There's a crucial bit in your reasoning, the assumption that the mind is a result of the brain. Your entire argument rests on this fulcrum.
All the questions you pose do carry the intention you mean IF you abide by that assumption. That mind stems from matter.
If we recognize that material science is purely speculative when it comes to explaining the intricacies of the inner world of the mind, we could make a list of similar questions.
For example:
> What part of continuity does it maintain? Why does it happen? How does it happen? How and why would it appear and evolve? What was the initial process? In what initial form? How would it progress? What maintains its existence as a phenomena?
You could ask this same question about feelings and thoughts and intentions. If you could answer it, if you could track down and correlate all those details from thoughts to neurons, you'd be able to read minds and predict people's behaviors mechanically.
In a materialist conception of the world, there is something binding the assumption that mind arose from brains to our current scientific understanding. There's a bridge of "we'll figure out the details if we stay on the train of scientific progress". But that's a promise.
That vagueness that you call out, standing from a scientific mindset, that same vagueness appears when you stand grounded in direct (non conceptual) experience, and you ask to science "what is a thought?".
There's no precise definition in science as to what makes up a thought, and science is born out of thought. That is worth contemplating (which is not the same as thinking).
What you're objecting is not unreasonable, but you're describing why reincarnation is incompatible with materialism, not with evolution. If you don't share the assumption of matter over mind, then there is room for compatibility, of mind working in tandem with matter in a process that we don't fully understand, in which reincarnation occurs in ways that we don't understand materially, and in which evolution occurs biologically in ways we kind of understand.
If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?
Considering that I used to experience that dread, and how I used to think, and the patterns I see in your speech -- I'd say that dread is not a response to the concept, but due to over intellectualizing.
The dread is precisely the intellect recoiling at its limits. It reaches for other intellectual theories to rescue it but this is of course in vain.
The way out is to seek answers in other complimentary areas and ways of seeing the world.
> Um, obviously? What distinguishes a person from a braindead patient is that one of the two has a mind. Are you saying that the fact that you talk to a person and have them recall facts is not enough to say that they have a mind? Also, to say that a mind has never been observed either dependent or independent of a brain would mean that the idea of mind has no basis in reality at all.
You're observing communication, which like the gravity example, is one effect that's discernible and understandable to us. Much like the effects of gravity could be observed by people of the past but without sufficient measurements and tools, they did not attribute the orbit of the planets and what glues us to the earth as the same principle.
> The upside of this is that if there's a phenomenon that does not interact with matter in any way whatsover, even indirectly, then that phenomenon cannot possibly have any relevance to human life.
First, whether it has relevance to human life had nothing to do with something being true or not. Secondly, clearly mind does interact with matter, it does so through the brain. We can already construct devices that interact with mind, by making babies.
But we cannot construct devices that can peer into your mind and perceive experience in the way that you do. You might theorize that we should or that science will, someday, but this is a promise not unlike religious ones.
> What aspect of reality informs that belief of yours?
The most fundamental aspect of reality is that which perceives reality in the first place, aka. your experience. Without this awareness, there is no perception, no memory, no intellect. Without these, there is nothing to construct and hold the theory of how mind came to be out of matter.
Fundamentally, I can posit that it is all a dream, the matrix, plato's cave, etc, but whether the contents of experience are illusory or not, it can't be denied that there is the fact of experiencing taking place.
The scientific fundamentals are posited on the premise of "if we didn't exist, what would we agree on is true about the universe". And that's a valid endeavor, but it rests on a hypothetical because we do exist as sentient beings.
Where are the gravity particles? Gravity is a fundamental process, yet the graviton remains hypothetical.
> It also seems odd that a mind independent of a brain has never been observed.
Has a mind dependent of a brain been observed? You can observe a brain, a body, a face, and hear speech, and you can take it upon faith that this is all guided by a mind, but you can't observe that mind unless it's your own. Same applies to your mention of the process of death.
