If bert1 were someone else, he wouldn't be bert1. That's why.

We aren't just our brains. We're our entire bodies. Where we end and where reality begins is up for debate. At a certain distance, the eyes and the light striking them become one in the same. There is no "me" and everything else. There is only everything working in unison.

I find this attempt to capture human life within the brain a little odd and absurd, as it clearly is not the case. Our wholeness is not within; it's on the very surface. If there can be a very surface.

If it's all the same, whether we live or die, why choose death. In such an instance, life and death are too similarly worthless to choose one over the other.

Is it just that it's more inconvenient to be aware of the absurdity of one's existence than to be unaware of the absurdity of one's nonexistence.

Honestly I revel in the absurd, so I'm not going to search for a solution in death.

I'm not so fatalist, though. I don't know if death is ultimately survivable, but judging from first-person accounts, it's revelatory, and I look forward to that, regardless of how short-lived it may be.

Our souls occupy a space where everything is localized. We only appear to have separation in time and space. In fact you are already in the dimension of the soul; it's just that you're not conscious of it.

Most people just don't want to consider big perspectives. Which is a blessing and a curse. You know, in the old days, you'd have a thirty minute Primetime tv interview starring Aldous Huxley. If we were still the intellectual society we once were, I bet the water would be polluted with literally every Joe Blow waxing poetic and not really contributing much of value. The way it is, in these obscure corners of the internet, is much easier to swallow. Even if things are getting dumber every second.

Just look how music has become a bona fide career. Look at the hundreds of thousands of hack artists trying idiotically to become famous, and for what?

The lights are too bright now.

This may sound weird, but the television often speaks my mind. I've noticed it enough to where it makes me feel awkward and paranoid. The only time someone else mentioned it they said, "Osmosis." A dude had inquired whether I'd go to a Metallica concert with him, and the tv gave a perfect negative response, which happened to be the truth of how I felt about that.

I find philosophy much more fun than art, except when people are complete dicks about it. Most people don't realize, but art isn't just free, unfettered expression. You have critics and cynics there, too, which, for me, have ruined the entire thing. The number of people who are just trying to have fun in art is vastly outnumbered by the elitists who are trying to get ahead at others' expense. Art isn't fun; it's mostly pretentious.

Sometimes philosophy is the same way, but not nearly as much, in my experience.

I understand the question. I'm not sure why you think it's even possible to be someone else.

And you honestly expect an answer?

Experience. I was raised by a narcissist, and I know for a fact that dispositions are inherent from birth. A baby has a disposition, and it has little to do with appearances or experience.

Maybe the astrologers are right, and it's the stars. I've been around enough babies to know that they are born with distinct dispositions, though.

These can be ingrained or these can be discouraged, but they remain intact throughout life. In a very real sense, we are all still newborns.

I don't know how to explain it. Why people are born with personalities and unique identities is one of the world's greatest mysteries. It doesn't make a difference if it all boils down to DNA. That's still not a sufficient explanation for why you are you. Your parents randomly had sex, and here you are, an actor on the stage.

There's no sense in looking for explanations where there can't be any. A cosmic abberation is a cosmic abberation.

If you're trying to suggest that all identities are identical aside from being in different locales inhabiting different bodies, you're sorely mistaken.

It really hasn't, though.

You're all honestly confused about why you don't identify as other people...?

Clearly you aren't just your brain. You have an entire body.

There is no explanation for identity. It is what it is. It's entirely personal. It isn't a matter of experience. The identity comes first and chooses how to deal with experience. It's with you from birth until death and is totally immutable. You might as well try to explain why an apple is red or why stars are hot.

I'll go ahead and be "reprehensible." It's the fact that you think it's your right to judge that keeps me on the sidelines. You all think you're the judge, jury, and executioner. But it's your funeral.

I don't trust Biden as far as I can throw him. I know he really serves the money. Great that you want Trump gone. There may be a whole lot of people just like you. There are people like me, too, who none of you respect and evidently just don't need.

I'm not voting, and I don't feel I matter enough to help determine who wins. Your idea of appealing to people like me is looking down on us and trying to shame us into voting. And for what? Biden? I can't relate to that clown.

A vote is a personal expression. It's about what you want to be personally responsible for. It's not what you say it is; it's what I say it is. And I don't like this society, of which Trump and Biden are both symptoms of the same problem.

You've got no problem with it. Fine. I do. I'm not into what this society is. Biden or Trump, you get the same society. Biden is just a placeholder for the next utter fascist who sparks the interest of the status quo.

In fact, we might be safer with Trump, because at least he's dumb and we all know it. What happens when a charismstic, yet evil, politician comes along? Electing Biden does nothing to change that fate. In fact, he engenders it.

