If I start with this question, the answer seems obvious:
– I’m Joe Gartenberg.
– No. «Joe Gartenberg» is a name, a label that you have been given at birth, without consulting you. Not the name and even less the surnames.
– How is it? I’m Joe Gartenberg!
– When you die, when you decompose … that name will exist?
– Yeah right. They will remember me with that name.
– Not even that. How many people are called like that?
– I dont know. Some.
– Are they called exactly the same?
– If they are called equal, they are called equal.
– And those others are you?
– Of course not.
– That is, you are not «Joe Gartenberg».
– Well, places like this …
– I repeat the question. And who are you?
– I am a American, from East Brunswick, now in NY. Researcher, father of three daughters, and a dog…
– Now you are adjectives.
– If we start the same, then neither. Now, do not repeat the question … I am this body.
– What body?
– The one you’re seeing!
– Excuse me, but I do not see any body. My eyes at most, capture different qualities of light as they move. With that, I code pre-established colors in my mind and I generate shapes from that color scheme. I compare that image with images that I have in the memory and something similar appears that I have labeled as «body». So that’s all. All that is in my mind.You will not tell me now that you are an inhabitant of my mind …
– I’m the voice you hear …
– The same. I can not hear voices The sounds are my own encodings, not yours. It’s not good either. And do not follow through the senses. Do I repeat the question?
– I know. Well, I do not know what to say to you … What causes changes that you can perceive? Life, animation?
– Good approach. But what is life?
– Well, a strange transitory state that only presages death.
– Well … and what is it?
– Well I!
– Do not start.
– Well, I do not know what it is that lives.
– What you live is only a consequence of an existence.
– I mean, I’m an existence?
– Of course. Nothing more and nothing less. An existence subject to change, to becoming, to conditionality, to itself. Meaningless, without being, without substance. Only a maniple of conditions, a subset of the kamma.
– And the others?
– Same.
– And you?
– No, not anymore. Not even that.