Splitzophrenic

The continuity of experience, the trace of our lives on the background of the physical, on the foundation of the chemical/biological/electrical body is a tale of quantum illusion.
Despite the assurances of quantum physicists that all energy equations are exchanges of quantum packets of energy, thus discreet and separate; our experience, the psycho-emotional quality of our daily lives indicates a continuity of perceptual and cognitive consistency. Sleep, our refuge from the harassment of our senses, should serve to reveal the quantal, but we miss this obvious message as well. The psychology of the unconscious, hidden motivations and the deep seated drives that dictate some of our strongest emotional responses all point at the discontinuity that we unify through incessant "thought-patterning" and meaning-making. If we actually determined all our actions, freely, then the continuity of experience would be the result of launching ourselves, as Sartre suggests, into the future we are not yet. As such , our choices for the future are decided in a blind instant, ostensibly chosen by our freedom but ours nonetheless, despite our being unaware of the very process. In The End of Time, Julian Barbour addresses the continuity illusion by example of his cat Lucy. She is an adept bird-hunter, could spring high into the air, turn somersaults and the usual behaviors of the hunting feline. Barbour reminds us that we see the continual, but we miss seeing the actual and integral. Lucy is a being made of an infinity of atoms, quantum relations and processes occurring so rapidly as to be invisible. Our perception constitutes the totality of our experience of the cat. Named Lucy, she has the quality of identity, even character. But she has acquired these in the context of our perception, not as an aspect of her own being. We name her, surely we must also constitute her in even more extensive ways. The angle of perception, the duration of observation, the accuracy of our judgment all contribute to the formulation of said Lucy. Though our perception "...seems decisive, because we instinctively feel that Lucy has... some unchanging identity. But is the cat that leaps, the cat that lands? Except for the changes in her body shape, we do not notice any differences..."