What's strange about this scenario is that you're only asking me to forget some of my past experiences. I apparently haven't forgotten how to chew and swallow, or what my body is requesting of me when I feel this thing you're calling "hungry."

Even if I don't remember the past, it's still the past. That is, even if I don't remember eating yesterday, if this person is taking good care of me then I would have eaten yesterday. And even if I don't plan to eat in the future, this person is doing that planning for me.

No, they'd cancel it.

These are good points, feels you are touching something basic. Part of the reality checking is acknowledging that predicting the future is about hypotheses. And the past you can't change. So I'm giving the present a lot of value, but it's still not everythng there is.

And your last paragraph underlines the importance of acknowledging that death may come at any time, as the ultimate messer up of your plans.

You aren't putting yourself in this situation though. You are thinking about it from the perspective of knowing what yesterday is and what tomorrow will be.

If you are sitting here and you don't remember anything from yesterday why do you care if you ate yesterday? Right now you aren't sure you will be hungry tomorrow so why would you worry about if you will eat again or if someone is planning that out for you?


Your projection of what will happen if you don't die from your current viewpoint isn't the future, it's just an idea, or a collection of thoughts from your past experiences that you project as what might happen. You are wasting the moment of now to worry or think about what could happen in the now somewhere down the line.

Again, I have said practical planning is important. I'm not telling you to ignore the fact that you have to do some planning in this world to make sure you survive. I'm simply saying your mind has created this concept of time to protect you and allow you to survive, but we mostly use this mind created concept of time to hold ourselves back from progressing in life by constantly living in moments other than right now...putting way more importance on the idea of a future event than we actually need to. Like a rhino attack for example if you are 95% of the human population.

So Minkowski space is R^4 together with the bilinear form (x1, x2, x3, x4)(y1, y2, y3, y4) = x1y1 + x2y2 + x3y3 - x4y4, where the fourth coordinate represents time, right?

What's the next basic thing to know?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space

Curiosity. Or am I forgetting how to be curious as well?

Is losing my memory equivalent to losing my sense of planning?

Worrying about what I'm worrying about is a waste of the moment, isn't it?

Besides, even if worrying about the future is a waste of the moment, how does that imply that time is an illusion?

1) You may be curious about a lot of things in the moment but if you have no memory how will your remember to continue being curious about them. You will be curious but then you would forget what your curiosity was all about almost as soon as it came on. You would just be in the moment experiencing it.


2) If you have no memory what are you planning? You can project what you may want to do in the "future" but what will that be based off of. You will have no memory to go off of so planning will be difficult and the plans won't be stored in your memory anyway so the whole exercise would be futile in planning more than a few seconds ahead.

3) If you sacrifice this moment in time now to consider what may happen 1 year from now you have wasted this moment now and can never get it back. When that moment comes it may or may not go exactly how you had planned it(there is almost 0% chance it will go exactly how you planned it). You have simply traded right now for the future and when the future comes you will still experience it right now. But by wasting your time planning/worrying about the future you weren't truly able to experience this moment right now.

You don't exist in the past or the future, you exist right now. For anything other than practical purposes why would you want to live in any other moment? When you are having sex with someone do you enjoy that experience or do you think about the time you were riding a rollercoaster when you were 12 years old or what you are going to have for dinner tomorrow?

Time is relative to your existence. Once you seize to exist what does time mean to you? You can only be alive right now, you can't be alive 10 minutes from now or 10 minutes ago. Life is about your experience, not someone elses. If you die on April 19 will you be worried about how many people plan to celebrate Easter the following day?

Does my memory still allow me to see food in front of me and remember that I was in the process of shoveling it into my mouth, and that if I had food in my mouth, I would remember that I'm eating it and not choke on it or spit it out?

This imply that time is an illusion.

Right. So I choke on my food and die because I didn't remember that I was eating, and instead tried to inhale a breath of air instead of swallowing.

I never had this moment in the first place.

This still doesn't show that time is an illusion. It just says that you think I'm wasting my time.

How do you know I don't exist in the past or in the future? How do you even know that I exist?

This is different from saying that time is an illusion.

Do things only exist if they exist relative to me?

I'd probably be more worried about how long the guy in the red pajamas is going to keep poking me with a fork. Or that angel next to me playing that stupid harp song for the rest of eternity. But either way, you have not shown how time is just an illusion.

I guess I'm not smart enough or articulate enough to get my point across. I think it's a very hard concept to understand for people who spend 99.9% of their waking hours constantly thinking. If you can learn to quiet all the noise in your mind it is much easier to recognize as you experience it.

Part of this comes down to whether you think you are your mind or if you recognize your own consciousness. If you can learn to separate who you are(consciousness) from your mind created self(ego) it becomes much clearer.

You like mindful meditation?

I can assure you that "just paying attention to now" has nothing to do with losing your memory.

There is no mind created self. 99.95% of people can watch a sunset and just watch the sunset. Not sure how telling them to do what they naturally do would be helpful.

We are not thinking science/reality all the time. Look at the music threads for example.
I think the brains are very entangled, and everything we think is "ourselves". I agree on that we should try to mentally check ourself and our thinking "from the outside" for learning about ourselves and possibly correct flaws. It's self analysis or being critical against oneself. It's difficult to do honestly though, should contain much positivity/humor/forgiveness/etc for not being a too depressing, but still valid activity.

Who the **** is "we"? Have the humility to speak for yourself. You fill the forum with your **** comments and your **** music, and then you call for other posters to get warned or banned or whatever, and then you appear to mistake being tolerated, or maybe pitied, to the extent to that you think you can start speaking for others.

What you're thinking about is of little importance....the important question is can you stop whenever you want to?

I agree that's important. Otherwise it would be a form of obsession. Maybe it partly is for me, something drives me to constantly search for "the objective truth" (in before it's argued that it doesn't exist).

It's more like I'm trying to feel what's good for me. Listening to music or playing online poker have their places for balancing my brains up from the more heavy duty stuff.

What it is really like:

It is a wonderful thing that we can actually look at the evidence. Nice little private hell of living purely in the moment.

A much longer documentary: from before she figured out how to have the right conversation (over and over again) to keep him from suffering too much.

So why isnt she living with him or he isnt living with her at home since he can manage elementary things and doesnt require special assistance like with washing or bathroom etc? ( i bet it would be costly to have him live away as well unless covered by some insurance? or prior plan ,unlikely very expensive for insurances, unless a special offer for someone famous in prior life ie via BBC etc)

I bet its torturing for her and him maybe to interact longer than a period of time each session but still i would try to maintain a permanent connection and experience a brain miracle step by step. What problems living with such person would carry? Can they endanger themselves (requiring permanent monitoring) by getting involved in some function that they then forget like say turning on the stove and then forgetting you are cooking or going to take a bath and then suddenly forgetting while in the shower what you are doing there. But i would imagine someone that can still recall basic skills and words can locally always reconstruct what is happening from the hints of information around under the full understanding of their own problem.

A pretty good article that answers all of your questions to some extent:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all