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Confident-Broccoli-5 t1_j9ole9v wrote

Reply to comment by slithrey in Often mischaracterized as a rather debaucherous, hedonistic philosophy, Epicureanism actually focuses on the removal of pain and anxiety from our lives, and champions a calm ‘philosophy as therapy’ approach in pursuit of life’s highest pleasure: mental tranquility. by philosophybreak

>I think that the illusion comes from the fact that you are not actually separate from your environment

It's not clear to me why that should be an illusion, I don't see why individuation can't exist via certain boundary conditions, for example I can't access your mind, you can't access my mind, we're located in different spatial coordinates etc. Unless there's some ultimate "one" solipsistic mind which we are all fragments of, I don't see anything much illusory regarding individuation.

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slithrey t1_j9optln wrote

I personally believe in extended mind theory. I would consider your distance to me the only real thing that prevents your mind from not being accessible to me. But the people around me they go have their own life experience, and then I probe them for their perspective when I require it. Sure I don’t have access to their entire mind, just like I don’t have access to the entire internet (for example, it would be impossible for me to watch every YouTube video) yet I can still answer virtually any question I have through researching via this extended mind. Your personal thoughts like what constitute your identity or your feelings towards a girl aren’t really useful to me, so it’s not so bad if they get filtered before reaching the societal mind. But the people around me I would certainly consider their minds, at least what they are willing to communicate to me, as an accessible part of my own mind. But that muddies the boundaries for my self concept. But my self concept still remains, whether it’s boundaries are muddied or not, I still will use terms like me and I, and that is just a concrete fact that this mental system exists. The illusion is that these boundaries must be set where we have traditionally set them. I am of the opinion I have responsibility to maintain not only my own life, but the life of the people I care about. If my best friend were to die, it would genuinely feel like a part of my own self died; like I lost a piece of my own mind. When I dropped my phone in a lake while kayaking, I lost a part of my mind, many ideas I chose to store on it rather than in my brain or on the internet, and now they’re gone.

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