[vasco]

Sounding a bit dismissive, you just said what I said in more words. My question is why you need god in the discussion, I think it's perfectly fine to have that awareness of being part of the whole without any god in the picture. It can sound like just semantics but for many people once you use the word god, there's a lot of other meanings.

[gnramires]

Yes, it's a little difficult to picture (or maybe you might fundamentally disagree) -- but it's like there a literal being, God, that constitutes all of this (I also associate this with the idea of an 'omnimind' -- that all consciousness are literally a part of a same mind). Also, the coherence with Christian (and maybe Abrahamic in general) traditions makes it an interesting interpretation of ethics in the sense of there existing a God in a literal sense (and other premises of those traditions being consistent in this framework). I recommend reading or taking a course into Spinoza if you're interested, because there's more than I can describe without writing a little book (although I think some of the conceptions I have are fairly original -- Spinoza afterall lived in mid 17th century).

To get a feel for an expanded mind, think about your cellphone (or PC or google, etc.). Some of your memories are stored in your cellphone. So in a very real way the digital world is an actual extension of your mind; think how some of our organs (like hair, or maybe cartilage etc.) are not living tissue yet we consider them part of 'us'. The definition of 'I' is in a way functional, and maybe more completely related to agency and information coherence. In a literal way also, Nature doesn't distinguish individuals. What is 'you' here is, as far as we can tell, a large amount of flowing interactions, which are not singular. What is 'you' is influenced by an entire past extended lightcone; what is 'you' does not live in a single moment in time, but is indeed distributed in time and in space -- 'I' is an abstraction over a cosmic soup -- a very useful, interesting, and important one, but nonetheless it isn't physically fundamental. What we are fundamentally changes in time as well -- you are fundamentally a distributed network of events, not a singular entity. In this way the fundamental distinction of individual seems to fade, and validate a greater distinction -- the maximum distinction is the one encompassing all that exists (i.e. Spinoza's God). In a way, you might call it just another way of seeing things -- just like the 'I' or the self -- but it can in the same way be interesting, useful, etc.. And again it fits the traditions in a way (this is also an insight of Buddhism but the interpretation is different).

Derek Parfit discusses some of this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS-46k0ncIs