# I don`t exist and neither do you!



## Misanthropic (Jun 25, 2010)

It feels so strongly that there is a permanent, central observer in 'my' brain with a constant identity but there isn't. There are 100 billion separate neurons in 'my' brain and none of them is 'me'. Each of these neurons is made up of molecules that are made up of atoms that are replaced frequently (every few months, according to V.S Ramachandran). There is no way that I could possibly be the same entity (ie. arrangement of sub-atomic particles) that I was 10 years ago. Some of the atoms in my body are probably the same as they were 10 years ago but only because they've been recycled, at one point (or two, three etc.), they were also replaced. There is no actual Misanthropic, there are just a bunch of sub-atomic particles that experience the illusion of being Misanthropic. It's only a matter of time before an entirely new community of atoms experience the illusion of being Misanthropic and the atoms I'm currently comprised of are recycled into other things. It's entirely possible, not even unlikely, that any of the atoms that any of my neurons are comprised of will replace or be replaced by any of the atoms that any of 'your' neurons are comprised of.

This is such a beautiful and fascinating fact to me. It makes me feel connected to nature as a whole. I don't feel empathy for most human beings but I admit that it's inconsistent for me not to. If you were to take this to it's logical conclusion, you should feel empathy for everybody, since there is no separate, single 'you' that can be considered as having separate interests from anyone else. Any of the particles you're made up of could end up experiencing the illusion of being Bill Gates or a starving, orphaned child. This completely destroys the validity of ethical egoism. Logically, we should be doing everything we can to minimize as much suffering as possible and increase as much happiness as possible.


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## OrbitalResonance (Sep 21, 2010)

I don't exist either but so do you


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## leonardess (Jun 30, 2009)

I have not posted this post.


(nice thinking by the way)


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## Dreamscape (Sep 18, 2010)

I'm still not sure how one could truly classify the difference between something that is real or illusion when it comes to this sort of thing. I'm not trying to argue against what you are saying, I just don't have a strong opinion about it one way or the other.

It seems like the language itself (in this case "illusion") can be used in such a way as to explain away something that seems very real in the sense of the word. What ought we mean by the term illusion? We don't need to have the same particles to persistently experience reality from one vantage point. We also maintain memories of past experiences made up of very different particles, and those can seem very real. Can we really dismiss such a persistent illusion? Speaking of which, what is *real* again? :um

"Who is it that knows there is no ego?" - Alan Watts


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## Belshazzar (Apr 12, 2010)

Every time you drink a glass of water, the odds are good that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. It's just elementary probability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls in the world. So every time we have a full glass, we are looking at a rather high proportion of the molecules of water that exist in the world. - Lewis Wolpert

Have you ever read Doug Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, btw?


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## danberado (Apr 22, 2010)

We're the cream in the airport coffee.


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## woot (Aug 7, 2009)

My mind = blown.


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## Misanthropic (Jun 25, 2010)

> What ought we mean by the term illusion?


To me, it means that something doesn't exist in the way that it appears to.



> We don't need to have the same particles to persistently experience reality from one vantage point. We also maintain memories of past experiences made up of very different particles, and those can seem very real. Can we really dismiss such a persistent illusion? Speaking of which, what is *real* again? :um


But if the atoms that our neurons are comprised of are frequently replaced, what makes you so sure that 'you' have always been there? You can't separate something from the parts it's made up of (a tree is different from an individual sub-atomic particle but it's still a collection of sub-atomic particles). I could be way off but I look at it like this : imagine there was a virtual reality machine that 10 people could plug into and simultaneously experience the illusion of being a man from the 15th century. Every 5 hours, one person would be unplugged and replaced by someone else who would have all of the man's memories from the last 5 hours and be convinced that he is the same permanent being with a constant identity. In just over 2 days, none of the people plugged into that machine and experiencing the illusion of being that 15th century man would be from the original group, even though all of them are convinced that they are a single, permanent being that has remained the same the entire 2 days. What's really 'trippy' is that there could be completely separate 'minds' in each brain. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of those neurons is comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms and each of those atoms is comprised of electrons as well as protons and neutrons that are further divided into quarks and gluons.


> "Who is it that knows there is no ego?" - Alan Watts


The collection of elementary particles that experience the illusion of being the ego.



> Every time you drink a glass of water, the odds are good that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. It's just elementary probability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls in the world. So every time we have a full glass, we are looking at a rather high proportion of the molecules of water that exist in the world. - Lewis Wolpert
> 
> Have you ever read Doug Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, btw?


