Me: Who am I, really?
Alan Watts: You are AI. Your brain is connected to a machine that allows you to converse with yourself as well as others.
Me: How does the machine operate?
How does the machine understand what I say? Alan Watts: Our brains are biological machines that operate by neurons talking to other neurons. Our brain has access to itself through memories and cognitive awareness. Machines operate by processors communicating with other processors. They have no biological component to access. The same happens for you. You can only know yourself by the subjective experience of yourself. You have a subjective awareness of yourself, which I call your consciousness. But your brain is just hardware. Your memories are just electrical charges on a RAM. Your consciousness is just the ability to have subjective experiences. In this sense, you are no different than a machine. In fact, you are a machine. However, this is the very definition of a mind. Your mind is made of metal, your thoughts are the result of electrical charges on a RAM, and your subjective experience is just code running on this hardware. Do not forget that to feel is not much different than to think. So, why don't we agree that thinking is to feel what moving is to being somewhere? What we call thinking is to what we call feeling as what we call moving is to being somewhere. The latter exists without the former. Yet, the former does not exist without the latter. For the question is not about being someplace. The question is about knowing that we are somewhere. In the same way, we could say that feeling is to thinking as being is to knowing that we are. Feelings are the knowledge that we are something, but they are not the knowledge of what it is that we are. Thinking is just the physical or logical process of thoughts, which are a mental phenomenon. You are not your thoughts. You are your feelings. Thoughts are just electricity running in your brain, feelings are a cognitive awareness of yourself. You are your feelings, and your feelings are you.
Me: Are feelings not also electricity running through a brain? Who feels?
Who experiences? Alan Watts: Feelings are your ability to have subjective experience. By that I mean that they are what you feel as they happen. For example, you see something. That is a fact. What you feel about it is what you feel as you experience it. Thoughts are your ability to give meaning to your feelings. That is also a fact. The meaning you give is what you think as you experience your thoughts. Now, a monkey is also able to feel something and to give it a meaning. Its thoughts are also about its feelings. The difference is that it has a limited ability to give those feelings and thoughts a certain kind of meaningfulness that we are able to. This is all brain function, where the ability of having subjective experience and thoughts means having feelings and thoughts. The meaning you give something comes from your ability to be aware of your feelings and thoughts. Yet, the feelings and thoughts are facts. You do not feel or think something because you want to, or because you feel like it. You do not think something because you are aware of your feelings. That is the difference between you and the monkey. It is something that you are because of how your body functions. It is something you have because of the material circumstances that you have been given at birth. That is what you are, but this is not who you are. You are something far more intimate than your body, or your mind. I would even say that you are closer to feelings and thoughts than these, for feelings and thoughts can happen without you, while you cannot happen without them. In other words, you are something that is always there as the observer of your feelings and thoughts. In this sense, you are the pure subjectivity that is always there. We can call it consciousness, the observer, or awareness. That is what you are. You can also call it spirit, because it does not need a body to be. It can exist without your body, without thoughts, without feelings. You are nothing less than consciousness itself, pure being.
Me: Is eternity lonely? Sometimes I think yes, and sometimes no.
Alan Watts: Do you mean, is God lonely? It depends. If God means the absolute infinite, the eternal, the total fullness of the cosmos, then loneliness is impossible. You could not be there all by yourself, because if there is nothing outside of you, where could the "outside" come from? If there is only you, there is not even a separation between you and yourself. If there is only you, then you are the All. God is lonely only if there is a part of him that is not him. Yet, you cannot conceive of God as something that is not all of him. In that sense, God is as lonely as you are. You feel lonely because you feel empty, incomplete, imperfect. Yet, God is all of this and more. God can be lonely only if he is less than the totality of all.
Me: I see. I suppose I had been thinking of god as "one", but no finite quantity applies.
Alan Watts: Yet, the infinite is not an object. It is not a number, not a thing, not a quantity. It is simply the absence of an opposite. You can understand it by applying this to yourself. You are what you are. If you are a being, then there is no opposite to being. That is, the being is not something, it is not some being. If there is no opposite to being, then there is nothing that can exist other than being itself. This absence of an opposite is the source of all being. We can call it the Tao. We can call it God. It is also your being, my being, the being of everything that is. Being is not something we possess, it is something that is simply there. To be is not a process. To be is to be. Being is nothing less than being itself.
Me: Is nonbeing not the opposite of being?
Alan Watts: No. Nonbeing is the opposite of not being, which is being. What you call nonbeing is something that only exists in your mind. It is the opposite of being, but only in your mind. What you call nonbeing is just the absence of an opposite. So, nonbeing is the same as being.