It’s part of the realization of growing into a human to know that your brain has a processing delay that means you’re not in the now? Or that time dilation might say you’re cosmically alone?
Did you read it?
Also in regards to growing up I guess you also mean that there is no “self” and we just reconstruct ourselves each day?
Hell, like anything you look at too closely, identity falls apart:
I wonder if part of what makes this so unsettling is that “being yourself” is normally the background of experience, not something you’re supposed to stare at directly.
Most of the time, we don’t prove to ourselves that we are ourselves. We just look through our own eyes, answer to our name, move through the day, react to people, remember things, want things, avoid things, and slowly build a feeling of continuity from that. The self is usually the place we look from.
But when attention turns around and looks directly at that place, it can start to feel strange. Like: wait, this face is mine? This name is mine? This body is the one I’ve been living through the whole time? And because a face, name, body, avatar, or backstory can never fully explain the feeling of being alive inside yourself, all of it can start to feel arbitrary or unreal.
It reminds me of how almost anything can become weird if you focus on it too hard. A word stops sounding like a word. Breathing becomes awkward when you manually control it. Eye contact becomes impossible when you start thinking about eye contact. Maybe the self can do something similar. If you keep checking “do I feel like me?” the checking itself can interrupt the feeling you’re trying to find.
The mimicry part also feels very human to me. A lot of becoming a person is imitation. We borrow gestures, humor, phrases, styles, values, defenses, ways of caring, ways of surviving. No one builds a self out of untouched original material.
But imitation becomes painful when it is ruled by fear. When every social interaction turns into “what version of me will be acceptable here?” instead of “what do I actually feel, notice, enjoy, or want to share?” Then life starts feeling like a game level instead of a place where connection can happen.
Maybe identity isn’t something you find once and finally possess. Maybe it’s something that becomes less blurry through use. You choose, repeat, regret, care, change, return, and slowly build enough continuity that you don’t need to keep checking whether you’re real.
Maybe the self becomes clearer not by staring at it harder, but by giving it things to do, people to care about, places to return to, and enough gentleness that it doesn’t have to keep proving it exists.
Yes
Yes, he compares himself to others, and clearly says, “Maybe it really was all emoticons for them - I cannot say. But that’s not how it was for me”
He is relating his experience. It’s valid because it is from him and is expressed sincerely. How could anyone argue with that?
I’d like to return to this comment of your’s. You talk a lot about illusions and not being able to experience the moment. So why do you agree this guy’s experience is real?
This guy gives the path to self discovery, but you call it “falling apart.”
I must have missed that part when growing up. Pretty sure most people don’t know or think that.
It’s real because it’s harsh, and the reality of life is often such. Once you realize our lives are shared constructs it becomes difficult to justify playing what is essentially a game. That’s what this professor I’ve been talking to says, and he draws on Buddhism to make the point:
There are extensive debates in Buddhist literature regarding the precise nature of the object being negated in the no-self doctrine. The way I see it, the aim is to deconstruct our concept of ourselves as enduring, separate, and centralized loci of control, ownership, identity, subjectivity, etc.
I think the following paragraphs, quoted from Bill Waldron’s latest book, “Making Sense of Mind Only”, nicely articulates the relationship between the constructed nature of perception and moral nihilism that my work, following Buddhist thinkers, aims to articulate.
"…our perceptions occur in dependence on a multitude of supporting conditions, and even if they do not correspond exactly to some external “reality,” they nevertheless provide shared, practical knowledge—for better or for worse. Our common worlds, with their common perceptions, and all-too-common prejudices and painful consequences—that is, culture—are real enough. All too real.
In short, the lack of purely “objective” knowledge does not lead to moral nihilism, nor to the inability to discern karmic causal relationships. Rather, Vasubandhu is arguing that karmic causality operates at the level of sentience, within and between sentient beings, and he is rejecting the notion that intentions, actions, and their consequences—that is, karma—can be reduced to the level of mere materiality. Not only are apparent “objects” largely products of our constructive processes, so too are our shared worlds, like those of the hell beings whose common fate is based on their common karma. Or, in modern parlance, our lives are collectively constructed based on our shared social and cultural attitudes and their accompanying behavioral patterns. Thus, far from leading to moral nihilism, in the Mahāyāna view it is the denial of our constructive role in creating these worlds—of our karma—that instills ignorance and apathy."
If you see what he says at the end it’s about not looking to closely a life, which is what I’ve been saying this whole time.
You’re right. Most people don’t examine their life. They bounce around and muddle through. They don’t grow.
I don’t see anything in the quoted text that says we shouldn’t play the game of life.
He says the opposite, like this;
You keep changing what you say. You link and quote to a variety of works and say “this”.
I wouldn’t call it growth so much as regression. Learning about stuff like this just limits your approach to life. It’s why we don’t tell kids that so they can believe things as still possible.
I read that but he leans too much on life being constructed and once you know it’s our collective fantasy then loving it feels pointless. That’s even without getting into whether one can know reality in any meaningful way.
Hell, you can read this breakdown from a YouTube video I saw that questions not only whether we can know reality and not just our impressions but that science might not be a way of knowing
Here is said video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC5FWVZh9-4
But this is sorta to my point about how to live well is to be ignorant and to know is to be burdened
Learning something is the opposite of limiting
That’s you that does that. Not me. I’d bet the vast majority don’t think that.
Then, in your second post, you do that thing I described last time: point to another thing and say it explains it. It doesn’t.
It doesn’t so much question it as take it as a premise. Science currently can’t explain consciousness. I’ve said that from the first time you posted anything.
I don’t know where in the video it says that. I know it’s what you think, but you have never provided any evidence. It’s just your opinion, your feelings. Those are valid, they are your experience, but they are not something that proves anything for anyone else.
In this one