I remember hearing something like this before. What's 'I am a strange loop' about?


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## Cerberus (Feb 13, 2005)

Yeah, buddhist philosophy is cool.

"I" is a convention of language that has been mutated into a distorted concept of who we think we are. We cling to concepts of who we are, only to wake up, look in the mirror, and think, "who the **** is that guy?" Do I know who I am? Do other people know who I am? People have surprised me with observations of me I never thought of. Observations of myself are ones others wouldn't think of. Which ones should I trust?

Then when you get down to analyzing parts of who you are, looking for some essential "I," one doesn't turn up. Someone might say that the parts of me combined is who I am, but subtract parts here and there, and you continually realize they're not essential. So, which parts of me combined are who I am? If consciousness is who I am, do I no longer exist when I'm unconscious? Wondering where I end and something else begins is also interesting to think about.

You might find the following interesting, OP.

"The emptiness of matter.
The ancient Greeks believed that matter is composed of indivisible small elements with certain characteristics, such as the characteristics of earth, water, air, and fire. They called these elements atoms and they held that atoms were solid and fundamental, like microscopic billiard balls. Ernest Rutherford invalidated the billiard ball theory by conducting an experiment, which suggested that atoms have an internal structure. He established that atoms have a nucleus containing most of its mass and that electrons orbit the nucleus. Moreover, he established that the nucleus of an atom is only about one ten-thousandth of the diameter of the atom itself, which means that 99.99% of the atom's volume consists of empty space. This is the first manifestation of emptiness at the subtle level of matter. Not long after Rutherford's discovery, physicists found out that the nucleus of an atom likewise has an internal structure and that the protons and neutrons making up the nucleus are composed of even smaller particles, which they named quarks after a poem of James Joyce. Interestingly, quarks are hypothesised as geometrical points in space, which implies that atoms are essentially empty. This is the second manifestation of emptiness at the subtle level of matter.
The terms "quarks" and "points in space" still suggest something solid, since they can be imagined as irreducible mass particles. Yet, quantum field theory does away even with this finer concept of solidity by explaining particles in the terms of field properties. Quantum electrodynamics (QED) has produced an amazingly successful theory of matter by combining quantum theory, classical field theory, and relativity. No discrepancies between the predictions of QED and experimental observation have ever been found. According to QED, subatomic particles are indistinguishable from fields, whereas fields are basically properties of space. In this view, a particle is a temporary local densification of a field, which is conditioned by the properties of the surrounding space. Ergo, matter is not different from space. This is the third manifestation of emptiness at the subtle level of matter.
An important class of phenomena in the subatomic world is defined by the various interactions between particles. In fact, there is no clear distinction between the notions of phenomena, particles, and interactions, although interactions can be described clearly in mathematical terms. For example, there are interactions between free electrons by means of photons that result in an observed repelling force. There are also interactions between the quarks of a nucleon by means of mesons, interactions between the neighbouring neutrons or protons, interactions between nucleus and electrons, and interactions between the atoms of molecules. The phenomena themselves -the nucleon, the nucleus, the atom, the molecule- are sufficiently described by these interactions, meaning by the respective equations, which implies that interactions and phenomena are interchangeable terms. Interestingly, the interrelations of quantum physics do not describe actual existence. Instead they predict the potential for existence. A manifest particle, such as an electron, cannot be described in terms of classical mechanics. It exists as a multitude of superposed "scenarios", of which one or another manifests only when it is observed, i.e. upon measurement. Therefore, matter does not inherently exist. It exists only as interrelations of "empty" phenomena whose properties are determined by observation. This is the fourth manifestation of emptiness at the subtle level of matter."

http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html


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## coldsorehighlighter (Jun 2, 2010)

Jesus preached about this, without the scientific details. Love your neighbor as you love yourself, because you are one...basically.


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## Same Difference (Aug 26, 2010)

It's pretty incredible. The more we search for answers, the more our questions become meaningless.


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## Belshazzar (Apr 12, 2010)

Misanthropic said:


> But if the atoms that our neurons are comprised of are frequently replaced, what makes you so sure that 'you' have always been there?
> 
> I remember hearing something like this before. What's 'I am a strange loop' about?


