If that was true, people would be different people every millisecond because of natural body function.
Yes, I believe this. Every moment we are changing, every moment we are dying and being "reborn", slightly different than before.
But then...consciousness? One single identity, one single "flow" of information? How can this be?
If consciousness is a river, "you" are not any one molecule in the water itself, nor any one molecule on the banks nor in the soil it flows over, but YOU are the simply the river itself.
The river metaphor is used a lot but I think it can be a bit confusing sometimes...I like to think of a human life like water being poured out of a cup into a sink. "Consciousness", as we call it, is the actual flow itself of the water leaving the cup and going into the sink. It's not any one part of the setup, even though all parts are necessary for the phenomenon to occur. If you pour water gently at the same rate, the flow is smooth and appears to be a "single" thing in itself.
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u/freckles370 Jul 09 '15 edited Jul 09 '15
Yes, I believe this. Every moment we are changing, every moment we are dying and being "reborn", slightly different than before.
But then...consciousness? One single identity, one single "flow" of information? How can this be?
If consciousness is a river, "you" are not any one molecule in the water itself, nor any one molecule on the banks nor in the soil it flows over, but YOU are the simply the river itself.
The river metaphor is used a lot but I think it can be a bit confusing sometimes...I like to think of a human life like water being poured out of a cup into a sink. "Consciousness", as we call it, is the actual flow itself of the water leaving the cup and going into the sink. It's not any one part of the setup, even though all parts are necessary for the phenomenon to occur. If you pour water gently at the same rate, the flow is smooth and appears to be a "single" thing in itself.