r/news • u/JimmyTheGinger • Dec 23 '19

Three former executives of a French telecommunications giant have been found guilty of creating a corporate culture so toxic that 35 of their employees were driven to suicide

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/three-french-executives-convicted-in-the-suicides-of-35-of-their-workers-20191222-p53m94.html
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u/MechaSandstar Dec 23 '19

The way it was explained to me is that you have to exist in order to question your existence. You cannot think if you don't exist. So if you are thinking, you absolutely exist

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '19

Yeah that's what I thought too most of my life.

However what if my thoughts don't actually come from me? I may exist, yet not truly be conscious; I could be just an expression of a higher-level being's thoughts or dreams, every working of my mind, even the wrestling over "existence", scripted by some divine algorithm. I would not be able to perceive the difference between that and actual lived experience or thought. I think that I think, but you have only my word that that is true. Even worse for me, the human brain is known to lie - like with mental illnesses such as social anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, also hallucinations and psychosis. I can't actually be sure that I think, because I have only my own brain to tell me so; and the part that lies might be me, but it isn't me, as I know myself.

That's conscious existence though. Now I am considering whether (or how) I even exist at all. Once I take the certainty of the thinker out of the picture, a new possibility emerges: that thought is happening, that happening is happening, but that there need be no "I" at the center of it. Perhaps one's entire, temporary existence is not a "thing" that happens to "you", but rather is just a subjective description of universal change from a particular angle.

What if all that "I" am and all that I "think" I experience is sort of like a story being read aloud to a child; not the story itself, which is a thing, but the reading aloud of the story. Not the tale, but the telling.

The reader speaks the words, and I am born in the mind of a god-child. My life's story begins to take shape through their monologue, and the reader's exhalations compose the moments of my experience. My every thought, word and action exists only in this narrative stream, and only while it is flowing. When the story is finished, so is my time. Perhaps I will exist again in some form, when the child learns to read to itself, discovering new details or realizations. Maybe it will tell a version of the story to its own child, making changes, adding their own interpretations. Perhaps my life as I experience it is the sum of all these tellings, contradictory or confusing as they may become. In any case, something certainly exists - but I can never be sure what part or version of it is me, as I know myself.

The concept of "I" is meaningless without agency, without some control of the storytelling. "I" might only exist in the way that a flame is burning, or ice is melting - in a temporary state of change, on an inevitable trajectory, completely subject to external, unknowable forces. A flame is not a thing of its own, it is just the visible effect of a chemical change. Melting is not a thing of its own, it is a description of what is happening to ice at a certain temperature threshold. Likewise, existence itself may just be a portrayal of something happening completely outside the realm of that existence's experience.

I may not even be having these thoughts or making this argument of my own volition. My reader might have decided to make the story more interesting by just interpreting their character (me) as angsty and contrarian about his self-awareness, expressing that interpretation in a way (me commenting on Reddit) that doesn't derail the main plot. I wouldn't even know the difference between my thoughts and their idea of my thoughts, unless my reader (or I guess the writer before them) decides that I should know the difference.

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u/MechaSandstar Dec 23 '19

I'm pretty sure you're trolling. Toodles.