Sorry for the late reply. Been really busy with some other things lately. Let's dig in.

However, is it even possible to truly 100% answer it without it being a subjective opinion?

You could indeed say that it is my subjective opinion, but I still think there's no absolute answer. Even the most clever person will have a hard time trying to explain most of the things that happen in our universe. We are still unimaginably far from understanding the true nature of reality, and I think our capacity to understand it in its truest form is still in its very early stage.

To me life is not just sentience or consciousness but also things like plants which I don't believe to be sentient on conscious. However some people claim they are, I certainly have my doubts since they don't have a brain or nervous system especially.. Yet.. We(science in general) still consider plants life in a way that we don't with rocks for example.

So what would be the characteristics in plants that make them life that a rock isn't? Good question.. Hmmm.. Perhaps it's how they grow and change over time and also "die" Rocks may change in time and perhaps even form mountains, and they can be crushed into dirt or small pieces, but do they die? I guess it depends on how you look at it..

Interesting. If you look even deeper, everything is made of atoms, right? And if we term atoms as "alive" because they show behavior by reacting with other atoms, then by that sense, we could technically say that literally everything is alive. That's so weird. I've never thought about it that way.

Rocks don't die per se, but there's a theory that after trillions and trillions and trillions (and a couple of more trillions) of years, everything is our universe will kinda "dissolve" and no particles will be able to interact with each other. That can be called "death" in a way, but I don't know for sure if that counts as the death we are talking about.

Perhaps they are intrinsically connected, yet what if we found a way to be immortal.. Would we then no longer be alive? Hmmm..

Damn that's a good question. For something to be called alive, it has to have the ability to die too. If we become immortal, we will have to change the very definition of what it means to be alive. If death is what gives life meaning, then would immortality make life meaningless? The big question is, would someone even want to live forever?

Maybe it's an illusion, maybe this was all set up beforehand by some other intelligence and it's not me at all, maybe there is no me. Heh.

There's this thing called The Simulation Argument that proposes that everything we see, experience, think about, feel, touch and everything we are, is nothing but a computer simulation. Just like we how we make video games and the characters in that video game "think" they are real, the same could be the case for us.

We could, quite literally, be a computer simulation and we would have no way to disprove that theory because every argument you make against it, could be said to be included as a program in the simulation itself. You can be programmed to think and act a certain way, just like how we program characters of a game to think and act. That's some scary shit.

The big question is, if this is true and we are indeed a simulation, then what is outside the simulation? What exactly is the reality? Who is controlling our simulation? More importantly, what if this continues forever? Like, every being who makes a simulation is a simulation itself and this cycle goes on till eternity. Does reality even make sense at this point? I'll stop now before I get a headache lol.

Not sure it's even scientifically possible but fascinating to think about. Maybe some day science will do something like that, maybe they already have deep in underground government labs with cloning and weird stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure something like that will be super easy to do is just a couple of decades. What's making me curious is the question of gene-editing and tech enhancements being available for our body. We've been doing it for quite some time with food, but when we are able to do so for our bodies, will we become a civilization of cyborgs? A civilization where everyone can just stick in tech in their bodies and instantly become better at everything?

What about gene-editing? If we are able to change our own genetics, then we can quite literally shape ourselves in whatever way we wish. We would be able to "edit" people for being immune to harsh conditions of space and radiations, give people wings, or literally make someone a hundred times more intelligent than any human that has ever existed. This all sounds pretty impossible, but it is actually doable and research on this is already active as we speak.

Maybe not "wrong" but maybe not fully "right" either, a sort of half truth half fallacy, or some other percentage of such. And I agree, would be a good discussion to have.

Makes sense. Neither right, nor wrong. Sort of a grey area there. But it still fascinates me because if I were to lose all my memories tonight, I would need my family to remind me who I was (or am?) and I would pretty much have to believe them and accept a group of strangers as my family even though I don't know any of them.

A universal consciousness which is not bound to any specific place and this would explain a lot of stuff in regards to reports of telepathy and dreams and reports of reincarnation where children are able to speak of past lives they never should be able to know about and weird things like that as well as umm.. Out of body experiences like astral travel and remote viewing.. I'm a lil mixed on this cause if you shoot someone in the head it seems like they're dead, that body stops working and was being controlled internally by their brain, however.. Maybe the spirit goes on, maybe the spirit can't be killed, maybe it's eternal and even if the body stops then the mind keeps living on?

I actually made a theory about that when I was much younger. Maybe it's silly, but I think it's worth it for the discussion. Let's imagine there's a whole reservoir of "consciousness juice" somewhere in the place where souls are made.

What my theory said was that every time a life is born in the universe and it's ready to gain the ability to be conscious (because we aren't exactly conscious right after birth, right? It takes some time), an incredibly small amount of that juice is given to that being, and when it dies, that juice returns back to the reservoir and the cycle continues. So, if you look at it this way, what you call a "soul" is actually just a consciousness that finds a host (like you and I) and sticks with it for until the host is no longer "fresh."

But then, does that mean that as the population increases, the reservoir just makes more of that juice? Or does the universe keeps a balance by killing beings on other galaxies? I made this theory up years and years ago and it still makes me curious to this date.

Cells might have some consciousness, I'm not sure if that can be proven one way or the other, and likewise I'm not sure if we can say androids can be conscious since it was all programmed into them by us. HOWEVER.. Who is to say that we weren't similarly programmed ourselves by some god or some higher alien type of being? Maybe we're robots as well.

Again, The Simulation Argument.

I think that could be our future, maybe AI will be our next stage of evolution and the machines we create will be so superior that the will replace us and then continue to improve and build and evolve themselves until who knows what the heck it becomes. Truly fascinating to contemplate.

If I remember correctly, Elon Musk said that Artificial Intelligence in the biggest potential threat to mankind. We are creating beings that are superior to us YET they have to follow our orders. A war is inevitable in this situation, I believe. Our machines are far more able to do stuff than we are, and if they try to dominate us, it would be very difficult for us to fight back because we've already made them better than us. Maybe gene-editing which I talked about earlier could interfere in this? Maybe it could make us even stronger and better than our own machines? That's some serious sci-fi stuff man. I hope they make a movie about gene-editing.

Maybe it goes on forever like that "As above so below" into infinity perhaps existence replicates and perpetuates itself outward and inward simultaneously.

Similar to what I talked about in The Simulation Argument. This phenomenon could go on forever and we would never even know!

Great post ayushjalan! It certainly is a mindfuck. Life is bizarre! How does it all work, how did it come to be? Why does it continue? Will it always continue? So many questions, so little time and it might be impossible for us to truly prove or know 100% for sure these kinds of things.
Thanks for playing in another round and for going so deep and helping me to think more about this stuff! I love these kinds of conversations and subjects. :D

I guess so. Stuff like this is just too damn complicated for even the smartest among us to try to explain. But at least our curiosity makes our lives more interesting that way! I absolutely love talking about these things. It's a shame most people don't even understand or try to discuss topics like these when they are actually the most important ones. But I wouldn't blame them for this though. To each their own! As long as I have a few buddies like you to talk with about this stuff, I'm all good haha!

Thanks for leaving such a detailed comment! I love how you take your sweet time with every post. That's rare these days lol!