Imagine a robot

Imagine a robot named X5-1.  Ants built X5-1 over the course of many years very slowly.  It took a lot of work and a lot of time.  They didn't actually build X5-1 at first.  They mined the iron ore first.

Ants.  Mining ore.  You can imagine it took a long time; centuries.

And X5-1 wasn't their first project.  They used the iron ore to make iron then used the iron to make lots of random things.  Cars and calculators and radios.  They would take apart those machines and build other machines with the iron, recycling it.  They even built other robots.  Some looked like X5-1.  Some did not.  Some of the robots worked very well and some were barely functional.  Some of those robots killed people and some were medical robots, saving lives.

Eventually, X5-1 was built from all these parts from all these different things and he was turned on.  X5-1 did his job, moved around, experienced life, then broke and was disassembled.  His parts were used to make cars and calculators and radios and other robots that did good things and bad things, believed things similar and opposite what X5-1 believed.  These parts kept being reused.  The iron kept being recycled and resmelted into different shapes and functions.  This went on until every ant in all of history died and stopped slowly building these things.  The iron continued to exist for all time just as it had existed for all time before the ants mined it.

We considered X5-1's "life" to be from the point he was built and turned off to when he broke and was disassembled.  If X5-1 is only a collection of parts which each had a life before and after his functionality then X5-1 has always existed in the iron and will always exist in the iron.  At the atomic level, he is immortal.

More than immortal, X5-1 is not only a robot named X5-1.  He is a car and a calculator and a radio and other robots with moralities similiar and opposite to the morality he carried in his "life".

If we imagine a particle that lives for eight billion years and is only self-aware of one of its personalities for 100 years, do we ignore the other 79999999/80000000ths of its existence?

The moment you realize I'm talking about humans (which might be this instant), you'll shut down the logic side of your brain and return to the primal side which fears death.  It's the side that tells us that nothing existed before us and nothing will exist after us.  We may learn about events and predictions, but they aren't real because they aren't us.  We can hear about things even in our temporal blurb, but geographically removed, and not feel their realness.  We can talk to a person temporally and geographically close to us, but if we perceive them to be different from us, their realness disappears.

You are Hitler.  You are Jesus.  You are Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

In your body is an atom or two that use to comprise a man named Julius Caesar.  And that's just the small picture.

For billions of years, since the beginning of time was just a ball of hydrogen atoms, the atoms in your body have been creating things and people.  As you live, you lose atoms that will go on to become other things and people.

Millions of years ago, there was a caveman named Grogg.  Grogg's atoms spread over the millenia and helped create Jesus and Hitler and Obama and Bush and that homeless guy on your corner and the ethnic guy who runs the convenience store and the guy on tv that you think is a hateful religious bigot and you.  Grogg is immortal and we're all Grogg.  We're all the big ball of hydrogen atoms.

By now, you're seeing this as "Yeah, we share a few atoms.  That's science."  You've already forgotten the lesson of X5-1.  We ARE atoms.  Mass and energy.  That's it.  End of story.  What we are is what your enemy is.  You are the same stuff.  At one point you were the same person or toaster that he was.  Eventually you will be the same person or toaster again.  Our story doesn't begin and end with our blip of consciousness to this particular identity in the billions of years of our existence.  We are one.  Not in the hippy dippy "We are the world so let's hug it out" kind of a way, but in a real, scientific way.

I teach and people ask me how I be so patient with my students.  Since my thinking has fallen in line with this fact, the question has seemed ridiculous.  When I'm talking to a student, I'm talking to myself.  Every interaction I've ever had or will have is with myself.  Of course I treat myself kindly.  Of course I want myself to succeed.  If someone is saying something that I consider hateful, I understand that it is me saying those things and I think about what my life must have been like for me to say those things and I feel pity for myself, not hate.  Because that's me.  I'm X5-1.