It BELONGS TO IT
December 4, 2008
I'm having a bit of a think about identity (again). It sounds sort of strange but I think I might just have it pegged. Some of the questions are odd, but work with me.
Could you make you?
This question is both absurd and profound. Of course you couldn't make youreself. It suggests an impossible logical contradiction. You would have to exist before yourself to be able to make yourself.
But if you cannot possibly be your own maker, how can you therefore be the owner of yourself?
And if you are not the owner of yourself, why do you say things like my hands and my face, not to mention my name and so on?
Is it because of convenient speech? Is there some other way that we could say it? If the hands doing this typing are not mine (since I didn't make them), then whose are they? Do they belong to the universe, the ultimate source of everything? It would sound a bit strange to refer to its hands or its ideas.
We use the word my in different ways. When we say my pen it's different than saying my eyes. Yes, it's the same word but obviously used differently. There is a difference between the way my is used in my hands and my pen. A pen could belong to me in a legal sense, like if I bought it or someone gave it to me, but how could my hands be mine? I didn't make me and no one gave me to me (tell me that's not a weird thing to say), but in a very technical sense my hands are not mine, for that matter neither is my entire body.
We would have to revamp the language to properly describe what exactly these things are. Since everything comes from the universe, it is most technically precise that my hands are actually its hands. If the universe made me, then it makes some sort of sense that I belong to IT. "I" is used of course as another convenience. With the utmost technical precision that I can think of, I should probably say, "It (me) belongs to IT (the universe)."