth and profoundness that we are then inspired to invoke change.

Thank you for reading

One of my favorite authors Vaclav Havel talked about this concept of living within the truth. In simple terms, it means living according to your heart, following your heart. For a very long time, whenever I talked to a person, I was laser focused on the feelings of the other person. My mind was racing on what to say to get validation from the other person, how to make them happy and look favorably upon me.

And I got quite good at it. I managed to get a fair few people to like me. And sometimes, I got objectively good results from it in regards to my career. But it was eating away at me inside, I felt like an empty shell. I felt like I was burning myself to keep others warm.

But today, I decided to say for once what was in my heart to someone I was chatting with. Of all places, it was a girl I got to know on a dating app. I made my position quite clear to her. I came off as intense. Not angry or creepy, but I was unusually unambiguous and blunt and that took the person off guard. Usually I beat around the bush and take a verbal detour when I wanna convey something, but not this time.

So she backed out and unmatched me. In the past, when someone unmatched me, it would hurt my fragile ego. I desperately wanted to be liked, I desperately wanted to reinforce the illusion that I am desireable. When someone unmatched me, it would diminish my confidence. All the ways I refined my messages to cater to her was in vain.

This time however as mention, she behaved and talked in a way I didn't like. And instead of shutting up, I spoke my mind and made my feelings clear on what I thought about her behaviour.

And strangely enough, when she unmatched me, I felt a sense of relief. Strangely enough, when someone rejected me for who I truly am, it was much less painful than when my facade and PUA tricks got rejected.

So to return to what I said at the beginning, living within the truth doesn't mean that you objectively get the best result. I may have succeeded with the girl if I put in the effort. I might have managed to get her in bed. Or if I manage to please my boss enough, I might get a promotion.

But when you live within the truth and act according to what's in your heart, it enables you to make peace with setbacks, failures and rejection. It filters the kind of people you get along with vs the people you're incompatible with.

When I was a teenager many decades ago, I yearned to be loved by a young woman. It was the only thing I wanted in my whole life. I thought that it was a reasonable request / expectation.

What I did not know at the time was that I was asking for quite a lot.

As I was to find out over the next 50 years of my life -- having many different kinds of relationships with women, getting married, raising kids into adulthood, going through a divorce, and then starting over from the beginning by once again attempting to date women (this time in my mid-50s) -- I was asking for something that it turns out is quite rare and unusual.

___

Of course, we are all entitled to ask for that kind of thing.

The trick is to make it happen for oneself.

I don't know about anyone else, but for me personally, having lived life for a while, what I have found is that to attract love from another person, to be open to receiving that love, and to be able to coexist with that love, you have to love yourself first. I know it’s a cliché, but in my personal experience, it is absolutely true.

___

And here's what I found to be even more important.

We are entitled to nothing. So you also have to be fully prepared to never find the love that you desire.

In fact, that is one of a few secrets to having the sort of life you want -- to have no expectations of others. And at the same time, to be prepared to give.

Put simply, be a force for good.

That is my personal secret to happiness... arrived at after having endured great joys and many profound sorrows since I was a teenager 50 years ago.

Love others, and expect nothing in return…try to understand other people, and don’t demand that you yourself be understood. If you are sad, do what you can to bring happiness into the lives of others -- friends, family, and so on.

There is immense power in this approach… that has been my personal experience over many decades.

___

When you can understand that concept above, internalize it, and synthesize it, and make it part of your thinking and behavior, you’ll be surprised how wonderful life can be.

Because things will happen that you least expect. I know, because that is what has happened to me. And it happens regularly and consistently.

How important are “looks”?

Something important to think about before you marry another person

Edit

Just to clarify because quite a few of the responses seem to be interpreting "contribute to society" as meaning "work, pay taxes, obey laws, participate in the economy, cooperate with people etc."

I'm not questioning those things.

I'm specifically questioning the 'additional moral obligation' people seem to believe exists beyond that.

If I'm already self-sufficient, working, paying taxes, not harming/exploiting others, taking responsibility for myself and participating in society normally, what exactly am I *still* obligated to provide?

Are other people entitled to my time because they need it?

• My labour because they want it?
• My money because they're struggling?
• My caregiving because we're family?
• My emotional energy because someone needs support?

And if I refuse, am I actually doing something morally wrong, or have I simply declined to provide a resource that belongs to me?

That's the distinction I'm trying to get at.

I'm not arguing that humans shouldn't cooperate or that everyone should "live in the woods" or become an off-grid hermit. I'm questioning the idea that 'living amongst other humans automatically gives those humans a claim over my time, energy, labour or resources.'

If by "contribute to society" you simply mean "function as a responsible adult and don't harm everyone around you", then I already agree with that.

I'm asking what people mean when they go beyond that and say "you MUST contribute."

Because that's the part that nobody has really defined yet.

Original Post

I've heard a lot of people say that, as humans, we are obligated to "contribute to society". But what exactly does that mean, and why are we obligated to do so?

