Thank you for answering (sort of). Big flaw in your reasoning though. Before you are conceived, you are not a "thing", so by your own admission, your "self" does not exist.

Now think of what comprises a "self". It is your thoughts, your personality, your memories, your behavior, your consciousness etc. None of these things exist before you are conceived. Many of them (such as memories) don't even exist for quite some time after you are conceived. Your "self" grows as you do. If there is some spirit that existed before you were conceived, it is certainly not in any way like "you".

So your "self" comes into existance at some point. Now if you can see that this is logical, then it should be equally logical that your "self" stops existing at some later point.

Yes, I already replied to that thread. You tried to compare souls to holograms. The comparison was very, um... insubstantial.
If you could get Swedenborg to come here to discuss his ideas, I'd be thrilled, but since he is unavailable to answer my questions, I'm asking you. Since you believe it is possible to communicate with the dead, I'm sure you can explain it to me just as well has he could. If you can't, I would say this is further evidence that once you die, you are totally and completely dead.

Might I suggest that it's a marriage of matter and spirit? And that this is afterall what the relationship between God and the Church is supposed to represent.

No, I'm suggesting that the soul develops at the same time that the body develops, and that both coincide. In fact this is why when people die as infants they have souls that appear as infants, and when they die in old age they have souls that appear old. Of course ultimately the young grow up, to about the age of early adulthood, and the old grow young, to about the age of early adulthood, and so return to the spring of their youth.

You can't say you didn't come from nothing though, because you have a father and a mother which suggests otherwise.

I'm trying to suggest that this is what it would be like if we existed in another dimension, the dimension of thought that is. In which case the experience can become just as substantial as what we experience in the flesh.

Yes, this is why I referred you to his book, Heaven and Hell, which is the next best thing.

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So when the body dies, and consciousness departs, where do "we" go? ... Off to define another "reality" perhaps?

'Berry covered this, in case you did not read her post. For reasons of convention (god is usually--even in your own writing--called "He"), and for reasons of grammar (the pronoun's referent is typically the most recent noun, substituting for it [see, this "it" takes the place of "most recent noun"] to make the sentence less burdensome and easier to scan). Other than that, there was no context whatsoever pointing to god as the referent. One could hardly be expected to assume that, in order to explain your own philosophy to Gooze, you would be required to be god!

Nonetheless I'm not the "it" which makes it tick.

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So when the body dies, and consciousness departs, where do "we" go? ... Off to define another "reality" perhaps?

Suggest away, but it does nothing to answer the question of where the "you" is before your conception or how you can have a "self" when there is nothing of your personality etc. to be a self. I realize this is a difficult question, but throwing in unrelated dogma does nothing to answer it.
Now that is very interesting. You are admitting that the soul grows, but then you are also saying that in some cases it regresses. Certainly you must admit that what you are is the entirity of your existance. Does the soul actually lose aspects of itself as it returns to an earlier form? Since you have already said a soul is not physical, there is surely no need for a soul to achieve the physical appearance of a young adult.

There are some confusing, contradictory and downright silly aspects of your conception of souls. But you have still done nothing to address the question of what your soul is like before you are conceived.
I did not say I came from nothing. I came from my parents' egg and sperm, which in turn were assembled from the nutrients my parents acquired from the world around them. Are you suggesting then that ova and spermatozoa have souls too? What happens to all the souls of the eggs and sperm that never become a person? Does each cell of your body have a soul? Then there is the problem of identical twins. They are a single zygote which splits. Does each twin get half a soul?

I'm afraid your explanation keeps tripping over its own feet, very much unlike my simple yet elegant explanation: Your "self" arises as your neural network develops enough for you to have awareness. It grows, learns, and matures with you. When you die, it dies. No loose ends. No contradictions.

Of course, my explanation contains no afterlife, which makes it quite unpalatable to people who are afraid of being completely dead.I'm sure that for you, such a evidence-less dimension is a pleasant "thought", but as you are surely aware, thoughts have no substance. Now we can imagine that there is another "dimension" where they do, but of course, our imaginations are not reality. Especially not yours.
I believe you referred me to his book because you can't answer the questions I'm asking, so you try to pawn them off on a dead person. Do you really have to consult Swedenborg to decide what you think?

No, I guess not. You are merely the person who makes claims about how it all works, and even wrote a book about it. It seems so silly, in retrospect, that we would have thought you'd be able to answer the questions. No author should be expected to be the authority on their own notions. I'm sorry to have disturbed you.

Yes, I am the authority of my own notions but, that's exactly what they are, notions ... to those who insist they're without meaning that is.

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So when the body dies, and consciousness departs, where do "we" go? ... Off to define another "reality" perhaps?

And are they more than notions to you? You do not act as if they are. And for the record, I do not insist that they are without meaning, I ask you to explain the meaning which I do not see. If I were to insist, I would not be asking you so many questions. I do not understand your motivation for not answering them.