Let me try again to explain because I also think we are still not on the same page. It seems to me that you believe that this thing we are calling the self is entirely dependent upon and indeed impossible to differentiate from a particular neural network, ie: the brain associated with the self. More concisely, you believe that you are in your entirety the systems maintained by your living brain. When your living brain dies, your self goes with it. Now in general I strongly agree with you actually. I think when my brain dies my sense of self will entirely disintegrate, all of the memories and opinions I have will be lost, obviously all of my sensory abilities will go as well. However where I hold a different view than you is that I do not think my self in its entirety will necessarily die with my brain. I believe that if it is true that my self is perfectly synonymous with my brain, that a perfect copy of my brain would be just as much my self as my original brain is. However, as we both agree, it is obvious that this perfect copy of my brain/body will not be me. If my original body dies, I will still lose my sensory perception, I will still lose my ego, I will still experience the things that are associated with human death. My exact copy will not experience these things, it will continue to see through eyes, think thoughts, feel things, have my memories and indeed even my ego. But it will not really be me seeing those things, me feeling those things, etc. The conclusion I come to from this is that there is some small part of me that is independent of my brain, for if my self and my brain were the same thing by different names, a perfect copy of my brain would still have my 'stream of consciousness' going through it and it would not in fact be a separate entity. Or perhaps it is the case that I am the same entity as my perfect copy, and am just completely incapable of having awareness of this. In some cases lesions of the brain can cut off communications between certain neural networks, leading to strange effects, such as the ability to see data but the inability to understand language in the perceived data due to severed communication pathways between the visual and verbal processing neural networks of the brain. Even though the language and visual data are understood separately , the lack of ability to pipe from visual to verbal can result in the inability to read what you have written, whilst maintaining the ability to write from muscle memory and to spell from verbal memory. I can somewhat imagine myself and my perfect copy sharing the same stream of consciousness and simply being incapable of recognizing it due to the lack of connection between our brains, however I am more inclined to believe that we would be two separate entities.