After-Orts #135

I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas.
    — Rebecca Goldstein, in Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity
quoted in Maria Popova’s indispensable blog, The Marginalian
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/07/rebecca-goldstein-personal-identity/

 

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What’s it gonna be like, dying? To go to sleep and never, never, never wake up.
Well, a lot of things it’s not gonna be like. It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever.
I tell you what — it’s going to be as if you never had existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. That just there was never anything, there’s no one to regret it — and there’s no problem.
     — Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
also quoted in The Marginalian
https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/31/alan-watts-on-death/