The malfunction is society as a whole.

The only thing to blame if Trump is reelected is the superficiality, stupidity, childishness, and greed of Democrats. There were good candidates in 2016; you chose Clinton. There were good candidates in 2020; you chose the creep whose entire campaign rests upon the fact that he's "not Trump."

I honestly don't think most Americans value decency. They value prestige.

My principles? I refuse to be affiliated with a rapist in any way. I'm not going to celebrate a rapist.

It's not a vote for Trump. It's this society that chose. I don't want to be a part of it.

Come what may, I'll deal with it. But it's abstract from whatever rapist you decide represents you.

Rapists don't represent me.

I can't vote for a rapist. I'll be sitting this one out.

Is there more than one present? Because in the past we always knew it to be the present.

I question whether anyone really changes. I think there is a subconscious part of us, our disposition, that remains the same.

Yeah, I suppose you're right. But my hunch is still that that's not the case, that consciousness is unbounded by time somehow.

I think this is so cool, because I think we're going to discover faculties of consciousness we currently don't dream of. For instance, the CIA has admitted that remote viewing is real. We're not even tangling that yet, but it implies something about consciousness' relationship to time and space.

We can't continue to set this sort of thing apart into the realm of the "divine." That really has nothing to do with it. I think if you truly want to explore our universe you can't set limits. You have to keep an open mind.

Why? I don't understand.

I'm not saying my body isn't eternal.

I think a person just has a character that is the soul. I don't really distinguish it from the body, though consciousness is non-local.

Would you call consciousness divine if it was something that existed somehow beyond time? By its nature it may seem somehow divine, but that doesn't mean it isn't natural. We shouldn't be ruling anything out, given that we don't know.

It just seems kind of odd that "life" would blindly evolve step-by-step in such a way that it led to conscious awareness. One day there's nothing, and the next the final piece fell into place and voila, awareness. I find that hard to swallow.

Understanding the world isn't the same as being cognizant that it exists. So no, awareness itself doesn't really come in degrees. And even if it did, we'd just have to push the goal post farther back and question what blind processes led to the lowest degree of awareness.

So yes, my thought is, wasn't it fortunate that a blind process led up to any degree of awareness at all. And the question is, how did that happen?

So reproduction just naturally led to consciousness? I guess that's what we have to explain. How?

There is no build-up to awareness. You're either aware or you're not. So it seems mighty fortunate that the unconscious progression of things got lucky, I guess...the right molecule fell into place and suddenly life became aware. It's kind of mysterious how a totally blind process led to all of this.

Had we evolved very differently, and not so self-aware, would it make any difference? We could all be protozoa, or a virus, and reproduce exponentially. If making copies is the only goal, why consciousness?

We know conscious beings are sometimes even driven to suicide, so it's not exactly necessarily advantageous.

Yet, I can imagine the first conscious being was driven to survive. But I wouldn't think more likely to survive than the billions of alleged unconscious beings that came before it.

I agree a lot with your line of thinking, except I'm not too keen on the multiverse. That's just a way to conveniently explain away fine-tuning. I don't think your philosophy rests upon this, though. I prefer q theory.

Also I think beyond the words you're using, you have to ultimately concede that it is a mystery. The big bang hasn't happened; the universe is over. Yes. What is this, though? It's shapes and forms and glib utterances. It's nonsense.

Wouldn't it be preferable not to know anything and be a p zombie than to have to face your own mortality?

Why is it useful to any creature to be a person when it will die? Seems like there's a conundrum there to me.

All you can reasonably do is try and eat everyone in the world's brain.

I tend to disagree. I believe there is an entire subconscious that is wholly a part of our lives that we aren't aware we're aware of. Waking life isn't everything.

As a person, one's sentience seems permanent. Yet, we know the identity we take on has a limit.

It is a real cognitive dissonance rather than a desire to be spiritual beings that causes people to contemplate a life eternal.

Our "now" isn't a fleeting thing. It's always now. And yet a part of us doesn't change, and thereby seems eternal.

I don't believe it's all illusory. You and I, having existed, are permanent facts of the universe, one way or the other.

So awareness is being judged by consciousness' seeming premonitory ability to react to a threat?

How does one fuck off a hole?

I'm not clicking that.

So you realize you neither know what time or, therefore, consciousness are. Good.

I have no idea what to do.

If that's what you need to believe, and your entire philosophy rests upon, be my guest. You understand the true nature of time and consciousness. Right. Meanwhile I and the rest of the scientific and philosophical community will continue to try and study it.

No, they don't. And it isn't me. It's a working theory of time, which is unexplained, and if you can't explain, haven't explained consciousness.

Sorry, "time is linear" isn't the end-all be-all of discussions about the nature of time.