Because you don’t exist. Neither do I. Neither does anybody.
When this first dawned on me, I thought it was so obvious, all I’d have to do was point it out and everybody would get it. Boy, was I wrong!
I suppose the difficulty in selling the idea should have been as obvious as the idea itself. The notion of people being real is, after all, embedded everywhere, even in the language: “I, you, me, us”.
Surely the epitome of the illusion must be the common expression: “my body”.
There is no “you” that owns a body, “you” are the creation of a body! If anybody owns anything, it’s the body that owns you!
For an animal that relies so heavily on its brain for survival, the creation of a “person” is absolutely essential. A torrent of data is flowing in from the senses, and it needs to be organized in order to be useful. The shortcut way to do that (nature loves shortcuts!) is to create a “person”. Instinct drives you to find sex, hunger drives you to find food and shivering drives you to find shelter, but with a “person” running things, those enterprises can be coordinated so effectively that there’s room left over to include even such things as art and music. To say nothing of agriculture and mining and manufacturing and science and space ships.
But in the process, these “person” creations start getting uppity, believing themselves to be as real as the body that created them. No, not “as real”, they’re the real deal, and they own the body!
Think of bodies as hardware and “persons” as operating systems. The operating systems may convince themselves that they’re real, but after the power gets shut down reality strikes back.
This of course horrifies the remaining operating systems whose hardware is still powered up: “You mean somebody can just pull the plug and we’ll disappear? No way! There’s got to something else going on! We’re too important to just go poof! Ah, I know, there’s a magical place where operating systems go to live after the power goes down. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
Which is why archaeologists see evidence of a belief in an afterlife in burial sites dating back to prehistory.
Of course “you” change. The hardware is constantly changing … with age and experiences and just the normal replacement of cells … so it will change the “person” it created accordingly. Or it will try to, but too often the uppity operating system gets in the way, trying to preserve the “real person” it believes itself to be.
