[alexvr]

I'm glad. They are disturbing thoughts at first but then they become profoundly liberating.

The "self" or "ego" is an illusion. It's very challenging to see beyond it when you're raised in the competitive, egocentric America. It's not at all obvious until it hits you.

I'm of course not saying that bodies and brains don't exist, just that they are only subjectively and almost arbitrarily separated from Nature. For example, outside of opinions, people are no more significant as entities than, say, doors. Can't doors be considered walls? Sure; it's an opinion, a name for a fuzzily-defined feature of the world. It's not a special entity in a computer system. Same with "person": It's just a name for a concept we have. It's arbitrarily defined. You could just as easily create a new word, like "personite," and define it to mean what we normally think of as a "person" plus everything in a 10-ft-radius sphere from their nose. It's just like "solar system" - it's almost arbitrarily defined. There's not a hidden sphere delineating solar systems just like there's not a hidden mesh delineating our bodies. We just approximately agreed on these definitions. It's also just like the notion of "alive": there's not a cosmic Boolean keeping track of whether or not an aspect of nature is alive or not; "life" is just a concept we invented, almost arbitrarily defined. As I see it, we're always "dying" in a sense: Are you really the person you were this morning? Can you have a conversation with him? I'm pretty sure he's gone, or in a position along the dimension of time that we can't access from this point in time. The idea that you're in some way the same "person" is an illusion of memory: It's just that a very similar brain has memories of what it was like to experience the world in a very similar body this morning.

So yeah, the thing "my body" refers to certainly exists, but it's not some kind of separate or significant "entity" except within our opinionated minds, perhaps; it's just "what the Cosmos is doing in that general area."

[jpttsn]

I share that slightly nihilistic vantage point in principle. I don't find it helps make decisions too often. I'm much more helped by thinking I exist, treating existence as a concept, requiring no metaphysics.

Nitpick on "illusion": A map is not an illusion of territory; it's a tool for navigating. Mirages and disappearing coins are illusions, useless for navigation.

Nitpick on "bla bla competitive America": lots of people outside America believe they exist.