when you look at a chair and you look at you, it’s evident that there is a clear distinction between you and the chair; you are you and chair is chair. however when you truly think about it, what makes you not chair? where does you begin and chair end?
what actually separates objects from other objects? nothing.
see, we are all one.
we are all sandwich.
50 trillion millennia ago, a giant made a sandwich and the universe we observe today is simply another atom in the sandwich. and there are going to be some objections to this very clearly true theory, so i will simply disprove them.
“we can’t see it,” it is beyond human perception.“physics behaves differently in a sandwich,” not in this sandwich
QED
anyways, if you have any more objections let me know and i will simply disprove them
Air? If I pick up the chair the electromagnetic fields around the atoms on the surface of the chair and the surface of my hand repel each other from merging so there is an infinitesmal distance. In that tiny, tiny distance there are virtual photons, electric fields and fluctuating quantum energy?
and if you zoom in way down to the scale of an atom, you will find that there is still space between that. if you zoom out to the scale of the observable universe, the space between the sun and the earth is practically non existent
In the physics model the same stuff that’s between us and the chair.
It seems like you are saying we are not separate from the universe. If I jump in water, I am no longer in contact with the air. If my wife leans on me we aren’t separate, but then if she goes to the kitchen and my brother leans on me…etc. So, one does get separate from objects. But it seems like you are saying we are touching parts of the whole, even if we are not touching the same parts of the whole. Is that what you are saying? Because if I am lying on the beach on the sand, the nearest chair might be a mile away. That object. But if you are saying we are always part of the local matter - if this is a kind of materialism/physicalism - that seems different from saying we are always not-separate from specific objects. I certainly may have missed something in ‘sandwich’ which I liked but can’t say I fully understand.
It would be visually non-existant from that perspective, but here we are not aflame. You wouldn’t let someone take your kid because from that perspective it’s all one.
that’s not really what i mean by “one” lol. from a human perspective, we have boundaries for what separates objects and people. but those are just constructs. they describe how we see the world but don’t say anything about how it is
OK. But don’t you think it’s also like we are inward-facing in a way. Like I don’t feel inward from, say, the walls of the room. I feel inside my body. I connect with what is inside me in a way I don’t with what is in the room. Aren’t we at least also separate? Do they have to be mutually exclusive? Not being separated and being separate. Can’t we be both?
But still, you won’t let that neighbor take your kid. And that belief runs down to the bone. What do I base the belief there’s no separation on? There’s no separation between the neighbor and my kid, nor between our families, any of it. Yet, I still block the door. Where’s the justification for the non-separateness? Oh, ok, I step out of the way.
oh i see. you might not feel that connection with things that are outside of “you” but that connection is still there whether or not you notice it. but i don’t think it can be both. i think not being separated and being separate do cancel each other out. how wouldn’t they?
Well, we’re used to that. We’re used to thinking that you can’t be separate and deeply connected. Those are opposites we say, so they can’t both be true. Maybe that’s wrong. I say this because you may be able to make a great argument about how I am not separate, but the separateness is so powerfully experienced and that argument will be very abstract and evanescent. That inward facing me-ness is like a lion striding through some old cobwebs of argument. But I don’t want to say the argument is wrong. At the same time I cannot ignore the lion, nor do I really want to. And I will base decisions on that lion and so will the people who think the separate lion is an illusion. They will make decisions based on the lion being separate, especially if it’s a lionness and you are trying to take one of her cubs. Should I believe their cobwebs or their actions?
you can believe one thing and still act another. take nihilists for instance. they believe there is no inherent value to the universe. so to do anything would be pointless. however they still behave as if they are not nihilists. because psychologically speaking, logic often doesn’t override instinct and habits. you can believe that everything is one thing, yet still not allow your child to be kidnapped because you care about your child. even if you technically believe your child and your neighbour are one, from a human standpoint, the neighbour is a threat to the safety of your child, who you must protect
Actually, if one could show that their actions indicate something other than nihilism that saying their believe in nihilism is at best incomplete. Let me use a different example since I think it’s tricky showing that with nihilists. Let’s say someone believes they are not racist. They say they are against racism and think everyone is equal in their humanity and should be treated as such. But if you track their behavior and find they treat people behaving exactly the same way differently depending on race (and negatively those from other races), I think that person’s belief about what they believe is false. They may like the idea or being anti-racist but they actually don’t have the beliefs they think they do.
