AnderDethsky
After all it you'll feel peace and all will b fine
- Oct 19, 2024
- 22
I remember when it happened to me. One day, when I was 9 years old, around the time I began to contemplate both death and of course CTB, one such night as I lay in bed, I was suddenly seized by an icy wave of terror. "Death is forever". It is exactly the same darkness and silence as now, but only completely, in which there will be no more not only my hated lessons at school, but also my mother's face, nor my favorite lego sets of Star Wars, nor Coke and other goodies. No, it's unbearable. I can't even imagine what it would be like to fall asleep and never wake up. But there's a similarly creepy question that also reeks of the unbearable cold of eternity: eternity without me. What if my mom hadn't met my dad, married another man, and they had a baby? Would it have been me or not me? Or not really me?
Let me guess, you want to immediately dismiss this head-scratching reasoning by saying that I am me and a child from another father is not me:
"It will be a different child, and the recipe for me is well known: It is half of my mom's genome and half of my dad's genome, not some other man".
But don't rush with the answer, even if you are so repulsed by some other man. Let's imagine that your mom met your dad, they, as they say, everything happened, but with only one tiny difference: the sperm with other different genetic information got to the egg - not other man, but your own father. Just the first finisher was not the sperm under the ID #12 400 000 542, but under ID #12 400 000 543. And so a baby is born, just like you, but with eyes of a different color.
Will the child that is born be you or will it be another person and you never show up? Before we try to give an answer, let's first understand what is the "Me"?
For clarity in further explanation we will distinguish as many as two kinds of "Me": "Me-role" and "Me-viewer". It's not exactly a correct classification from the point of view of the current state of affairs, but as a temporary explanation it will do. So to understand what "Me-role" is, try a little bit tell about yourself – everything you know about yourself and can tell when you meet, any autobiographical memories, the thoughts that come to mind, the opinions you have, the image of yourself, that's your "Me-role".
That's the "Me" that you can from the outside, like a viewer watching a play on stage. So the one who is looking at the stage is the "Me-viewer" – the first-person perspective from which this life is happening, someone who is observing these thoughts, possesses these memories, reveals his body and consciousness. Your Qualia, if you will. The "Me-role" that your "Me-viewer" habitually identifies with is a fictional character, but by whom is it created?
By everyone, a little bit of everyone, first it's the parents. On this planet we come into consciousness with no idea of ourselves, who we are, where we are. But we are immediately greeted at the threshold by our senior companions on the planet, and kindly explain that your name is X, your nationality is Y, your religion is Z, you think that this is good and this is bad, this is right and this is wrong. This is where the story of yourself begins to be written. Everything you push out into the future keeps a record of it in one way or another, environment you get, what books and videos you get, what people you're around – will influence your self-image, your personality, your role.
In addition, the "Me-role" is a total fluid and changeable substance, something that is ceaselessly transformed by many factors. Who among us hasn't read their posts from ten years ago and thought to themselves, "Omg, did I write all that?" That's the point, it wasn't you who wrote those posts. These posts of another person with a different face, with other beliefs, with other ideas about the beautiful and right. But there's something you do have in common. It's — your memory, your history, your database. What is responsible for the continuity of your self and the continuity of your experience. Something that connects you forty-year-olds and you ten-year-olds and constantly reminds you who you are, what you love, where you come from and where you are going.
But memory is also an extremely unreliable thing. Because memory is not a documentary chronicle, it is a form of imagination. The memory of of any event is not a recollection of that event, but a recollection of the last time you accessed to that memory. That is, the information that is stored in your brain is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and another 100 times a copy of that. If any of you you're programmers, you probably know this, it's also called recursion.
So there is no memory – there is no "Me-role". Imagine that you woke up in the body of someone you don't know right in the middle of their life. Of course, this someone, who has come to himself, - "Me-viewer", will be in complete confusion, he cannot compare himself with anything. I mean, normally, after the word "Me" we say our name, age, profession, hobby, but here "Me" is completely alone. I'm a blank slate. You also observe something like this every morning: there is a tiny second gap between waking up and the moment when you remember your role. And that second is the whole clue.
So, if 18 years ago my parents had a child with a different eye color, it is clear that even such a minor difference in the initial conditions, such as eye color, can change your entire life trajectory, your future personality, your "Me-role". But what about the "Me-viewer", that feeling that "I am me" and this life is happening to me - will I have it or would I never have it? We'll come back to that.
