Where Is Here?

Is the whole of me technically my body, so that "here" is wherever my body finally makes contact with its environment? Or is here the inside of my body? Both are places that I feel very familiar with. But which one is here?

 

here is not there


but it is everywhere

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTS2yP48eW0

 

It's over there...

 

I'll look, but I doubt it.

 

"Here" is the realization from an emergent phenomena of consciousness in an individual, recognizing it's presence in a particular place and time.


So I would say it's a dynamic interaction of both questions in the op.

 

Where do you want it to be?

 

Well i'd need at least 20 pints before I could answer that......I don't know where here is and not sure if I've ever been there....but I can safely say I've never been to me :book:

 

http://youtu.be/QhQWND9jKDA

 

I don't necessarily want it to be anywhere. Maybe my further point is that we should abolish use of the word "here" since it doesn't mean anything. Like, if someone says "I'm here" are they actually occupying a space where it makes sense to say that they're "here" to me? Couldn't the other respond, "You're not here; you're over there"?

There seems to be a shared here, but where is it? It's neither here nor there. Even though two different bodies occupy two different positions in the environment, they still both know what is meant by "here". Which must be to be present. To be sensed.

Where are the presences, I wonder. Or is there only presence? We are all presences, and we're all here, but damned if I believe we can identify where this here is. The speed at which we become present at the advent of our shared "here", the forum in this case, is quite beyond speed. It's more like the forum is a haunted house and the presences come and go strangely as presences in a haunted house would. Where is the "here" in which we behave like this? What is it like? Why isn't it a here in which everything moves in a simple, explainable fashion and what does it mean that it's not?

I guess how could you have ever been to yourself? It's so weird how we know ourselves the best but cannot see ourselves in maybe the truest light, which is from another person's perspective. I occupy space like any place, so I guess the people I meet could be said to have been to me, and even though I'm the one in the space, I have not.

 

"Here" is wherever I'm at.

 

No it's not it's wherever I'm at!

 

I beg your pardon, but I'm clearly here and I don't see you. Just sayin'.

 

Utilizing my definition, I think most sensible people (even some animals) can understand the relational accordance of what is meant by when someone says "I'm here" or "Come here". Here serves many practical purposes such as spatial descriptions, which can range from directions,to a lover's invitations, to authoritarian discipline. It does seem that when here is used in an informal context like such as conveying information over a cellphone In perhaps an unfamiliar environment with a lot of people, the ability to comprehend 'here' seems to dissipate into the environment, unless there are more precise descriptions.

However here is such an obvious concept that in formal context, a tradition that here is represented is by the song "Here comes the bride" played at weddings, in which everyone acts accordingly, just by hearing the tune.


I think I can see your dilemma though, it approaches a paradox if the concept of here is always infused with the descriptive language, personally this seems to rely on blurring concept into all descriptions, which I don't think is how we approach the world but similar type of paradoxes have been raised such as "What is north of the North Pole?" So I don't see your line of reasoning without precedent in this dilemma.

 

I like "It's raining" or "It's windy", or "It feels weird outside today."

 

here is now

its a place in time not a place in space

it never moves but everything ahead of it and behind it does

 

If nothing is ever moving in the "here" then how can you say it's a place in time? Isn't our understanding of time dependent on motion?

 

Not many people may recognize how deeply philosophical this question is. Guerillabelam does. Others that have responded sense how difficult it is to answer this question.

You bring it up as questioning the Cartesian concept of the question which has defined the interpretation of it for the Modern World. To Descartes, there was a mind-body split and the self was separated from the world around it----existing in a shell of a body (the body itself being an object of the objective world)----and in this way conceptually doomed to becoming an almost indifferent observer looking through the window of the eyes at a world of mere objects. It is no wonder that today we live in a culture, where everything, including the people and other living things that surround us, are nothing more than 'objects' in an objective reality.

