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> 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 previ

> 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.
  - jrsdav 5y ago
    > all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves That’s really well put. Thanks for sharing your insight.
antihipocrat 5y ago
When you say you don't exist are you referring to your sense of self identity? i.e your ego, the feeling that your mind and body and all of your senses, emotions, thoughts and memories are a distinct entity? This idea is very interesting, and not considered strange in philosophy (ego death) and is also prevalent in Buddhism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Yes, kind of. I'm pretty sure I am neither my ego nor my body. But besides the body and the ego (the ego being a product of the body) no thing which could be reasonably called me physically exists. I am a rational kind so even if I believed in immortal soul in the Christian sense and could imagine an ethereal projection of my body retaining my memories going to some heaven after my body death, I would still understand the heaven as a physical place existing in spaces beyond reach of today measurement instruments and scientific reasoning of today. Therefore that would still be another body of mine, made of different sort of particles, existing physically (there is no way to exist nonphysically, physicality is a synonym to existence). But not me.
  - antihipocrat 5y ago
    Does the universe exist? If so, then the atoms that comprise your body also exist, and defining your body as a distinct object within the universe is categorical.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      > Does the universe exist? This is hardly possible to rationally give a logically true answer to this question. I would say it does because despite being unable to tell their nature reliably, despite the fact all we perceive is just a representation of what is, we can observe the fact phenomena (any) take place and if something happens it has to happen to something. Even an illusion, a hallucination, has some physical existence (e.g. in form of a pattern of chemicals and electrical currents in the neurons). Nothing unreal exists © (except the Unreal Tournament).
wizzwizz4 5y ago
> I am merely the observer of all these Perhaps there is a mere observer, but you are not it. If you were a mere observer, then how did that observation reach your hands? Things can exist without being fundamental components of reality. A Lego house is still a Lego house, even if it ceases to be when the bricks are separated, and has no identity separate from those bricks save for what we assign it. The identity, such that there truly is one (does “truly” even make sense here?), is partly in the arrangement, which is not a tangible thing.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Perhaps there is a mere observer, but you are not it. Sure, because I am not anything. I told this all is a simplification. And yes, this contradicts the statement that I am the observer. Whatever I could express in words is doomed to be just a simplified and corrupted model which can just give a hint but not tell "the truth" as it is. In fact the observer also can be pointed to and has a word for it in the Buddhist languages but actually (rather than epistemologically) dissociating from it is a particularly advanced step. > A Lego house is still a Lego house This is Zen. Of course everything is what it is but to truly realize this you have to go through the weird place of "nothing is what it seems" first. I believe a Zen master described his experience this way and that is quoted somewhere in Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen", more close to the end of the book than to its beginning. Albeit not a Zen master, I can confirm from my own experience, this actually is a path worth going rather than a simple truism hardly worth even saying as it seems first.

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.
- jrsdav 5y ago
  > all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves That’s really well put. Thanks for sharing your insight.

antihipocrat 5y ago

When you say you don't exist are you referring to your sense of self identity? i.e your ego, the feeling that your mind and body and all of your senses, emotions, thoughts and memories are a distinct entity? This idea is very interesting, and not considered strange in philosophy (ego death) and is also prevalent in Buddhism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81

qwerty456127 5y ago
Yes, kind of. I'm pretty sure I am neither my ego nor my body. But besides the body and the ego (the ego being a product of the body) no thing which could be reasonably called me physically exists. I am a rational kind so even if I believed in immortal soul in the Christian sense and could imagine an ethereal projection of my body retaining my memories going to some heaven after my body death, I would still understand the heaven as a physical place existing in spaces beyond reach of today measurement instruments and scientific reasoning of today. Therefore that would still be another body of mine, made of different sort of particles, existing physically (there is no way to exist nonphysically, physicality is a synonym to existence). But not me.
- antihipocrat 5y ago
  Does the universe exist? If so, then the atoms that comprise your body also exist, and defining your body as a distinct object within the universe is categorical.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > Does the universe exist? This is hardly possible to rationally give a logically true answer to this question. I would say it does because despite being unable to tell their nature reliably, despite the fact all we perceive is just a representation of what is, we can observe the fact phenomena (any) take place and if something happens it has to happen to something. Even an illusion, a hallucination, has some physical existence (e.g. in form of a pattern of chemicals and electrical currents in the neurons). Nothing unreal exists © (except the Unreal Tournament).

wizzwizz4 5y ago

> I am merely the observer of all these Perhaps there is a mere observer, but you are not it. If you were a mere observer, then how did that observation reach your hands? Things can exist without being fundamental components of reality. A Lego house is still a Lego house, even if it ceases to be when the bricks are separated, and has no identity separate from those bricks save for what we assign it. The identity, such that there truly is one (does “truly” even make sense here?), is partly in the arrangement, which is not a tangible thing.

qwerty456127 5y ago
> Perhaps there is a mere observer, but you are not it. Sure, because I am not anything. I told this all is a simplification. And yes, this contradicts the statement that I am the observer. Whatever I could express in words is doomed to be just a simplified and corrupted model which can just give a hint but not tell "the truth" as it is. In fact the observer also can be pointed to and has a word for it in the Buddhist languages but actually (rather than epistemologically) dissociating from it is a particularly advanced step. > A Lego house is still a Lego house This is Zen. Of course everything is what it is but to truly realize this you have to go through the weird place of "nothing is what it seems" first. I believe a Zen master described his experience this way and that is quoted somewhere in Alan Watts' "The Way of Zen", more close to the end of the book than to its beginning. Albeit not a Zen master, I can confirm from my own experience, this actually is a path worth going rather than a simple truism hardly worth even saying as it seems first.