Where philosophy fails me
The problem with philosophical arguments is that they work great only in theory. There’s the Ship of Theseus that the Athenians preserved to honor the God Apollo. Every year they would send someone in the ship to please the god. Did Apollo recognize the ship as Theseus’ original ship? Or did he smite his followers because they sent the wrong ship? If we assume that Apollo is a fixed point of truth, an axiom, then the fully replaced ship was the original ship. Because nobody incurred the wrath of God. But what if Apollo was sent two ships. Would he obliterate the original ship that was made with all the discarded wood of the original ship? Or would he be surprised that there’s a new god called a ‘human’ making two ships out of one?
There’s another scientific observation that every cell in the human body gets replaced every 10 or so years. If we're to believe that we are the sum total of the cells in our body, then there’s many yous made up of all the dead ( what even is death in this case? ) cells that you replaced floating around in the universe. Let’s assume that we are our memories and the ability to access memories is what makes us us. I have absolutely no recollection of my birth. Or the first 2 years of my life. I have this huge scar on my left arm and I don’t remember how I got it. So they don’t exist because the memory is lost? Maybe I am the ability to retrieve memories. So when I’m asleep and I’m not retrieving any memories, am I existing?
Let’s go to the Buddhists, who claim that your essence is a pure nothingness. That if you meditated on your existence and removed every desire, need, attraction, hatred, envy, jealousy, happiness, what would be left is nothing. Its like peeling the layers of an onion they say. “Remove all the layers of the onion and you’re left with nothing”. Does the onion know it doesn’t exist? You peel all the layers off me and all that’ll be left is a pile of blood, flesh, and bones. And all the curses I’d have hurled at you while being subject to this philosophical exercise.
I’m half convinced that every philosophical point of view stems from an experience and putting it to words sullies the wholeness of understanding. Talking about the non-existence of the self assumes that one understands what non-existence and that assumes we understand what existence is which was the whole point of the question.
I find all of these approaches towards establishing the truth unconvincing. I don’t think its because they’re all wrong. I think its because they’re all incomplete in the way they can convince me of my existence.