I disagree. If I were to poke you with a pin, your first reaction would most likely be to get upset and say that I am poking 'you'---not poking 'your body.' We experience ourselves as a single mind-body entity. (There are objectivist exceptions----if I were to touch my wife's nose, her first reaction would be that if anything happens to 'it,' it will cost another $7,000. Her nose is clearly an object---like any other object of one's vanity, it can be shaped to her desire, and so forth... Having said that, on a different level she still sees it as her being who she wants to be.)

My own philosophy approaches the question differently: From Quantum Mechanics we can garner the possibility that everything is simply waves of energy stretching through space-time, but that for a brief moment, certain waves manifest as individual particles existing at a single point within space-time (a quantum probability wave collapse)----and this is physical reality. Furthermore, all we can say that truly exists in a physical sense, is the present (and it is actually gone before it is perceived). In other words, what we understand to be physical reality is temporal to the extreme, and that the physical concreteness of reality is largely illusion.

The mind is not trapped to the present, and therefore it is transcendent of physical reality, after all, we can remember, anticipate, foresee, perceive the present, feel pain or joy over the past, and plan the future. This is despite the fact that the past and future have no physical presence in the present---only the present. But as much as the physical reality around us is a physical manifestation of quantum probability wave collapses, our physical bodies, even if they to exist via the temptorary collapse of waves into particles, are our own physcial manifestation of who we are. Our self may exist beyond the death of our bodies, but for right now in the physical present, the presence of our bodies is who we are.

I would therefore say that here is always subjective, and it is where both the self, and the physical body, is physically present, as a single entity (or any such localized position where we subjectively determine close enough to our physical presence to be 'here'). In fact, you hit the nail on the head, in my opinion (or per my philosophy), when you wrote, "wherever my body finally makes contact with its environment," because my philosophy is phenomenalist, meaning that reality is really determined by the phenomena that we perceive.

The implication is that for each of us, it is only this subjective here that exists in our physical reality. In other words, in that very small moment of now, in which the physical present actually exists, all that exists of it for you, is phenomena that you are perceiving at that single infinitely small moment.
If, for example you were sitting at a computer on a veranda, outside in the sun, you would perceive your computer screen, the sun, the veranda, and so forth, and the primary phenomena would be that of light. But the light from the sun, for example, took 8 minutes to get to you, and you can only perceive those light particles which you presently perceive. It is absolutely physically impossible to perceive, or even detect, any other photon leaving the sun, or somewhere on its journey, other than the ones you perceive in the present. Light moves at the speed of time, and therefore any of those photons do not exist in your present. Likewise, the same is true for the photons leaving the veranda or the computer---the only one's you perceive are those. Even a photon one step behind those you are perceiving in your present do not exist.

In other words---it is only the here and now that exist for any of us. Subjective reality is more critical than objective reality. This is another way of saying that life is more important than objects.

 

Cartesian dualism crossed my mind for a split second when I wrote this post, but I quickly abandoned it in favor of something else.

I don't really buy that the mind and the body are two separate things. However I don't think that things are as they seem, and that everything I am now is destined to perish. I think there must be some eternal truth to everyone's identity that I don't think can just disappear. I mean, we're here, as much as anything ever has or will be. If there is something sacred, surely that is. Doesn't the universe know anything? In a space beyond time, a space at the speed of light, isn't everything preserved? It may not be aware, but it preserves information. Are we the information that is simply forbidden to it? Or are we more like the individual grooves of a record, the record itself being space and time.

There are eternal mathematical truths, and I think we are as good as that. It seems to me that we were destined to be from the inception of everything. A mathematical inevitability. I know you can't measure the position and momentum of a quark, but subatomic particles are clearly following certain rules of engagement. Everything is situation normal. Nothing, no matter how small, is really behaving abnormally. The arrow of time flows in one direction, though we can imagine a "backwards". But what about sideways and zigzagged?

We are like the bubbles in the marbles of time, existing beside ourselves, radiant as daffodils on a summer afternoon.

 

Here is not a discrete location in time but it is a term with which we relatively contend as a general parameter for focusing a fragment of attention as it is, within our hearing. Here then meaning within our frame of reference. The frame can be exponentially extended as well as collapsed but the pictures content is always the same which remains ever, some element of self.