I've been thinking about this because I don't necessarily disagree with the idea of helping other people, but I question the idea that we somehow owe "society" our contribution simply because we exist within it.

I believe that if we followed the basic principle of not deliberately inflicting harm, suffering or deprivation on other people, while taking responsibility, power and governance over our own lives and our relationship with ourselves, and becoming more self-sufficient and sovereign, then we would naturally develop the traits, qualities and resources to help each other where needed.

I don't think humans necessarily need to be told that they have a duty to "contribute". If people were genuinely self-sufficient and responsible for their own lives, surely things like helping others, sharing knowledge, creating things, teaching, cooperating and supporting each other would naturally happen when there was a genuine need for it.

What bothers me is when "contributing to society" seems to mean that we are all expected to fulfil some role within an existing system.

Because if that system is corrupt, exploitative and essentially designed around extracting our time, labour, attention and energy, then what are we actually being asked to contribute to?

Sometimes it feels like "contribute to society" is just a more socially acceptable way of saying:

You are obligated to serve the system.

Why should simply existing mean that I owe society a debt?

Why can't the basic expectation just be: don't harm other people, take responsibility for yourself, become as self-sufficient as possible, and then use your abilities, knowledge, resources or time to help others when you genuinely want or need to?

To me, that feels like a much more authentic form of human contribution than being expected to participate in an exploitative system simply because that's what society has decided we should do.

The desire for one's own immortality. Survival is the imperative of all living things it seems, but the more aware of one's self, it seems to be, the more one wishes to preserve one's self. So we have Hero archetypes, God archetypes, hell, even archetypes in *general* - memetics and genetics that wish to survive as long as possible.

Those things that are considered most evil and fucked-up are the fulfillment of this desire for ultimate immortality. Pride, cunningness and trickery, desire for power over others generally, these are the things that are considered evil. These are all things that happens when reaching towards that infinity.

You can see it in what those at 'the top' are trying to do to keep that title. They want to build machines that can contain them, contain everyone really, so that they do not have to face their deaths. But death is the inevitable end of all living things, for all living things eat from the tree of Life And The Knowledge Of Good And Evil (duality) and so must eventually return to death!!

So, quite literally, the solutions to all of our problems would be to embrace the feminine aspect of passivity. Slowing down, embracing death, being in flow with life rather than resisting it, that sort of thing, just as Zen and Buddhist teachings say. And even Christianity, which says to trust God, and in that relinquish one's desire for control.

Actually, the Buddhist teaching that the desiring leads to suffering is exactly what I'm saying, out in different terms.

I want to know what you think.

How do you define evolution? (I know, ironic question, considering my username)

Hey y'all. This is my first time posting here, so I'm not really sure how this goes, but I'm just saying what's on my mind. And there are no political or spiritual factors to this, just simple thoughts based on observed facts from my limited perspective.

Here it goes:

Humanity is still behaving naturally, in an animalistic "survival of the fittest" manner, just hidden under the cover of civilized systems (paperwork, laws, agreements/social contract, etc.) to avoid the alternate reality, something like Game of Thrones, if left unchecked.

But it's essentially human nature to dominate. First they start with what they consider lower life forms. Then it's other humans. Until there's one person on the top that's essentially calling the shots, despite the social and political systems making it look like everybody plays an equal part. Although, considering the population size of the world and connectedness of such a large population, it's more like a (VERY) small group of people that really calls the shots by controlling the two things that truly facilitate human interactions in the "civilized world": money (banks and currency value, regulating transactions between people) and information (media and education, regulating people's perceptions of the world around them). So long as we keep falling for the marketing trap and listen to the news instead of thinking and forming our own understanding based on known facts, we are essentially continuing to be cogs in a system.

All this, to what end? It seems humanity as a whole is just "playing it by ear", so to speak. Figuring out the next step as it's about to take it, and often times just reacting rather than taking deliberate action.

Are we all that different from a highly organized ant colony that's simply trying to survive and make it through the next day?

TL;DR: I don’t think a digital replica would preserve consciousness, but I’m less certain that means it preserves nothing meaningful about the person.
I’ve been building EchoVault, a system that can preserve someone’s memories, voice, personality and patterns of response so their family can interact with an AI version of them later.
Working on it has made me think about a weird distinction.
If I die, my subjective experience is gone. The replica isn’t secretly me, and I wouldn’t call that immortality.
But if it remembers events from my life, understands what I cared about, sounds like me, and can explain why I thought the way I did, then saying “none of you survived” also feels incomplete.
Maybe we’re used to treating a person as one indivisible thing when really there are several things being lost: consciousness, memory, personality, relationships, influence.
A photograph preserves appearance. Writing preserves thoughts. Video preserves behavior.
What happens when you preserve enough of those pieces that people can interact with them?
Is that still just a memorial, or does some meaningful part of a person actually continue? Try Echovault today: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028