What do you remember from your infancy? Probably either nothing at all or some fragmentary episodes. The first full-fledged are usually from the age of 3 or 4. Anything from earlier in life is covered by an impenetrable shroud of memorylessness. It's called infantile amnesia. One of its causes is that the formation of any memories of the protagonist requires for someone to be present within themselves around which the disparate memories begin to coalesce into a coherent story. If there's no protagonist, there's nothing for the memories to attach to. And so, up until about age 2, most children lack self-awareness. and symbolic thinking, which is the ability to look at the process of consciousness from the outside and label it as "Me".
The interesting thing about children's consciousness is that it does not separate the subject of observation from the object of observation, thoughts about the object from the object itself. You are looking at the locker and saying to yourself: "Here I am, here is the locker. I am looking at the locker - in your thoughts there is Subject (Me), Object (Locker) and Relationship(Watch). The child doesn't separate these things, for there's just something indivisible something that's perceived by the process of consciousness itself, and it's neither external nor internal. The division of the world into subject and object, inner and outer. comes later, when thinking begins to slice this consciousness into isolated pieces and label them. If you meditate long enough, then at some point it becomes clear that all the contents of your consciousness - thoughts, lockers, the desire to to scratch, and yourself as an image of yourself, are made of the same material, consciousness. It's like looking in a mirror with all the things on which various reflections are flickering and dancing, and at some point, transferring the visual focus from the reflections to the surface of the mirror itself of the mirror and realize — there was never anything but a mirror.
Such consciousness does not belong to anyone, because its master will be invented later. Moreover, consciousness cannot belong to anyone, because it does not contain any individual features that would allow us to call it our own or someone else's. All personality traits, character, way of thinking, roughly speaking, lie on its surface. Consequently, the "Me-viewer", that's the one. deepest and most intimate thing that you have, is the same in all other people. Functionally, exactly the same, because it has the same function. the same function — viewing . Just as all mirrors, no matter where they are placed, no matter what shape or size they are, they always do the same thing – reflect light. It turns out that behind all the superstructures and temporal forms of our "Me-role", our "Me-viewer" is the same from person to person.
Harvard graduate, doctor and author Ali Binazir has tried to determine what the odds are that your entire genetic lineage stretched from the first single-celled organism to the birth of who you are, and didn't break anywhere. In other words, what are the odds not only that the right sperm from your dads met your mom's egg, but that the same thing happened for your dad and mom, your grandparents, and in general, that all of your ancestors came into the world, lived to reproductive age, met the right person, and had everything happen exactly as it happened.
Calculations, to put it mildly, turned out approximate, but you can get a general idea from them. So, the chances of you being born is equal to the probability that if the same number falls out after tossing a million dice each with a trillion faces. That's the probability that after milliards of years of evolution, your genome will have appeared, and even a small shift in the evolutionary branch will result in you never existing.
It sounds dramatic, but it is only the probability of the appearance of one particular organism, for us it is commonplace that someone is born and born every day. For us, the birth of someone matters only when all the numerous properties of the organism have formed somewhere there in the brain in such an amazing way that this someone realized himself to be you, not someone else from the whole desert of unborn but possible variants. That is, when he has your "Me-viewer".
And now we are finally getting to the cherry on the cake of this discussion - the "Open Individual View of personal Identity " a.k.a., "Open Individualism". A philosophical concept according to which, in order for your "Me" to appear in the world, all you need to do is flip a single coin with all the faces being the same. The probability is 1 in 1. Yes, according to Open Individualism, your birth is inevitable. Why? Because there is no such thing as your "Me." As I revealed above, our consciousness is no different from anyone else's consciousness. Neither the "Me-viewer" nor its derivative is different, but only the "Me-role", and, this means that we are all, at the most basic level, the same "Me". Accordingly, for you to come into existence, it was enough for anyone with any data to be born. You simply had no choice but to be born. And there is no queue of the unborn staying in some void, because there is exactly one participant in this lottery.
