I Know You Are, But What Am I ?

Personally, I think of human beings as physical bodies that are 99.5%+ biological in everything that we do, with a. "connection" to something external, an observer, that can either have zero impact on what our biological bodies do, or a very small one. The observer is our own awareness, which you could call a soul if you want. I think of it as something without physical property: no mass, density, chemical composition, etc

I do not have any proof that such a thing exists, but assuming that it does not exist opens up a huge can of worms, because how then does self awareness as we experience it make any sense at all? If humans are just sacks of meat, then yes, they would think they are self aware, but they would not experience true self awareness. We do. And you can't ascribe physical properties to that.

I don't think that there is anything spiritual or particularly sacred about our bodies. If you transported a body to a parallel universe, be it alive or dead, that body would be moved in location. If it's alive, it would.walk around and talk, it. And I think the person living in it would continue to experience reality just as they did before visiting the parallel universe. Whether there is any merging going on probably wouldn't be observable. It's nothing I can try and measure, so I cannot know for sure, but I don't think this thing we have, this awareness, this observer, is something that can really "merge" with something else.

When a new person is conceived, is a new observer created, or is it really just the same.one, looking through a different window? I tend to think that we all actually share our awareness. We're all part of a massive superorganism called humanity, Earth, or the universe. And we are ironically killing ourselves, causing ourselves pain, f•••ing ourselves over a million different ways all the time. And everything we do that, we do it to ourselves. We just don't realize it.

I'm not sure about multiple universe theory. I would think of it as branchings of the physical world though, and I don't see the consciousness as physical. So our bodies could move around the world, across other dimensions above 4D spacetime to other branches. But the consciousness don't really have a location, a size, a mass, all that. Our self-identity is an illusion tied to our body, so if you move the body, the self identity would stay its own separate self, even if you made a genetic clone of yourself, sent yourself back in time to a time when you were also alive, or traveled to a different branch of time. Time as we perceive it is also an illusion I think. We are, and we experience. We experience life as the now, as something linear, but is it? We have no context to tell beyond the moment.

I've always believed that at any given moment, every single possible version of our life is open to us (except those doors that have been closed to us based on prior decisions). This is probably self-evident. I'm just not sure if those alternate realities exist in any sense other than in our minds. That isn't to say there isn't utility (and entertainment) in exploring that through fiction; we always wonder how life could've been different if we'd decided to take a risk, not take a risk, not hit the snooze button, or ran to make that elevator. To a very limited extent it's worthwhile to consider that in our day-to-day.

It's complex enough to give one a headache, and we're just theorizing about *one* individual at a time. Ourselves, typically. If we assume that all of us are existing in this free-will sort of way, then it's simply impossible for me to fathom.

I would say that if you were to switch to a parallel universes, it'd be like you traded places with "The Other Self-Awareness". And neither of you would realize it, and nobody else would either.

How many "infinite nows" are there?

This is disjointed because I actually have a migraine. Anyway, is time just our means of measuring the change that happens to the "infinite now"? Our tool so that we can say It *was* just like that, but now It is this. And after enough thats to this', we can conjecture the direction the now is moving in with relative accuracy.

Hmm. Had to ponder this one a bit. I'll probably blog my epiphany, but here we can continue with some thoughts on Existence. "I think, therefore, I think."
What? Alright, our brains are observation, recording, differencing, and resolution engines. If we observe a state, store in memory, and see a difference in the following state, we exist, whether we think about it or not. Existence is not in doubt, but given the above, time and energy are relationships to things which exist. They do not exist in themselves. They are tools which can be used improperly. What saves us is probability. With an infinite (immeasurable) number of states of existence, there are infinitely probable universes, realities, whatever. We can only observe, record and process the now state. What's really out there is yet to be discovered by those with the ability to measure and record it. That makes the now more important.
Now, Expression.. is an entirely different reality!
Blog that, I will.

We cannot access parallel universes. They are gone the moment of bifurcation. Because in this theory this happening all the time the millions of universes surely clutter up space.
As for the Tao - yes way to go!
Quote: You can disappear in smoke: Hawkind - Hall of the Mountain Grill