We don’t get to identify our whole organism with some idealistic part of the neocortex.
It’s quite common to believe 1) people can’t be wrong about what they believe 2) people can’t hold contradictory beliefs 3) people are conscious of their beliefs. 4) beliefs are binary
These overlap. I think people can be wrong about what they believe, be unaware of what some/many of their beliefs are, and can hold beliefs that contradict each other and that there are degrees of believing.
Well, it wouldn’t be kidnapping. I’m not talking about someone grabbing your child. I mean, they meet the kid at school and take over parenting with some really nice parenting practices. You still won’t let that happen. You don’t really believe. Or you believe to a certain degree, but you also believe contradictory things, like that is your child and beings are separate and so on. And we still haven’t come close to proving the cobweb of ideas about all being one are correct either. What does it mean that we are all one?
no humans aren’t robots; someone can believe something and still act like they don’t. it’s not “i believe x so i must do y.” if you take people that scroll on tik tok all day, they know that it’s unhealthy and that they should stop, most of them aren’t oblivious. but they still scroll all day. that doesn’t mean that they secretly believe that they should.
but not just humans. everything is one thing. the constructs we believe don’t translate into the reality that exists independent of our minds. because once you take away the boundaries we’ve made up, there is no definitive way to separate things.
This is a very different situation. That scroller knows they scroll. They know a part of them wants to scroll. The person who thinks they are not racist doesn’t know. They would likely be shocked if the data (and videos, say) was shown to them. But on some level they do not think the races are the same - and by the way this example is actually quite common. I am not making it up. People are often quite unaware that that actually do not think the races are the same or other similar anti-racist beliefs. The other difference is that the person who scrolls need not have a belief that they should scroll, but there are like emotional reasons why they feel that compulsion. It might be the only way they allow themselves to sort of relax. I’m not making an argument that people are robots, in fact I think my view is much less robotic than the
you know your beliefs, they are binary (yes or no), we are units, etc.
We are much more complicated than that and we can be quite wrong about what we believe. That doesn’t make us robots. The person who wants to be non-racist but mistakenly thinks they aren’t racist isn’t robotic, they don’t know themselves well and they confuse one portion of themselves for the whole self. People often think the wordy-thinky part of the brain is who they are. Au contraire.
But these are made up boundaries. The skin keeps things out to a great degree, as does the immune system. We are innervated, and that nerve system and the hormonal system self-interacts in incredibly complicated ways, but it does not interact with the external world. We maintain a homeostasis inside our skin that we do not maintain outside our skin. I can voluntarily move what is inside the boundaries of my body, but I cannot voluntarily move what’s outside the boundaries of my body. And again, remember, I’m not arguing that we aren’t one, I’m saying we are also separate, and that this is very meaningful.
in a way, i agree. but the more conscious part of you is still you. the racist can believe in anti-racism but still act the opposite because of some belief they are unaware of. but that doesn’t mean anti-racism isn’t something they believe. but yes, the “wordy-thinky” part doesn’t cancel out the subconscious beliefs (do we actually agree on this then? lol)
oh. haha i was about to argue against this point but i actually get what you mean i think. thank you.
I agree. It’s not binary. But…it might only be a small part of them that believes in anti-racism. And it might also be that it sounds nice to them. They want that to be how they can describe themselves. There is at least a kernal of belief in that, but it might not be much. Or it might be a significant amount.
Yes. I don’t even disagree with you when you say we are not separate. I just think it’s radically incomplete. I used the opposite science mingled with common sense position to try to find out what you believed and why.
I think we are separate and not separate.