And back to the original question "Who would my parents have had if another sperm had come first at conception?" , The answer here is disarmingly simple: I would have been born. And even if any woman met any man, whoever they had would have been born, it would have been me. And it seems like such an ironic clue to the reality that no matter what your passport information is, the main name of each of us is the same "Me" Regardless of genetic assignments and the environment you are in, we all initially have that consciousness. And then life writes new stories in our personality, leaving a unique imprint, the second of which there is no other in the whole universe, and hardly ever will be. We are all one and the same "Me", one and the same consciousness, localized in different organisms and in different life circumstances. And everyone who is reading this now – is me.
So what's it like to fall asleep and never wake up? No one knows. But what each of us knows absolutely well is what it is like to wake up without ever having fallen asleep before. Death is simply amnesia, and all it takes away is the "Me-role," the body, attitudes, habits, self image, memory, your suffering, all the things that are constantly dimmed as life goes on as it is. But "Me-viewer" - this basic sense of being - is simply a property of matter, such as the human brain, and it was there long before your body manifested and will be thereafter. And your consciousness will never die simply because it is not yours.
Some would say that this concept is just another variation of the afterlife, like reincarnation. But it only seems that way at first glance. Because any posthumous journey of the soul presupposes preservation of memory and personality. It is for the loss of identity that people often worry the most. Whereas in open individualism, death is still what it used to be - it is the same eraser that erases our complex and unique pattern of our experience, our experiences, our complex and unique destiny. But on the other hand, death is a cache reset, a replacement of worn-out components, a wiping of a blurred lens, CTB has the same purpose.
When has life brought you the most joy, in and of itself? The point is that the manifestation of each stimulus depends on the previous one, and if you stimulate your senses with the same thing, over time your sensitivity to it starts to decrease, stupidly for physiological reasons. Life loses its brightness and flavor over time, and all the magic of the images that impressed you in childhood irretrievably disappears. Of course, this process can be slowed down, changed, changed environment like worn out clothes. But the potential of these measures is also limited and inevitably comes the moment when it will be better for you to give place on this planet to another blood, which by virtue of freshness of its perception will get more pleasure from life and see its magic, which is no longer available to you. After all, this other blood is not so alien to us.
Yes even if you do not consider life in general as pleasant and somewhat joyful, even if any life for you is always suffering, even if you have a different view of death and you'd just like an eternal blissful rest after leaving this planet forever – it's still helpful to keep in mind that any person you see, whether IRL or on the other side of the monitor, under the cover of all those endless, irreconcilable outer forms, is not really really isn't all that different from you. He's just as lonely as you are, he's just as scared as you are, his heart is just as longing as yours longs for love and his soul as yours longs for peace.
And if there is a law of boomerang, I swear to you, you and I have completely misunderstood it. Any pain comes back, but not because there is a possible ricochet, or there is some karma, but because you cannot cause it in this world to anyone but yourself:
I am the one aiming a sniper rifle from a rooftop.
And I am the one who in a moment will fall dead to the ground.
I am the one who calls from an unknown number and introduces himself as a bank employee.
And I am the frightened grandmother who gives away the last of her money.
I am the Beautiful confident girl at the peak of her fertility, I will easily refuse this guy to date me because he has an ugly face and is under 6'0.
And I am a Man who is doomed to die in dreary loneliness and misery because sexual selection does not see his as worthy of reproduction.
I'm a carefree young man, coming home late at night after an incredible disco, I still have everything ahead of me.
And I am an old man with dried up eyes, who is slowly turning into a shadow.
I'm a small child, and I'm very scared when daddy beats mommy.
And I am the adult head of the family who hurts my loved ones because I have only seen pain in my life and learned only pain.
I am an important official, you would know how many people are after my signature, and I will turn a blind eye to the dumping of toxic waste into the local river.
And I am also a child in a small downstream community who was born blind.
I am a military commander confident of victory, it means nothing to me to open fire of batteries on peaceful settlements, the enemy will be defeated!
And I am an innocent little child who will lose his family forever that very day
I am the doctor who refused a tortured patient's request to kill him. I took the Hippocratic Oath that I would not kill anyone, and I'm absolutely convinced that I will fight for life at all costs.
And I'm a paralyzed patient begging in a lonely room for someone to unplug the cable from the outlet next to my bed so I can finally to
.....forget everything.
This essay is a summary of one work done by one Russian video blogger Denis Cheptsov in his film on YouTube "Death is a loss of memory" on the channel "ЧД". All that I have done is a transcript, translation and adaptation of this film in order to share the main concept presented to as many people as possible and to ask everyone's opinion on it.
