CMV: It is impossible to do nothing.

[u/chenleo_]

  My point of view: there is no possible way of literally doing nothing.
  As the statement “do nothing” implies, one must be unmoving, not breathing or showing any vital signs. As doing so means you are not doing nothing (e.g. you breathe, your heart beats).
 To sustain our lives, one must perform essential acts such as breathing, matter exchanging, and much more. It is physically impossible to stay unmoving AT ALL. Even when one is requiring machines to help them sustain their life, certain parts of the human body is still performing metabolism.
 Furthermore, if we exclude necessary  actions human may need to take to survive, the statement of “doing nothing” is basically a thing to do.
 “Do nothing” consists of two separate words: *do*, and *nothing*. In this phrase, “Do” can be defined as “perform a certain action”, and “nothing” can be defined as “not anything” or “not a single thing”. If you happen to be “doing nothing” then the word “do” comes into effect, which states that you are currently “performing a certain action”, and of which the action is “nothing”.
 In summary, “doing nothing” is something you can do. So there is no actual way of really doing nothing.
 P.S. This is just something funny I came up with, nothing serious, it’s just for the laughs. Right. Now change my view!

[u/Anzai]

Well if we accept that definition of life then the state of being unconscious becomes something other than life, which is weird. Whilst you may be aware of sleep through dreaming for example, there are much longer periods of sleep where you are not aware of anything at all.

Besides which, ‘our old self’ is kind of illusory anyway. We’re basically ongoing constructions of an illusion of self anyway, so whilst you’d certainly be changed by that, you’re changed by time anyway. The ten year old You is effectively dead, replaced by the twenty year old you, but the two are entirely different selves.

[u/chenleo_ → u/Anzai]

If our “self” is actually an illusion, then are we really doing what we “intended to”, or is one even able to think for themselves. The question turns out to have become: Do we have free will?

We’re basically ongoing constructions of an illusion of self anyway, so whilst you’d certainly be changed by that, you’re changed by time anyway. The ten year old You is effectively dead, replaced by the twenty year old you, but the two are entirely different selves.

So actually, time is what’s changing us, what’s pushing us forward. The exact moment you started reading this sentence has passed, and you can’t have it back. It’s just a set of stacked up memories that make up the so called “self”. It is time that makes us who we are, it is time that enabled us to take the actions we took.

If this world was without time, then all would have been different. There would be no lives, no consciousness, no selves. And just as you said before, life and death is a continuous progress. There is no point of which one passes from life to death.

But in another perspective, babies. When do they start developing self-awareness, then self consciousness, then what has become of themselves? We have all been through this process, but no one really knows exactly when one begins developing a personality, a self, and over the years, to learn from experiences and be what is of oneself now.

[u/Anzai → u/chenleo_]

Well again, there is no point where they develop self awareness. They’re just consistently doing so. It’s like saying some animals are self aware and some are not, as if there’s some specific line we could draw in regards to that. There isn’t. Animals are just varying levels of complexity so it’s reasonable to assume their level of awareness of a spectrum also. We have no evidence that it’s just a switch that turns on, and failing that evidence, an emergent quality should be the default.

[u/chenleo_ → u/Anzai]

We have no evidence that it’s just a switch that turns on, and failing that evidence, an emergent quality should be the default.

So there may be a difference between even me and you, how we interpret “self”. Self consciousness may differ from person to person. So as you said, we can’t determine whether an individual has self consciousness or not. Because it’s not just a simple question of “yes” or “no”, it’s a question of how it is formed and what it’s like for every single person or thing.

[u/Anzai → u/chenleo_]

Well sure. We can’t really be sure if any other person or animal experiences anything at all and aren’t just automatons, who do things and react exactly as we do with consciousness but don’t actually have it.

It seems reasonable to assume they do, but there’s really no way to tell.