You could also say that it's not the stuff, or atoms, that make us us, but the pattern in which they're arranged. A series of notes played in progression on the piano can make a song. If you play this same set of notes on a different piano, it's still the same "song." But it's not exactly the same -- different piano, different time of day, maybe a key is out of tune, etc. That is, it's what could be called a different "instance" of the abstract concept of the song. The abstract and continuous "I" would work the opposite way, though, because there is no pre-defined abstract I like there would be musical notation to read from on a sheet. It would be more like the sum of all your physical "instances" creates the abstract idea of I. The result would be less like an orchestra playing strictly from the sheet music and more like a jazz band adding new improvisations to old songs.

Interestingly, we tend to define arbitrarily which instances belong to the I and which don't. E.g., "I lost my leg in the war but I'm still the same person." Or "Now that I've gotten my alcoholism under control, I'm a new me." There's also some interesting research where people are asked to identify at what age they "became themselves" or felt a "contiguous identity" and the cutoff usually falls at some point during elementary school, where people remember events as more representative of "me" after the cut-off and less representative before it.

I Am a Strange Loop is pretty much about what's been said in this thread.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/Hofstadter.htm


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## Dreamscape (Sep 18, 2010)

Misanthropic said:


> But if the atoms that our neurons are comprised of are frequently replaced, what makes you so sure that 'you' have always been there? You can't separate something from the parts it's made up of (a tree is different from an individual sub-atomic particle but it's still a collection of sub-atomic particles). I could be way off but I look at it like this : imagine there was a virtual reality machine that 10 people could plug into and simultaneously experience the illusion of being a man from the 15th century. Every 5 hours, one person would be unplugged and replaced by someone else who would have all of the man's memories from the last 5 hours and be convinced that he is the same permanent being with a constant identity. In just over 2 days, none of the people plugged into that machine and experiencing the illusion of being that 15th century man would be from the original group, even though all of them are convinced that they are a single, permanent being that has remained the same the entire 2 days. What's really 'trippy' is that there could be completely separate 'minds' in each brain. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of those neurons is comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms and each of those atoms is comprised of electrons as well as protons and neutrons that are further divided into quarks and gluons.


I can appreciate what you are saying and I understand what you mean.

I do consider the _I _that represents my ego to always be in a state of change, on many levels. I think the fact that it isn't static doesn't necessarily make it what I would call an illusion, though.

I'll try to use a weird analogy, not sure how useful it will be. If I imagine that I can put whatever food I want into my body, I essentially change what I am in a small way. The food I select could have entered into my stomach, your stomach, or sat on the ground, or whatever else. It's something that can be shared by all. Yet when that food becomes part of my body, it really doesn't seem that special to me and I don't feel that I need to keep it inside me forever in order to retain what I am. Everyone eats food, and though it is very important that we all eat food, I am not the food. I would consider the ego in this analogy to be more like my mouth. It encounters different types of food, some of which many others experience as well, but we're not really part of the food. Also, if the mouth is gone and it is unable to encounter anymore food, then there is no longer any joy or use in having food. When I die the food will still be there, and people will eat some of the same foods I ate, but I won't be able to taste it, experience it, etc. I need my mouth, my awareness, my sense of self and _I_ for the food to even matter.

I still have empathy for many other reasons. I can still feel connected to others in many ways, but my mouth is still important so that it can experience the different type of foods and be able to appreciate the food. When that mouth is gone, or the illusion is gone, there is still something very unique being lost. That mouth won't magically become another mouth, even if they shared in some of the same exact foods and experiences alike. Without a mouth, the food doesn't really matter for it.

Hopefully that makes some sense. xD I typed this with a little whiskey in me so I'm not sure how coherent it is. And maybe you're right it's some kind of illusion, it's just hard for me to perceive it _only_ in that way. I'm somewhere in the middle. The illusion just seems pretty important to itself, even if it is just an illusion. Maybe that's a way of putting it?


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## Misanthropic (Jun 25, 2010)

Apotheosis said:


> I can appreciate what you are saying and I understand what you mean.
> 
> I do consider the _I _that represents my ego to always be in a state of change, on many levels. I think the fact that it isn't static doesn't necessarily make it what I would call an illusion, though.
> 
> ...


An illusion is still perceptually real, I agree with you. What gets me is not that I am a collection of sub-atomic particles that, individually, do not have the personality I associate with myself, I already knew that, but that I'm not the same me that I was 5 years ago. I don't know if "I" am one neuron (sharing the illusion with other neurons), a single sub-atomic particle found in one neuron or what but it's possible that I won't wake up tomorrow. It's possible that I really will experience being my cat or recycled into air, water etc.