Below you can tell/discuss what you think about "Open Individualism": Does this concept appeal to you, that at the most basic level we are all one, and after death we simply change roles, or is it more familiar to you to think that absolutely everyone has their own unique personality, and after death you will find eternal nothing/something else?
Let me guess, you want to immediately dismiss this head-scratching reasoning by saying that I am me and a child from another father is not me:
"It will be a different child, and the recipe for me is well known: It is half of my mom's genome and half of my dad's genome, not some other man".
But don't rush with the answer, even if you are so repulsed by some other man. Let's imagine that your mom met your dad, they, as they say, everything happened, but with only one tiny difference: the sperm with other different genetic information got to the egg - not other man, but your own father. Just the first finisher was not the sperm under the ID #12 400 000 542, but under ID #12 400 000 543. And so a baby is born, just like you, but with eyes of a different color.
Will the child that is born be you or will it be another person and you never show up? Before we try to give an answer, let's first understand what is the "Me"?
For clarity in further explanation we will distinguish as many as two kinds of "Me": "Me-role" and "Me-viewer". It's not exactly a correct classification from the point of view of the current state of affairs, but as a temporary explanation it will do. So to understand what "Me-role" is, try a little bit tell about yourself – everything you know about yourself and can tell when you meet, any autobiographical memories, the thoughts that come to mind, the opinions you have, the image of yourself, that's your "Me-role".
That's the "Me" that you can from the outside, like a viewer watching a play on stage. So the one who is looking at the stage is the "Me-viewer" – the first-person perspective from which this life is happening, someone who is observing these thoughts, possesses these memories, reveals his body and consciousness. Your Qualia, if you will. The "Me-role" that your "Me-viewer" habitually identifies with is a fictional character, but by whom is it created?
By everyone, a little bit of everyone, first it's the parents. On this planet we come into consciousness with no idea of ourselves, who we are, where we are. But we are immediately greeted at the threshold by our senior companions on the planet, and kindly explain that your name is X, your nationality is Y, your religion is Z, you think that this is good and this is bad, this is right and this is wrong. This is where the story of yourself begins to be written. Everything you push out into the future keeps a record of it in one way or another, environment you get, what books and videos you get, what people you're around – will influence your self-image, your personality, your role.
In addition, the "Me-role" is a total fluid and changeable substance, something that is ceaselessly transformed by many factors. Who among us hasn't read their posts from ten years ago and thought to themselves, "Omg, did I write all that?" That's the point, it wasn't you who wrote those posts. These posts of another person with a different face, with other beliefs, with other ideas about the beautiful and right. But there's something you do have in common. It's — your memory, your history, your database. What is responsible for the continuity of your self and the continuity of your experience. Something that connects you forty-year-olds and you ten-year-olds and constantly reminds you who you are, what you love, where you come from and where you are going.
But memory is also an extremely unreliable thing. Because memory is not a documentary chronicle, it is a form of imagination. The memory of of any event is not a recollection of that event, but a recollection of the last time you accessed to that memory. That is, the information that is stored in your brain is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and another 100 times a copy of that. If any of you you're programmers, you probably know this, it's also called recursion.
So there is no memory – there is no "Me-role". Imagine that you woke up in the body of someone you don't know right in the middle of their life. Of course, this someone, who has come to himself, - "Me-viewer", will be in complete confusion, he cannot compare himself with anything. I mean, normally, after the word "Me" we say our name, age, profession, hobby, but here "Me" is completely alone. I'm a blank slate. You also observe something like this every morning: there is a tiny second gap between waking up and the moment when you remember your role. And that second is the whole clue.
So, if 18 years ago my parents had a child with a different eye color, it is clear that even such a minor difference in the initial conditions, such as eye color, can change your entire life trajectory, your future personality, your "Me-role". But what about the "Me-viewer", that feeling that "I am me" and this life is happening to me - will I have it or would I never have it? We'll come back to that.
