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That's not really very useful. Of course you exist! You share sufficiently many properties with other things that we would say “exist” that it is more useful to

That's not really very useful. Of course you exist! You share sufficiently many properties with other things that we would say “exist” that it is more useful to consider you extant than non-existent. What you mean might be a more useful, meaningful concept, but what you've said is kinda nonsense. If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? I'd be interested if you could elaborate.

aj3 5y ago
They where probably saying that “I” doesn’t exist as brain doesn’t really work that way and inner voice/narrator is just illusion.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > inner voice/narrator is just illusion. It isn't, it's a physical phenomenon you observe which yields information. But you don't have and should not believe everything it says, let alone believe it is you. Theoretically you could run something GPT3-like on your personal computer (which is approximately the same kind of a part of you like a finger of yours is), train it on everything you can remember and that would be less you than your inner voice is. Some schizophrenics apparently have particularly fluent inner voice and too little capacity to perceive it critically.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    I meant that would NOT be less you than your inner voice is.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? The hands. Driven by the chemical phenomena taking place in the brain given the information it had been fed previously. Both the hands and the brain and the memories are mine but not me. The same way my finger is (I won't be less me if I loose it, neither I will if I loose a memory of something, even of my name) and my car is. I am merely the observer of all these but ok, then where this me which "merely is" is then? Nowhere because whatever a thing within my body or personality I could point to is mine. Where will that me go when I die or when the universe collapses into a singularity and booms in a next big bang - nowhere, which is exactly where it is now. Because it doesn't exist. This is a very rough simplification though (in fact the hands, the memories etc aren't even mine if everything else in the world isn't). I had to digest this for years and observe this, excuse me for some nonsense, from different angles inside the multi-dimensional space of pure non-verbal semantic experiences perception. This can be a long way to develop this ability and I am not sure many are ready to go this way. No, I'm not a heavy psychedelic abuser, nor a new-age loon, nor depressed, nor psychopathic, I am sober, enthusiastic, generally Okay, happy and compassionate and the realization of the above only made me even more of these and helped me through the hard times. The first step is to observe it (a pure meaning without words) when you know exactly what you want to say but can't recall a proper word in any of the languages you speak. If I were to seriously rationalize this I would say nobody writes the comment, it is an emergent structure resulting from a very complex fractal system. Whoever is not really into this but feels curious and wants an easy explanation watch the Dr. Sapolsky's lectures on emergence in his behavioral biology course on YouTube.
- jrsdav 5y ago
  I've found this concept is near impossible to share without sounding, well, like you put it, "a new-age loon". We haven't really developed a system or language that succinctly expresses the nature of self or experience (well, I only know English. Perhaps other languages lend themselves better). For me, I find the simplest terms to be the most profound way of capturing what you said, but when I say them out loud to someone who hasn't climbed the same "context mountain" I probably sound like someone you would encounter at a drum circle in a public park (which I find nothing to be wrong with, I should add!).
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    If other languages had proper words right for these things, even the people for whom these languages were native would have to explain the words to the kids somehow. And the only ways to teach someone a word are either explain in simple concepts or point to the object and say "this is it". So having the words doesn't really help much. There actually are such words in Tibetan, Pali, Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, native American languages, etc but you won't need them once you actually know what do they really mean and knowing them won't be of much use in expressing the meanings to others who don't know so far. As a rough (yet quite close) example: we have a word for swimming but you can't just say "swim" and see a person who never did like "aha! all I have is to swim!" yet all he has to do actually is to swim and breaking it into simpler concepts isn't a particularly fast way to teach them. I myself learnt to swim (after all the instructors with their theories failed to teach me) just by going into water and trying until I acquired a feeling of how to do it. Curiously enough, there is an easy way to instantly turn the swimming skill of by means of electric stimulation so otherwise normal person believing he can swim (because he did it so many times) would jump into water and immediately discover he doesn't remember how to. If we consider the experiences and understanding we are discussing useful for others (I believe they can have great therapeutic value for many but also be dangerous for many) all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves. Religions took care of this historically and Buddhism in particular has been particularly productive (and didn't lost nor hid that with time) but I believe a religion with all its mythological, mystical and dogmatic stuff is not really necessary, rational methods are possible.

