the continuity of our life is an illusion

98 percent of all of your atoms are replaced every year. your dna constantly mutates, your memories altered every time you access them them and your personality transforms. and of course our appearance has changed. its pretty safe to say that none of the original information that defined your existence 10 years ago is still present.

since our form has been fully changed many times over the course of our life time is this akin to us having died and been reborn gradually many times? if we lack physical continuity how do we define ourselves as a being? is death just a more extreme form of this change?

 

the information stays, it adapts but largely it stays. You don't replace an atom without getting the new one to do the same job.

 

there has NEVER been a time when you were not alive , nor will there ever be .
all is illusion .

 

In the middle of smoking pot, this is 10x more interesting. Thanks guys.

 

The continuity is the ideal we hope for, though. In fact the discontinuity is upon mediation of that ideality the substance for reflected Consciousness. But if Life were Hope which it isn't anyway... the living Consciousness only needs the externally present otherness. And if Life is One, it is Faith which it is only as the one Faith: we fight the enemy.

 

Without a perfect means of conceptualizing time passing, there is no way to tell what the meaning of our lives is...even how we actually appear in the "physical" world.

Is death really the end of something, or is it just the opposite end of something?

 

Define yourself however you want.

There is more than one truth.

 

i die and am reborn every morning. sometimes i'm reborn before sleep after loads of DMT.

 

clearly indicating (or at least strongly suggesting) that the continuity of our awareness does not in any way depend upon it.

 

Think about a wave of water. It is made of many atoms, none of which resemble a wave of water at all. But the wave is not an illusion; when I look at it, I am seeing a wave, and this wave is not reducible to the atoms that make it up.

In a similar way, the continuity of my life is not an illusion. I experience continuity from a first-person perspective. Tell me I am made of atoms that are replaced many times over during my life, but you will not bring it about that I do not experience continuity. I may not know whence this continuity arises, but my experience of it is all that is needed to convince me that it exists. I associate my being with this first-person continual experience, not with the atoms that are said to compose me physically.

 

Is it is it really?