Science is limited to phenomena that can be verified and measured objectively. So it is not odd that it would not be the right tool to examine something that is not entirely subject to matter. At most it can examine its interaction with matter, but to draw conclusive theories from that will carry on to those theories the limitations fundamental to science, and you will confuse those limitations with truth about nature.
The way to observe this is direct experience, but the issue there is that conceptualization and intellect get in the way, because what you know and assume about the world will bias direct observation.
You're fine to view it that way, it's a reasonable view. My point is to highlight that there's other views.
What I mean is that mind is to consciousness what matter is to the brain. It is a property of the universe, that manifests itself in ways that can form memories, identities, self awareness. But underlying these systems there is pure awareness, in the same way that all matter can be reduced to the same fundamental particles.
In the same way that something like a car or a brain can be made from these same fundamental building blocks, an identity and a self can be made from fundamental mind-properties that are just inherent parts of the universe. They become identifiable as "a person" at a certain scale in the same way that a group of particles becomes "a car" at a certain scale and distance.
Trust is what makes you believe your friend is not lying, it's cast upon them specifically, it is related to their history and integrity.
Faith is believing that all the other conditions, the ones that we do not think about, will align. It is important to highlight that it is working on a low level, because we take this for granted all the time. Actually it might not be until you lack this low level of faith that you see its presence (through its absence).
Either way, your linking of faith to superstition remains completely bogus.
Cars exist because the need for faster and better movement exists. The process of movement created the need for the invention of the car.
> Talking about consciousness interacting with the brain makes as much sense as talking about movement interacting with a car. It's a process that's running on the brain.
If we follow this logic then "movement is a process that's running on the car."
Cars are a result of multiple conditions, including movement and the necessary material conditions to employ movement in a specific way.
Consciousness is a result of multiple conditions, including mind and the necessary biological conditions to employ mental factors in a specific way.
Sure but a cat would probably have the same reaction if an arrow behaved like that irl, it's not the same as recognizing something as a living being due to how it moves.
Faith does not mean superstition. I swear youtube atheism debates have confused many to knee jerk react to specific words.
Faith can operate on low levels such as: You arrange to meet with a friend at the park tomorrow.
You don't know for a fact that you will still be alive, or that your friend will, or that an accident won't befall either of you, etc. You operate on faith that your and their word will be made reality.
This is faith. It doesn't need to involve god, it doesn't have anything to do with superstition. You just take a belief and you act as if it will pan out.
> If the brain is not the seat of consciousness and the self is instead the result of some metaphysical process that's external to the body,
This seems backwards to me. It is the self that is the result of processes from the interaction between consciousness and the body (including the brain).
Analogy: the sea does not create the matter of the stone it hits against on the shore, that is already present. But it is the interaction between the sea and the rock that shapes the rock, and in doing so it can create a pattern that looks like a face.
I think if you view the pyramid as blocks you're being a bit simplistic.
All aspects of the pyramid are present at all levels, what the pyramid represents is what you have to free yourself of in order to truly and wholly endeavor in each stage.
You can act with self-transcendence even if you're starving, but you can't direct as much thought, time and energy towards it unless you cover the underlying needs.
There's no immutable aspects of you. Everything is constant change. The illusion, the impossibility that you speak of, is this belief in immutability and the craving for it.
Technology, materialism, science. The currents of thought that move us based on perceived value and belief, and where myths and assumptions stem from.
A popular creation myth at the moment is simulation theory.
Reducing consciousness to material data-processing is a way to believe there's a possibility of life after body-death.
A popular "promised-land" myth is that technology will save us.
The assumption that mind stems from matter is so commonly beheld that people take it as fact, in the same way some people take god as a fact, unquestioningly.
I'd disagree a bit. Family and friends are centered around a self. There's millions of people who are super generous towards their circle yet assholes towards strangers. I think seeing strangers with more generosity is transcendent.
In fact I'd say this concept is strongly related to how you behave precisely when there's no belonging: to those that don't belong in your perceived group and when you don't feel like you belong in a group.