What do you remember from your infancy? Probably either nothing at all or some fragmentary episodes. The first full-fledged are usually from the age of 3 or 4. Anything from earlier in life is covered by an impenetrable shroud of memorylessness. It's called infantile amnesia. One of its causes is that the formation of any memories of the protagonist requires for someone to be present within themselves around which the disparate memories begin to coalesce into a coherent story. If there's no protagonist, there's nothing for the memories to attach to. And so, up until about age 2, most children lack self-awareness. and symbolic thinking, which is the ability to look at the process of consciousness from the outside and label it as "Me".
The interesting thing about children's consciousness is that it does not separate the subject of observation from the object of observation, thoughts about the object from the object itself. You are looking at the locker and saying to yourself: "Here I am, here is the locker. I am looking at the locker - in your thoughts there is Subject (Me), Object (Locker) and Relationship(Watch). The child doesn't separate these things, for there's just something indivisible something that's perceived by the process of consciousness itself, and it's neither external nor internal. The division of the world into subject and object, inner and outer. comes later, when thinking begins to slice this consciousness into isolated pieces and label them. If you meditate long enough, then at some point it becomes clear that all the contents of your consciousness - thoughts, lockers, the desire to to scratch, and yourself as an image of yourself, are made of the same material, consciousness. It's like looking in a mirror with all the things on which various reflections are flickering and dancing, and at some point, transferring the visual focus from the reflections to the surface of the mirror itself of the mirror and realize — there was never anything but a mirror.
Such consciousness does not belong to anyone, because its master will be invented later. Moreover, consciousness cannot belong to anyone, because it does not contain any individual features that would allow us to call it our own or someone else's. All personality traits, character, way of thinking, roughly speaking, lie on its surface. Consequently, the "Me-viewer", that's the one. deepest and most intimate thing that you have, is the same in all other people. Functionally, exactly the same, because it has the same function. the same function — viewing . Just as all mirrors, no matter where they are placed, no matter what shape or size they are, they always do the same thing – reflect light. It turns out that behind all the superstructures and temporal forms of our "Me-role", our "Me-viewer" is the same from person to person.
Harvard graduate, doctor and author Ali Binazir has tried to determine what the odds are that your entire genetic lineage stretched from the first single-celled organism to the birth of who you are, and didn't break anywhere. In other words, what are the odds not only that the right sperm from your dads met your mom's egg, but that the same thing happened for your dad and mom, your grandparents, and in general, that all of your ancestors came into the world, lived to reproductive age, met the right person, and had everything happen exactly as it happened.
Calculations, to put it mildly, turned out approximate, but you can get a general idea from them. So, the chances of you being born is equal to the probability that if the same number falls out after tossing a million dice each with a trillion faces. That's the probability that after milliards of years of evolution, your genome will have appeared, and even a small shift in the evolutionary branch will result in you never existing.
It sounds dramatic, but it is only the probability of the appearance of one particular organism, for us it is commonplace that someone is born and born every day. For us, the birth of someone matters only when all the numerous properties of the organism have formed somewhere there in the brain in such an amazing way that this someone realized himself to be you, not someone else from the whole desert of unborn but possible variants. That is, when he has your "Me-viewer".
And now we are finally getting to the cherry on the cake of this discussion - the "Open Individual View of personal Identity " a.k.a., "Open Individualism". A philosophical concept according to which, in order for your "Me" to appear in the world, all you need to do is flip a single coin with all the faces being the same. The probability is 1 in 1. Yes, according to Open Individualism, your birth is inevitable. Why? Because there is no such thing as your "Me." As I revealed above, our consciousness is no different from anyone else's consciousness. Neither the "Me-viewer" nor its derivative is different, but only the "Me-role", and, this means that we are all, at the most basic level, the same "Me". Accordingly, for you to come into existence, it was enough for anyone with any data to be born. You simply had no choice but to be born. And there is no queue of the unborn staying in some void, because there is exactly one participant in this lottery.
And back to the original question "Who would my parents have had if another sperm had come first at conception?" , The answer here is disarmingly simple: I would have been born. And even if any woman met any man, whoever they had would have been born, it would have been me. And it seems like such an ironic clue to the reality that no matter what your passport information is, the main name of each of us is the same "Me" Regardless of genetic assignments and the environment you are in, we all initially have that consciousness. And then life writes new stories in our personality, leaving a unique imprint, the second of which there is no other in the whole universe, and hardly ever will be. We are all one and the same "Me", one and the same consciousness, localized in different organisms and in different life circumstances. And everyone who is reading this now – is me.
