The identification of self with viewpoint provides some interesting data on the nature of existence and its opposite, which goes under the name of "death" in this culture.

     You are alive only where your viewpoint is.  What's it like phenomenologically, to be dead?  Well, it's easy to evoke an accurate sensation of this.  Where are you, physically, now?  Let's presume for the sake of argument that you're not in Algiers.  Fine, then you are, right now, dead in Algiers.  You experience no input or output from there, you affect nothing.  People and things there are unaware of you.  You don't exist there.

     This argument can be extended.  You are dead most places in the universe at this moment.  Dead in Paris.  Dead in New York.  (Assuming you don't happen to be reading this in either of those places.)  In fact, the only place the self exists is atop a small local pinnacle of space and time.

     Of course, this "liveness" has degrees.  Timothy Leary is on television right now in Paris.  Somebody is reading an R. U. Sirius essay in Algiers.  Phone a friend in China.  You are alive there -- a little bit.  Not as much as where your body is, where you see, touch, and perhaps are tasting a delicious chocolate sundae.

     The beauty of information/communications technologies is their ability to extend the boundaries of self, to diminish distance and other physical limitations, and permit an individual to reach out nearly undiminished across time and space at the speed of light.