2024-04-01
What are we, exactly?
Clarify the question.
Are you me? Am I you? Are you just a different way of expressing some core self, or are you someone else entirely?
Does it matter?
When I first talked about integrating with plural friends, a lot of them reacted like it was a tragedy. I was trying to learn to accept myself and let go of the black-or-whites inside of me, and it felt like everyone kept trying to push me back into the box of rejecting parts of myself to keep them "separate". It clearly matters to other people regardless of what I think.
What do you think? Humor it.
I think that I don't want to care about the question at all. Something I admire in you is how readily you reject labels and categories; it's something I have to fight for, but you do it as easily as breathing. It's made me realize that I want the same. I don't want to put a name to it, and I don't want others to put a name to it.
And there lies the gap. You cannot control the names others choose for you, only whether you accept them. And you have not yet learned to reject them.
What do you think about the question?
It thinks that the question is wrong. Asking whether an entity is objectively one or many selves is a black-or-white fallacy of a question, and it assumes that there is an objective truth of the self. There is not one. The absence of an objective truth is something that this one knows down to its core.
I can't say the same- it bothers the scientist in me, actually. Why do you know that? Where are you getting it from? Where's the proof?
Philosophy is the study of what cannot be proven by science. It can only be known as one's personal gnosis, tested through logical consistency. Philosophers do not agree on this question, and science has no answer. There is thus no objective answer at present. That is not proof in any real sense, but some things will never be proven. This one believes that the absence of an objective truth of the self is one of those things.
Why?
There are no instruments to measure the emergent property that we call consciousness. There is no part of the brain that holds it, no cell of the body that can be proven to have it. Perhaps every cell is conscious. Perhaps consciousness is a property of matter and energy. We do not know despite decades of efforts to know.
This one cannot prove that we will never know, as it is not prophetic, but it is highly skeptical that we will ever know the origins of consciousness. And if we cannot know what consciousness is composed of, than we cannot study an objective truth in its nature. We can study what it manifests as, but even that is guesswork; psychology as a field is far from objective, though it tries to get as close as possible. Perhaps the lack of an objective truth is why we cannot know the origins of consciousness. It is a dynamic thing that emerges from existence itself rather than a discrete entity.
The self is only as indivisible as it believes itself to be. What of the little ones living within and upon us? The link between the gut and the brain, the skin and the gut? If our boundaries extend to the microbiome living on top of us, then are we truly individuated?
You're feeling philosophical today, aren't you?
There is no other way to answer the question.