Bad news; you don't exist.

The earth does exist. So does the sun. And so does your body.

But is your body "you"? Most people would say no. If I cut off your arm, I haven't removed any of "you", just a part of your body (although losing a limb will cause changes in your brain, so maybe I altered "you"?). There has been a lot of debate over what makes up a person's "essence", going back to those crazy ancient Greeks, but most people would agree that the self is not a physical thing. Now, this leads to all sorts of Aristotelian conjecture and mystical invocations of things like souls and "higher planes of existence".

Thankfully, we have neuroscience, so the "self" can be mostly explained through biochemical means, without any need for creative fiction. Mostly being the operative word. As much as we know about the biology of consciousness, we can't point to a concrete thing that is consciousness. We can point to the thing that consciousness comes from, (the brain, in case you were wondering) but people like to think of themselves as being more than a three-pound lump of wrinkly tissue.

However, in a sense, we are actually less than a three-pound lump of wrinkly tissue. It's difficult to point to a physical manifestation of consciousness because there isn't one; our "self" has no physical manifestation at all. It doesn't exist.

Now, you may be wondering, "but if I don't exist, how can I be reading this blog?". That's a good point. But notice the words "wondering" and "reading". They're both verbs. In other words, they are things that you do.

Your body doesn't have to be doing anything to exist. If time were to freeze and all your atoms stood perfectly still, your body would still be there. But what about "you"? You couldn't be thinking, because thinking requires neurons to be firing. If you couldn't think, you couldn't have awareness. And given that you are awareness, you wouldn't exist if time were to stop.

Now, if you consider time to be a series of infinitely short moments, then you appear to exist only as a function of time flowing . But freeze time on any single frame and, poof, you're gone. In other words, you are not a thing. You are a process. You don't exist. You happen.

If you're familiar with the idea of a continuous versus a discrete variable, than this idea might sound familiar to you. If you're not familiar with it, look it up. Or don't.