“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts — saw038
:DEver tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. — Samuel Beckett
I don't think I get it.now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep. — saw038
No, there is no such thing to imagine, because the ability to identify what something is like is acquired when one is awake. If you have never been awake before, then there can be no such thing to imagine as waking up without ever having gone to sleep. Also "crudely" it would be a fictional story of what something was like but which couldn't have been like anything.. . it logically follows because we can imagine going to sleep and never waking up (at least, crudely); therefore, we should be able to imagine the inverse; that is, waking up without ever having gone to sleep. — saw038
I said that based on my own memories, in particular that I have no recollections of consciousness prior to the age of four. It's possible that I was lucid at the age of one month but do not recall it. That seems implausible to me but you're right that I can't prove it.I see what you're saying, but some of what you're assumes that we understand the consciousness of newborn babies and that is something that really can't be proven. — saw038
Well, waking up logically requires that we were asleep first, though. — Terrapin Station
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts
Thoughts?
This is most certainly not true historically speaking.Anyway, that's going quite far from what Watt's said himself, but I think there is a 'grand unifying theory' of many different philosophies (including pessimism, Buddhism, determinism, some form of idealism, Stoicism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, philosophy of time, and every-day understandings of death and the self) to be found somewhere in my ramblings. — WhiskeyWhiskers
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