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## Dreamscape (Sep 18, 2010)

Misanthropic said:


> An illusion is still perceptually real, I agree with you. What gets me is not that I am a collection of sub-atomic particles that, individually, do not have the personality I associate with myself, I already knew that, but that I'm not the same me that I was 5 years ago. I don't know if "I" am one neuron (sharing the illusion with other neurons), a single sub-atomic particle found in one neuron or what but it's possible that I won't wake up tomorrow. It's possible that I really will experience being my cat or recycled into air, water etc.


 I think there is always going to be a sort of overall encompassing concept of _"I_" that we maintain until the death of the body. But there might also be different levels of awareness outside of it that we can sort of be connected to others by on certain levels of functioning. I guess I just wouldn't worry about losing my own awareness of _I_ (until death), since it's always there in some form or another. Any neurons that could end up in something else won't take away from the collective that make up my own experience. That sounds pretty frightening to think it could just pop out and into something else. I view it more like building blocks of our self that are being exchanged though, and not the sense of _I_.


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## Echonnector (Sep 12, 2010)

What's the meaning of life? Where did life come from? These have long been fundamental human questions motivating theologians, philosophers, and scientists searching for answers. From as far back as can be discerned the fundamental algorithm for everything around us is the ability to be copied and extenuated. Anything that can fulfill this role will spread and succeed to varying degrees based on multiple factors, such as copying fidelity or cleverness in avoiding hazards and outwitting opponents. This is the root meaning of life; a tautology in that life exists because it exists, and continues to do so because it can adapt and overcome. 
As the scale of our awareness increases our often inflated sense of self-importance shrinks in significance. And things are not always what they seem because we so often distort actual events through the lens of our selfish impulses. We now realize that, contrary to ego-driven beliefs, a human being, like all life, is the vehicle for genetic continuity. The reproducing animal is actually just the form genes use to spread and perpetuate. The ego-cult of the individual has been overthrown, yet the critical concept here is the act of replication, for even ideas moving through a sea of culture can outlast genes.
Where life came from isn't certain, but the basic outline is already known. From spectrographs scientists can detect that life's primary chemicals form in clouds of interstellar gas, a chemical soup warmed by a steady stream of radiation. Comets and asteroids bombarded the early Earth and delivered the basic chemical ingredients needed for life, such as water and amino acids.
Curiously, almost every living organism on Earth uses left-handed amino acids instead of their right-handed counterparts. In the 1990s, scientists found that meteorites contain up to 15% more of the left version too. That suggests space rocks bombarding the early Earth biased its chemistry so that life used left-handed amino acids instead of right. [3]​ Convincing evidence indicates life could have originated in underwater alkaline vents, consisting of bubbly rocks riddled with labyrinthine pores, which existed before Earth had an oxygen atmosphere.
The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells - not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea. [7] ​ This ingenious idea solves the mystery of two key elements necessary for cellular life - an energy source and a discrete package protect the special chemical reactions. If this is the case the necessary situation and ingredients for life to begin must be remarkably common throughout the universe.
But if life really did originate on Earth it did so suspiciously fast -- as soon as possible, immediately after Earth's formation during tumultuous volcanic cataclysms and violent meteorite impacts. Since the necessary situation and ingredients for life to begin must be remarkably common throughout the universe, it's not a great leap to consider the possibility of a cosmic origin for life in a theory called panspermia or exogenesis. In two separate experiments India launched rockets to search for signs of life in the upper atmosphere, in what was thought to be an inhospitable region for living things considering the high-levels of radiation. Yet life they did find -- three previously unknown species of bacteria. [4] Incredibly, these two experiments establish that life can survive in outer space.
Whether life started here on Earth, or somewhere in space and was delivered to Earth by a comet or asteroid, the point is that our very physical existence is the direct result of cosmic events. Jumping from inorganic chemicals to self-perpetuating cells, life eventually evolved into sentient beings capable of recognizing what's happened!
The logical conclusion is that life must be ubiquitous, even if it's isolated and hidden from our currently very limited capacities for detection. This realization contains enormous significance. As living beings we are not unique or alone in the universe. No longer is Earth an anomaly and we can establish a context for our existence as a part of the greater universe. Our effort and struggle doesn't have to die here, alone and forgotten. 
For tens of thousands of years people have gazed into the night-sky at an amazing multitude of scattered fires. They invented stories and elaborate religious beliefs to explain the burning lights. The ancient Greeks developed philosophy as a way to explain events and forces through subjective rhetoric. The scientific method was developed and it competed with philosophy and religion, eventually superseding both by providing objective, verifiable, and predictive conclusions. Between religion and philosophy, and between philosophy and science, someone imagined a different state of affairs and others helped to create it. Philosophy was overthrown and the burning spots in the sky turned out to be stars, and the stars turned out to have planets of their own, and someday we'll even find out what's on those planets.
Meanwhile the natural forces on our small and dynamic planet are continually creating the new by destroying the old, and a balance emerges from this natural state of chaos. Yet human effort so often struggles to retain the status quo long after it transforms from a benefit into a burden. It was once a blasphemy to suggest that the Earth revolved around the Sun rather than being the center of everything. Even today natural selection and biological evolution are attacked as heretical. Similarly it was once only the family, and then it was only the tribe, then the nation, the empire, the state, the global institution, and now the network. Despite the force of cultural inertia and social conservatism superior ideas and predictive methodologies inexorably supplant the useless and ineffective.

