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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 |