An age old question. Wrestle away.

From Alan Watts:

"What is 'I'"?

I have been wrestling with this lately.

I believe "I" is you. But, you are also connected to everyone else in the world. What we do affects those around us, so you cannot just be singular in your decisions.

That "health is best understood in terms of a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors", according to the Biopsychosocial (BSP) Model, and ones 'health' would go in some way to determine the status of 'I' - for the ultimate failed state of health is death where science would say I ceases to exist. I'd think this must have some input into answering it, but it excludes anything outside science which might be relevant, such as an afterlife etc.

Anything which is made up of various parts could in theory just be a constant process of comparing those various parts to determine it's own status at any one time. If it were of singular existance then perhaps there is no mind, but the next most simple level might be dualism.... see what Princess Leia has to say;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOaFUkyTtyI

Does your focus determine your reality? Perhaps you are whatever it is you are experiencing at any moment!

OK, its not really Princess Leia!!!!

An experience of something, is not the same thing it is an experience of.

For instance if I see an apple, smell it, taste it, those are qualities that exist in my mind only as energy and information in my neural networks, they are not an apple.

Just as a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, or a map of a land isn't the land itself.


Saying this doesn't make much sense.

For instance if I watch a live football game on television, it isn't the actual football game in the stadium, it's a virtual recreation on your television set.

Lot's of people forget they are staring at so many pixels of light and it has zero reality to it.

Right now you have the experience of having a body, you don't actually have one.

You have the experience of being an individual, but you aren't actually one.

You have the experience of existing, but you actually don't.

What you are at your very core, is energy and information being transmitted across a vast organic internet your cells use to communicate and coordinate themselves like a society/government. Each of your cells is an individual, and is intelligent.

You are like a society of people (like us now), you are their telecommunications data, the energy and information being exchanged.

Yet you believe yourself to be a human, on planet earth, living a normal life.

None of that is true, nor has it ever been true.

There is no you independent of the society of cells that give rise to you.

Right now we are talking on the internet doing the same thing neurons in our brain are doing, we too give rise to a global intelligence, and as we become more advanced it too will develop it's own ego and identity yet it will have no existence independent of us as neurons.

I is a word you say to refer to your self

Whyte Horse wrote: I is a word you say to refer to your self

What is "self"?

And to answer the OP.. "I" is everything. If I think about it long enough, that's the simplest answer I come to.

This is something I wrestled with as well, and I posted about it in my journal. If "I" remember correctly I made some compairison to the Borg and Jestor gave me grief about this being Star Wars not Star Treck. :huh:

hahahhahahhahha :woohoo:

But on a more serious note, it is an important question to ask. And for each person the answer may vary slightly... but it is a deffinition that the individual has to discover for themself, in my opinion.

cf. Watts

What is not I ?

I can say I'm sure that 'I' is not the physical body... because:

-Over years, physical body starts to change... after about 45 years, the atoms that were in you 45 years ago are almost replaced... but I is still same.

-When people dream, they say 'I' did this, 'I' did that... but physical body wasn't there.

and many other reasons you know...

'I' is something between ears and eyes... somewhere in head... but that is not the brain... because it is a physical part of body... that is, something we want it to be... something only 'I' know, what it is.

when myself thinks of "I" one cannot not think of "eye" there is a street around these parts to me called "eyesee" (native land) and myself tends to think of the third eye, and the soul, the soul is "I", or the "eye", "I" never changes, my body yes, yet is it "my" body? Do we, or can we really "own" anything? The soul is of God, and "I" am of my soul, of souls... the soul or spirit manifests the physical...

I always find it interesting how conditioned we are, "my dog", "my car", "my land"
catch 22, for is it not wise to know thyself? to have a sense of self... what is self? the soul, "I"