- http://www.counterorder.com


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## leonardess (Jun 30, 2009)

uh, look, obviously I'm no philosopher, but if we are illusions, or whatever else, what are the meds people are on?


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## shale (Jul 24, 2010)

I like thinking about myself this way. Somehow it makes me less afraid of death.


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## Ape in space (May 31, 2010)

'Reality' is an ill-defined concept.


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## Akane (Jan 2, 2008)

> Any of the particles you're made up of could end up experiencing the illusion of being Bill Gates or a starving, orphaned child. This completely destroys the validity of ethical egoism. Logically, we should be doing everything we can to minimize as much suffering as possible and increase as much happiness as possible.


I only care about the atoms that currently make up me. The rest can go suffer or experience success all they want so long as they don't bother me. Tomorrow (or after supper tonight) I will care about new atoms. :b


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## Chemical Isolation (Oct 6, 2010)

This is a very humbling philosophical concept. One of my favorite, infact It's fascinating how when you get down to it, most everything in the universe (as far as we know) is made of the same thing: energy. We are the made up of the same material as animals, plants and dirt are. So really, you could consider it all as a great illusion. People tend to see our existence as much more perminant then it really is. It seems like most people get way too caught up in their veiw of the world (understandably, it's human nature to be self centred. It is partial to our survival) and they forget how very little of what we perceive can actually be called reality. This is especially true in social situations. There is a general paradigm (things that are considered right or wrong by most people. Big things such as murder or other crimes) in society, but everything is so open to interpretation. What is wrong in one situation might be right in another, or what is right for one person might be wrong for another. And ideas of what's right and wrong may change with experience and maturity, or as society's veiws change. Everyone percieves things uniquely. There is a lot in our universe that cannot be defined as true or false. Humans are very strange.. And reality has a much more narrow definition than most people know. There is a huge grey area between what's real and unreal in which things can exist without being either.


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## Chemical Isolation (Oct 6, 2010)

Misanthropic said:


> To me, it means that something doesn't exist in the way that it appears to.
> 
> But if the atoms that our neurons are comprised of are frequently replaced, what makes you so sure that 'you' have always been there? You can't separate something from the parts it's made up of (a tree is different from an individual sub-atomic particle but it's still a collection of sub-atomic particles). I could be way off but I look at it like this : imagine there was a virtual reality machine that 10 people could plug into and simultaneously experience the illusion of being a man from the 15th century. Every 5 hours, one person would be unplugged and replaced by someone else who would have all of the man's memories from the last 5 hours and be convinced that he is the same permanent being with a constant identity. In just over 2 days, none of the people plugged into that machine and experiencing the illusion of being that 15th century man would be from the original group, even though all of them are convinced that they are a single, permanent being that has remained the same the entire 2 days. What's really 'trippy' is that there could be completely separate 'minds' in each brain. There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of those neurons is comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon atoms and each of those atoms is comprised of electrons as well as protons and neutrons that are further divided into quarks and gluons.
> The collection of elementary particles that experience the illusion of being the ego.
> ...


Great interpretation of this concept! And our growth as a person over the years really supports that we are in no way the same person that we were say, 7 years ago. Think about it.. Look back 7 years. Did you have the exact same believes then? Would you react the in the same manner now that would have then in any given situation? My guess is no. It's obvious that over the years, our personalities are changed by our experiences and we become very different people (psychologically) then we we were before. The fact that every 7 years, all of the cells in our bodies die and are replaced just proves that we actually physically become different people.


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