“Pointers” and not “Ideas” because the word “pointers” acknowledges itself as not being “it,” but rather a signpost, unlike “ideas,” which is less self-referential as a concept. The point is to get free from concepts.
1. All the body’s cells are new every seven years. Are you still you seven years later? Yes. So what were those cells? Were they you? They’re all dead. Are you dead? No. So then you must not be just your cells, or you would be dead also.
2. You eat food. You drink water. Those molecules become part of you. You shed other molecules. Which molecules are you? And which molecules aren’t you? At what point in their trajectory through you does this attribution switch? And how do you make this distinction?
3. You breathe air, exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide. The trees take your carbon dioxide and exude oxygen. How is this conceptually different from internal organ or cellular processes within your body? Cells in your body team up to take certain molecules out of food and turn them into simple sugar molecules for energy, releasing other molecules. Your cells absorb certain molecules and what they cannot absorb goes into the intestine, which is naturally inhabited by bacteria. These bacteria absorb the molecules your cells can’t, and secrete other molecules which your cells can absorb. They both give to each other. Your cells give molecules to each other. Conceptually, how is this different from your molecular relationship with the tree? I say that conceptually these examples are all the same with respect to the exchange of molecules.
So at what point does the molecule of air, or of food stop being you and become part of the tree or bacteria? The answer that science would tell you is that this is when it passes your skin, but they have not proven this anywhere. Has there ever been a test done on molecules to see they are labeled “you” when they’re in “you” and labeled “tree” or “bacteria” when they’re in the tree or bacteria? No. Science is ignoring this “most obvious” question by taking their assumed answer for granted. If they were to examine it, their whole system would break down. It would take a very courageous, undogmatic, and uninvested scientist to try to examine this question. Uninvested scientists probably don’t get much funding.
I say these conceptual distinctions between “you” “your cells” “tree” and “bacteria” are just that – concepts. They don’t fully describe what’s real. What’s real is that though you appear to be detached from the earth, while the tree appears to be rooted in the earth, and the earth appears to be perched upon the bedrock, and the bedrock appears to be floating above magma, all of the relationships appear to be an exchange of molecules, atoms, electrons, and other subatomic particles (like turtles going all the way down). I would bet that though science will continue to divide particles into smaller and smaller pieces, that they will never find a so-called elementary particle. Every time there is such a division, we find more and more empty space.
4. Did you know that solids are actually more empty space than they are anything else? Looking at the structure of atoms, they consist of clouds (orbitals) of electrons, which can appear to us both as particles and as waves. As soon as they are observed, they are forced to appear as a particle, but otherwise they are waves, which are not “matter” how we conceptualize “matter:” being something we can touch that has “substance.” It’s funny. We have this concept of “substance” and yet haven’t fully defined “substance.”
The wave-particle duality occurs for all particles. Assuming we are looking at an atom so that it is appearing as a particle, the space between the electrons and the center of the atom containing the protons and neutrons is huge. The diameter of the Hydrogen atom including the electron orbitals is 52800 times the diameter of the nucleus containing the protons and neutrons. So if the nucleus was 1 cm in diameter, the whole atom would be 52800 cm in diameter, or 528 m, just over half a kilometer. So even assuming the nucleus is “solid” (I’ll expose that as an assumption later), The volume of empty space of the electron cloud is roughly 150 Billion times the volume of the nucleus of the Hydrogen atom. [insert analysis of the structure of the elctron, nucleus, neutrons, protons]. In short, what we perceive as solid is actually at least mostly empty space. I say mostly just because I haven’t written yet about the electron, nucleus, neutrons and protons yet. But in the clues I’ve seen and in my heart of hearts I know they are just as empty as the atom.
5. Science does not know the substructure of the electron.
…TO BE CONTINUED