I’ve been listening to a lot of Great Courses lectures on Audible lately, mostly with a preference on history, physics, metaphysics, psychology, and the human condition in general, and it’s been a real mind trip.
I’ve been considering (and reconsidering… and re-re-considering….) the absurdity of existence, and I’ve had a lot of “young” philosophical thoughts about these topics, so it’s been really helpful to hear other points of view and concepts and ideas from the great thinkers of the past such as Descartes or Plato, and from more contemporary voices. I’m also now very, very much aware of how little I know, and how complex the idea of reality and “self” really is. It’s been a stunning blow to my own ego and a beautiful execution of the Dunning-Krueger effect.
So – existence is absurd. Really – if you think about it, it’s truly bonkers. (I would like to re-iterate that it is unlikely that you will ever see something new here, it’s only my own interpretation and personal ramblings on the topic.) We live, on a giant blob of rock, affixed to the surface by a relatively weak force called gravity, and that blob of rock is traveling at blinding speed, but only relatively, around an explosion. Oh and there are trillions more of these explosions with their own rotating rocks, also spinning around themselves.
Ultimately, we have to rectify the fact that what we experience – sight, sound, taste, touch, all that stuff, is just electrical impulses in a grey meatball in our skull. Reality is real so much as our ability, and capability, to process it continues to exist. When we die, and our self as it currently exists, ceases to do so, is reality over, or are we? Does it matter? Is it not essentially the same? I’m not asking about souls and afterlife here, just this mortal coil. Who – or what – makes reality real?