So what's it like to fall asleep and never wake up? No one knows. But what each of us knows absolutely well is what it is like to wake up without ever having fallen asleep before. Death is simply amnesia, and all it takes away is the "Me-role," the body, attitudes, habits, self image, memory, your suffering, all the things that are constantly dimmed as life goes on as it is. But "Me-viewer" - this basic sense of being - is simply a property of matter, such as the human brain, and it was there long before your body manifested and will be thereafter. And your consciousness will never die simply because it is not yours.
Some would say that this concept is just another variation of the afterlife, like reincarnation. But it only seems that way at first glance. Because any posthumous journey of the soul presupposes preservation of memory and personality. It is for the loss of identity that people often worry the most. Whereas in open individualism, death is still what it used to be - it is the same eraser that erases our complex and unique pattern of our experience, our experiences, our complex and unique destiny. But on the other hand, death is a cache reset, a replacement of worn-out components, a wiping of a blurred lens, CTB has the same purpose.
When has life brought you the most joy, in and of itself? The point is that the manifestation of each stimulus depends on the previous one, and if you stimulate your senses with the same thing, over time your sensitivity to it starts to decrease, stupidly for physiological reasons. Life loses its brightness and flavor over time, and all the magic of the images that impressed you in childhood irretrievably disappears. Of course, this process can be slowed down, changed, changed environment like worn out clothes. But the potential of these measures is also limited and inevitably comes the moment when it will be better for you to give place on this planet to another blood, which by virtue of freshness of its perception will get more pleasure from life and see its magic, which is no longer available to you. After all, this other blood is not so alien to us.
Yes even if you do not consider life in general as pleasant and somewhat joyful, even if any life for you is always suffering, even if you have a different view of death and you'd just like an eternal blissful rest after leaving this planet forever – it's still helpful to keep in mind that any person you see, whether IRL or on the other side of the monitor, under the cover of all those endless, irreconcilable outer forms, is not really really isn't all that different from you. He's just as lonely as you are, he's just as scared as you are, his heart is just as longing as yours longs for love and his soul as yours longs for peace.
And if there is a law of boomerang, I swear to you, you and I have completely misunderstood it. Any pain comes back, but not because there is a possible ricochet, or there is some karma, but because you cannot cause it in this world to anyone but yourself:
I am the one aiming a sniper rifle from a rooftop.
And I am the one who in a moment will fall dead to the ground.
I am the one who calls from an unknown number and introduces himself as a bank employee.
And I am the frightened grandmother who gives away the last of her money.
I am the Beautiful confident girl at the peak of her fertility, I will easily refuse this guy to date me because he has an ugly face and is under 6'0.
And I am a Man who is doomed to die in dreary loneliness and misery because sexual selection does not see his as worthy of reproduction.
I'm a carefree young man, coming home late at night after an incredible disco, I still have everything ahead of me.
And I am an old man with dried up eyes, who is slowly turning into a shadow.
I'm a small child, and I'm very scared when daddy beats mommy.
And I am the adult head of the family who hurts my loved ones because I have only seen pain in my life and learned only pain.
I am an important official, you would know how many people are after my signature, and I will turn a blind eye to the dumping of toxic waste into the local river.
And I am also a child in a small downstream community who was born blind.
I am a military commander confident of victory, it means nothing to me to open fire of batteries on peaceful settlements, the enemy will be defeated!
And I am an innocent little child who will lose his family forever that very day
I am the doctor who refused a tortured patient's request to kill him. I took the Hippocratic Oath that I would not kill anyone, and I'm absolutely convinced that I will fight for life at all costs.
And I'm a paralyzed patient begging in a lonely room for someone to unplug the cable from the outlet next to my bed so I can finally to
.....forget everything.
This essay is a summary of one work done by one Russian video blogger Denis Cheptsov in his film on YouTube "Death is a loss of memory" on the channel "ЧД". All that I have done is a transcript, translation and adaptation of this film in order to share the main concept presented to as many people as possible and to ask everyone's opinion on it.
Below you can tell/discuss what you think about "Open Individualism": Does this concept appeal to you, that at the most basic level we are all one, and after death we simply change roles, or is it more familiar to you to think that absolutely everyone has their own unique personality, and after death you will find eternal nothing/something else?
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