God cannot be everything if you are you when you get there.
You are about 1/2 you (in terms of potential,) the rest to be shaped by your environment. So you have your genes, and you have your environment, that is, your experiences.
You take your individual (part genetic, part determined by previous interactions with your environment,) and move on to the next interaction with your environment.
Then you call
that your self, your uniqueness, etc.
"Ah," you say, "But I think therefore I am; I exist; I must be unique."
So far we have established that an organism was born, so you are live. In that you are like an ant, a dog, a paramecium, take your pick.
The distinction is that your brain is a bit bigger than most animals', and is bigger in relation to your body than most animals. Interestingly, small birds and small ants seem to have a higher brain-body ratio. In any event, in
our brains something happens that we (predictably) highly value, which we call consciousness. (As to animal-kingdom versions of consciousness, that's another discussion.)
I don't think we mean the consciousness of a newborn baby. It may have the equipment for consciousness, but it is full of nothing yet but hardwired instinct. It has to take a leak or poop. It sometimes has to vomit or burp, because it's still figuring out the basics, like eating (or drinking, to be more precise.) It's not going to be writing
Madame Bovary or the general theory of relativity anytime soon.
The baby grows and learns - first almost exclusively from its mother and the inanimate things around it, then more and more from other things in its environment. It takes in sense impressions. Things that cause pain (and anything associated) should be avoided, things that bring pleasure (and anything associated) should be sought out. It constantly seeks out information through sense impressions, and organizes them with a very complex processor capable of memory, processing new information, and importantly for our purposes "higher functions" like language, math, and other forms of abstract thought. The person no long needs to take you to a hill and point at it. He can say "hill." He can draw a picture of a hill. He can mathematically describe the hill.
Since he can use symbols he can combine them to discuss things in the world.
And then there's the part we really think is special: He can tell
himself a story about things he's converted to symbols, then manipulated in hierarchies, sometimes invoking laws; two plus two always equal four, for example. But the important part is that in telling
himself this story, he
includes himself in the story. He says "I saw," "I think," "I etc." He is not merely comparable, say, to a mobile computer with its own freedom of movement. He is self-aware (something we don't think any computer has become to date.)
But save for the emergence of ego, what does it mean to be self-aware? What are we thinking of?
We manipulate symbols, a very high-functioning outcome of the earlier faculties we are born with (ordering sense impressions in a very economical way, then combining those derivative symbols into system of symbols.) Most of what we call "thinking" is outside the realm of true thought; other aspects happen without much consciousness at all. For example, if we "know the way," we drive easily from point A to point B "automatically." If you play a musical instrument, you know that you have to think while learning a song, then you practice it until you are on full auto. When I edit, I know almost by "muscle memory" one set of rules (such as grammar and spelling in most cases, even the cases most smart people haven't committed to memory, or for which they use different conventions). I use a more practiced set of rules to do more "subjective" things. Finally, I use the rule of "what sounds better" for other aspects. Similarly for almost all work functions.
Now: When I
write, which someone or another (in another age) once defined as "thinking on paper," I am synthesizing what we generously call "ideas." We do this out of combinations and interactions between systems of symbols we've heard of before or constructed out of our symbolic vocabulary, again processing and referring to the world around us (including other symbols and symbolic systems.)
The same is the case in the sciences and in mathematics. That is not to say that our combinations of symbols are not unique, or that they are random. In each system of symbols, the "system" part comes from the rules the individual imposes on the symbols representing representing the physical things which first entered our minds through sense impressions. A good example is Einstein's thought experiments having to do w/relativity -- he'd highly symbolized (as do all physicists,) yet he was constantly thinking in terms of clock towers, falling elevators, streetcars, etc. -- reincorporating symbolized sense data from closer to the "real world" into the land of symbols. In fact, we know the products of Einstein's
mind. His physical brain had asymetrical parietal lobes, with the right larger than the left. The parietal lobes are responsible for visual-spatial relations.
It is only the pure existence of ego - "I am that I am," if you like - that separates any of these activities from something that could conceivably be generated artificially.
Now, what is the content of ego? It's a very, very useful way for us to organize these many symbols into a frame that's useful to the individual organism. We may say "I think X," but be no more likely to act in a way consistent with "X" than someone who says "I think not-X." Do I like being me? Of course. Do I conflate it for being the entirety of existence? Of course not.
If you are not you then you are just a redundant toy for God and you will eventually just disappear. Your consciousness will be wasted.
Regards
DL
I'm certainly "me," and my consciousness is certainly my consciousness, as is true of you. You read my words, and conclude that I have written them, and generate an idea of "who" I am. Of course, the physical aspect is unimportant. I've had people on here say they think I'm a skinny bespectacled type.... I do wear glasses for distances, but it turns out I'm more overweight than underweight. But physical impressions are unimportant; you get an idea of the thoughts I put out there, and vice versa. You take these things as a unit and decide I am another individual. I decide I am another individual. We all agree I am another individual.
And since certainly all this gathering of impressions, abstraction to symbol, and symbol manipulation happens in a one-consciousness-per-organism way, it makes
sense for us to discuss "me," "you," etc.
But all of these subdivisions into selves can easily be part of the One great evolving thought that is God. Since what we do in our "selves" is so intensely symbolic (in our way of considering it, of a "high" level of consciousness,) I suspect we humans play a big part, at least for our local level, in that One. Of course, we do inhabit one planet orbiting one middling-size star about two-thirds of the way out from the middle of an unremarkable spiral galaxy. There's a
lot of stuff out there... even if there weren't seven billion of
us, certainly those "bright spots" of consciousness are far from the only ones. And that's to say nothing of the part being played in the One by those small ants (taken together -- which is how they "think.")
By saying one or another person is a "toy" of God, you still insist on separating creator from creation, which is a fundamental difference between us -- or more to the point, between the symbolic systems local to our respective organisms.
PFnV
