"Wandering through the streets, you look around. You look at people's faces, what do you see? People walking to and from destinations, moving about. I'm sure you just assume that thoughts actually are going through their heads, right? Well, this is where you went wrong.
I'm going to attempt to argue a rather interesting point: I don't exist. I'm just a figment of your imagination. How do you know I really even think anyway? As far as you can tell, I'm just some chunk of fleshy material that seems to walk about in a haphazard and unpredictable fashion. Or, if you are lucky enough to have never met me, how do you know I even exist in corporeal form at all?
I contend that I do not.
You have no proof thoughts go on inside my head, my actions could be purely random. Anything I say or do that appears to be even remotely intelligent could just be some massive computer performing a context switch to give a few extra CPU cycles to my otherwise empty, random existence.
I am a mechanization, a pure conglomeration of chemical reactions assembled together to provide the illusion of autonomous behavior. I am a machine. I move how the laws of physics tell me to move. I have no mind. I think how the laws of chemistry tell me to think. I have no will. I simply react to the Universe, which is nothing, and by extension, so am I. I have no soul.
Ahh, but if I really had no intelligence, why would I try to convince you of such a fact, you ask? It's quite simple really, I'm just programmed to evoke a response in you, to alleviate the doubts you've always had. If I argue that I don't think, well then clearly I do, don't I?
It all just one big test. A sick, twisted attempt to drive your mind in circles until you are too dizzy to pay attention to what is really going on. Reality exists only behind your eyes. You know what you see is only a charade. It's all just a test to see how long you can go without figuring it out.
The thoughts that you have, no one can hear them. No one can hear the shouts inside your head. No one cares, because they don't exist enough to care. You think you are alone? How do you know you even exist enough to be alone?
The responses that I'm programmed to evoke in you? Well, wake up. You are programmed so they are invoked.
You are a mechanization, a pure conglomeration of chemical reactions assembled together to provide the illusion of autonomous behavior. You are a machine. You move how the laws of physics tell me to move. You have no mind. You think how the laws of chemistry tell me to think. You have no will. You simply react to the Universe, which is nothing, and by extension, so are you. You have no soul.
'Stop, this is madness!' you might say, 'we are all real! Just because we can't read eachother's thoughts, doesn't mean they don't exist. And just because we obey the laws of physics doesn't mean we have no free will!'
In your deeper moments, you may even cherish your mental privacy.. Each one of us living out the ultimate cosmic vacation provided for us by some champion of privacy and free will, perhaps the last in the Universe, you think. If anything, that pile of flesh you seem to cherish so much is at least an approximation to true consciousness, right? .. Right?
You think you can think, and you know you exist, because you can look around you, and touch and feel this Universe you live in. So it's all real, right? Well, let me tell you a little something about the Universe.
I'm sure you have been told about the wonderful progress of science in determining information about our Universe. If you have taken any form of science classes, you know the laws of science to be guesses that we have only verified to be appropriate approximations on an empirical level. You may know, for instance, that if you combine an acid and a base, you produce a salt of some form, and usually some form of neutral gas or liquid, because you can measure the effects of the reaction. Or you may know that if two particles collide in a particle accelerator, you can observe some indirect effects on magnetic and electrical fields, and therefore we can determine their contents.
A scientist would use this to argue that the value of the Universe and our effort to understand it at all is that it's self-consistent. But that doesn't amount to much, considering according to Steven Hawking, when you take gravity into account, the net sum of the energy in the Universe is zero. That's right, zero. You sum up everything in this goddamn place - all the particles, all the fields, all the energy, everything we have tried so damn hard to learn about - and it all amounts to zero. Nothing. He called it the ultimate free lunch. A free lunch consisting of some imaginary water and bread made out of air. You see, it's easy for nothingness to be self-consistent.
So this universe, of which you are a single person, who is insignificant to one nation, the mere concept of which is meaningless to a planet, which in turn is all but inconsequential to its own galaxy, itself but a molecule of water in an ocean of other galaxies, amounts to nothing.
It doesn't exist. And by a long, long, loong extension of several orders of magnitude of insignificance, neither really do you, or I.
So when it comes right down it it, this is all that you have of your empty, meaningless universe: Things that you can observe within your universe, effects you can observe within your universe, and your thoughts on these observations. In short, it's all inside your head.
And what happens when you die? What happens to the universe that you hold on to so dearly inside your head? It's gone, it begins to deteriorate, to break, because it is merely an entity of your mind as it decays, and all the things you ever cared about stored within it are gone. Sometimes you wonder: can you think or feel this decay? Where do you go? What is the nothingness made of? Close your eyes for a second, and I'll tell you the answer:
Zero."
- Damn long quote yeah~ from TotalPerspectiveVortex