so i'm cleaning out my room cause it is full with stuff i don't use and want. and i found this book called Astonish Yourself! 10 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger-Pol Droit

i wish i could post all the experiments in here but that would take forever. but listen to this: "...the strangeness of this name that is so familiar, but which you can never use to address yourself without feeling you're someone else. Only other people call you this; you don't, normally, ever call yourself". this is in an experiment where you "call yourself". you are in an empty room where you can't hear anything or one and no one can hear you. then you repeat your name over and over again like you are calling someone. you do it for like 20 minutes. you feel like you are being called by someone but you don't know who but you also feel like you are calling someone you don't know where they are or who they are. cool huh?

this one is really cool. i makes you think. i'm going to try to type all of it up. it's long.

"It's one of the the terms you employ most frequently. During the day, the word "I" crops up in nearly all your sentences. Since your tenderest childhood you have ceased referring to yourself by your own first name. "I" has become the word by which you express your desires, disappointments, projects, hopes, acts of all kinds, physical sensations, illnesses, pleasures, plans, resentment, tenderness, your weakness for vanilla, and your aversion to fennel. For a long, long time you have linked this tiny word to your mulifarious mental states. It is intimately involved in your feels and your memories. Apparently, nothing is possile without it. it is there in all your stories and all your judgments. Not a single decision, not the slightest rumination escapes it.

"The curious thing is: everyone uses the same word. The most irreducible intimacy, the most singular existance, for each one of us, is linked to a word that we neither chose nor coined, and that everyone else employs in exactly the same was. A pronoun in the language. There's nothing less personal that this "personal" pronoun. The particular existence it refers to remains, linguistically speaking, completely interchangeable. It could be anyone who says 'I'm happy' or 'I'm sad'. All of us, in all our difference, refer to ourselves by exactly the same word as everyone else. A most paradoxical situation. But you don't think about it, and nor does anyone else, of course. You have enough to do without worrying in your head about questions of that order.

"And yet, try to pin down this "I." Does it exist? How can you find it? What does it look like" If you apply yourself to asking these questions, an trying to resolve them, you'll find that this "I" is neither simple to localize nor to authenticate.

"This is not a brief experiment, whose limits are easy to circumscribe. it can come to seem, on the contrary, like a long pursuit. You need time, different occasions, a certain application, and stubborness. So where is this blindingly obvious "I?" You will seek for a long time, in differnet places and under different aspects. And there is a strong chance that, at the end of it all, you'll return somewhat at a loss. Which i where things start to get interesting.

"Among the avenues of inquiry you might like to pursue, it's worth remembering the existence of the body. Is not this "I," which is both individual and yet assimilable to others, in fact identical with the body that houses it, with its habits, its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities, and its particularities? But there's no trace of an "I" in your body. Not one of your cells lives longer than ten years. No part of your body has persisted unchanged. So what will you address as "I?" The form? The ensemble? The general organization? There remains, famously, the phenomenon of thought. All may change, but not your memories, not your sense of remaining unchanged despite corporeal alternations. But even here, you cannot put your finger on an "I." All you will ever discover are thoughts, sequences of thoughts, memories, associations of ideas, desires - all of them pressed into service by what you call your "I."

"To all these sensations, to all these mental events, the "I" seems to provide a common denomination. But it neither supports nor drives them. It merely imparts to them something like a family resemblance, a shared aspect to what are very diverse notions and feelings - something like a color or an odor. A way of seeming, a style. Nothing more. "I" is not a someone or a something. And yet neither i it just a word. It must refrain of the self, a secondary quality, at one remove.

"If you manage to carry the experiment thus far, you will need to know what to do about this sensation. What impact will this impossible discover about your "I" have upon your existence? How will you cope once your "I" has gone missing? This is another story."

truthfully that was really boring and i didn't follow it all. but it is a very cool idea to think about. my arms are tired. so i'm going to continue thinking and cleaning.

if you are wondering how long that took for me to write i don't know. it's 5:25 now. what time does it say i posted this at?