aj3 5y ago

They where probably saying that “I” doesn’t exist as brain doesn’t really work that way and inner voice/narrator is just illusion.

qwerty456127 5y ago
> inner voice/narrator is just illusion. It isn't, it's a physical phenomenon you observe which yields information. But you don't have and should not believe everything it says, let alone believe it is you. Theoretically you could run something GPT3-like on your personal computer (which is approximately the same kind of a part of you like a finger of yours is), train it on everything you can remember and that would be less you than your inner voice is. Some schizophrenics apparently have particularly fluent inner voice and too little capacity to perceive it critically.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I meant that would NOT be less you than your inner voice is.

qwerty456127 5y ago

> If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? The hands. Driven by the chemical phenomena taking place in the brain given the information it had been fed previously. Both the hands and the brain and the memories are mine but not me. The same way my finger is (I won't be less me if I loose it, neither I will if I loose a memory of something, even of my name) and my car is. I am merely the observer of all these but ok, then where this me which "merely is" is then? Nowhere because whatever a thing within my body or personality I could point to is mine. Where will that me go when I die or when the universe collapses into a singularity and booms in a next big bang - nowhere, which is exactly where it is now. Because it doesn't exist. This is a very rough simplification though (in fact the hands, the memories etc aren't even mine if everything else in the world isn't). I had to digest this for years and observe this, excuse me for some nonsense, from different angles inside the multi-dimensional space of pure non-verbal semantic experiences perception. This can be a long way to develop this ability and I am not sure many are ready to go this way. No, I'm not a heavy psychedelic abuser, nor a new-age loon, nor depressed, nor psychopathic, I am sober, enthusiastic, generally Okay, happy and compassionate and the realization of the above only made me even more of these and helped me through the hard times. The first step is to observe it (a pure meaning without words) when you know exactly what you want to say but can't recall a proper word in any of the languages you speak. If I were to seriously rationalize this I would say nobody writes the comment, it is an emergent structure resulting from a very complex fractal system. Whoever is not really into this but feels curious and wants an easy explanation watch the Dr. Sapolsky's lectures on emergence in his behavioral biology course on YouTube.

jrsdav 5y ago
I've found this concept is near impossible to share without sounding, well, like you put it, "a new-age loon". We haven't really developed a system or language that succinctly expresses the nature of self or experience (well, I only know English. Perhaps other languages lend themselves better). For me, I find the simplest terms to be the most profound way of capturing what you said, but when I say them out loud to someone who hasn't climbed the same "context mountain" I probably sound like someone you would encounter at a drum circle in a public park (which I find nothing to be wrong with, I should add!).
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  If other languages had proper words right for these things, even the people for whom these languages were native would have to explain the words to the kids somehow. And the only ways to teach someone a word are either explain in simple concepts or point to the object and say "this is it". So having the words doesn't really help much. There actually are such words in Tibetan, Pali, Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, native American languages, etc but you won't need them once you actually know what do they really mean and knowing them won't be of much use in expressing the meanings to others who don't know so far. As a rough (yet quite close) example: we have a word for swimming but you can't just say "swim" and see a person who never did like "aha! all I have is to swim!" yet all he has to do actually is to swim and breaking it into simpler concepts isn't a particularly fast way to teach them. I myself learnt to swim (after all the instructors with their theories failed to teach me) just by going into water and trying until I acquired a feeling of how to do it. Curiously enough, there is an easy way to instantly turn the swimming skill of by means of electric stimulation so otherwise normal person believing he can swim (because he did it so many times) would jump into water and immediately discover he doesn't remember how to. If we consider the experiences and understanding we are discussing useful for others (I believe they can have great therapeutic value for many but also be dangerous for many) all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves. Religions took care of this historically and Buddhism in particular has been particularly productive (and didn't lost nor hid that with time) but I believe a religion with all its mythological, mystical and dogmatic stuff is not really necessary, rational methods are possible.