A while ago I saw a video in which a comedian was talking about how we are not our bodies, and how we would never say "I am a body". He later went on to describe how we envision ourselves as being located somewhere between our eyes. This made me ask myself what a person really is. Who are we? How are we defined? For a long time I couldn't figure out what it was; we are not our bodies, nor any part of them; we are not equal to our intellect, our lives, or values, our consciousness, or even our personalities. So what are we?
After reading 1984 by George Orwell, I thought about O'Brien's speech in the Ministry of Love. What stuck in my head was mainly O'Brien talking about how Big Brother was omnipotent, and how he could float across the room like a soap bubble if he wanted to. The theory that reality exists only within our minds helped me to uncover the answer to what we really are.
To do away with all of the explanation and state it simply, every individual is the universe as they perceive it. That is to say, my world is only as big as I know of, and as I learn, my world grows. Additionally, a Puritan lives in a world where God is vengeful and life is centered around the afterlife and hell. Ironically, none of these perceptions are wrong... If the universe is contained within each individual's mind, then we all live in different universes in which each of us are always correct until proven wrong, at which point we either deny our fault or we learn and our universe expands. Even the afterlife is as we perceive it. According to Ethan Hawke from Waking Life, a dead body has six to twelve minutes of brain activity after death, meaning that you can dream even when you're dead. Since a dream second is infinitely shorter than a waking second, you can lucid dream the afterlife all on your own.
As for social interaction, I like to think of it this way: Every other person we meet is a window into another universe, and some of us take certain aspects of those universes and add them to their own universe.
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thantounderscore
There is a specific part of our brain that controls our sense of separation from the universe. Damage to this part of the brain or intense meditation results in a sense of one-ness with the universe. So, yes, meditating monk or brain damaged person may feel that he/she is the universe around him/her, but the reality is not so. We are not the universe we perceive. If we were, there would be no surprise.
Additionally, we would also never doubt or have reason to doubt our senses, but we do. I'll give you a little mental exercise to explain: suppose you are walking home from the store, and you see a tyrannosaurus rex walking around, eating people, smashing cars, and all around making a big ruckus. You run home so as to avoid being eaten/destroyed by the tyrannosaurus rex. And, as any normal person would, you turn on the telly to see what's going on. No news coverage. You walk back outside to where the tyrannosaurus was. No dino prints. Buildings are fine, no damaged cars, people milling about as normal. As if nothing happened. What would you think of your perceptions at that point?
Kwing
I'm not saying that we're not individuals. We are each (literally) in our own world, and our only connection to others is by the people themselves, who are like windows into our existence. Because we can still interact, surprise can still come from other people, which builds to our universe. If you met a stunning woman, you might say she "came into your life". The same goes for anything else that could surprise you.
As for your second paragraph, when I said we live in a world in which we are always right, I phrased it like that quite carefully. We don't live in a world in which we always will be right; we live in a world in which we ARE right. Our universe changes constantly, and is always growing. Every time we learn something, our universe expands.
Next, your t-rex story seems to agree with what I'm saying. If I were the person involved in the situation, I'd think I was hallucinogenic. Someone who has schizophrenia or hallucinates is commonly thought to live in their own world, and a pretty unstable and dangerous world at that.