Answering the Vertiginous Question
The Vertiginous Question is a problem posed by professor Benj Hellie and is simply this: why am I me and not someone else ? In other words, how come I live in this body having this particular mind and not some other body and some other mind? How come I can cause things to happen in the world from this particular vantage point and not another (your vantage point, for example)? This will be the subject of this article. In truth, for this to be properly accommodated, an entire book would be necessary. So I will need to take some shortcuts in order to keep this article manageably long, but do so in a way that doesn't take away from the coherence of the story. For this, I need to start with physics and then build our metaphysics on it and see where that takes us. We will see why death is an illusion, why you matter, despite your fragility when compared with the enormity of what we call "the rest of the universe", how we are all "one with the world", what can we say