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Imagine someone who's familiar with /r/birdsarentreal finding one of these in real life without knowing the punchline
A thing like that could shatter you. Am I even real? Did I create this place? Am I a brain in a storage locker somewhere, and it's all just made up for me? What are they trying to tell me now, when they show me these things? Am I being tested?
I mean we are all brains in a storage locker. It’s just a portable/mobile storage locker.
Yes! It’s this mentality that has helped me cope with some major life events. It really helps to put things in perspective when you realize that who you truly are is little more than a pink blob driving a meat skeleton.
And it is all the more fascinating when you think about all the other pink blobs that did not get the chance to exist like us - e.g. (non-avian) dinosaurs, but also too like chimps that can talk, walk, use tools, etc., but do not come anywhere close to our level of Mind.
Without getting into any particular religion (even though this is almost a direct quote from the description of a religion in the super-old TV show Babylon Five), in a way we are the universe (molecules) thinking about itself!:-P Our pattern may be small, but our significance large, at least to our own perspective - e.g. every human life is precious, or arguably should be; but at the same time, as you point out, on the grander scheme it's nothing at all.
I find such thoughts very freeing - like, we can choose to love, or not, rather than have that forced upon us by like societal conventions, or whatever. Namaste and junk. :-)
If you think about Newton’s law that says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then it’s not unreasonable to imagine that our life energy is floating out there in space until we’re born, where it then enters our bodies. Then when we die, our energy is released back out into the universe. So in a way, we are literally catching a ride through our life on our way to who knows where.
Or perhaps not only Space, maybe just here on Earth.
Or you could get even weirder, and wonder if the reason that electrons aren't anywhere in particular is b/c they are really everywhere, at once - so maybe we are all the same entity, who just forgot?
Sci-Fi is fascinating to me, especially from the Golden Era of like Asimov and HG Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. And one thing that scifi has taught me is that nothing is beyond the bounds of imagination!:-D
And part of that is that Time itself is something that we see only narrowly, through our human perspective. But from the perspective of Energy, which as you say has existed since the dawn of Time, and will continue unti its end too, the lifetime of stars themselves is but a "short" while. Or like how we may read a long book (or series?), describing someone's entirely lifetime or even spans over millennia, but to us it takes just a few days (weeks?) to read.
Or we could get even weirder than that - this whole Universe could be a simulation, and like there's a million running in parallel, and when it grows cold or uninteresting, the Matrix-God could just start it back up again to fulfill whatever purpose it had in mind.
None of which we can properly DO anything about right now, since we do not know and cannot affect any particular outcome. Hence why we wrap back around to just ignoring it, from the practical perspective at least, and live out our lives however we wish:-). But it is fun to think about regardless:-).
I think there actually is a theory that there's only one electron in the whole universe, it's just everywhere
Or doesn't string theory postulate that electrons themselves are merely vibrations of even more foundational... thingies, though ofc nobody really knows much about that.
Maybe we're all part of the same waveform duality equation:-). I really dislike the thought that I could be in any way related to Donald Trump, but it does give me compassion to think that there but for the grace of God (and education, and genetics, and circumstances, and hopefully many more things added to this list to provide separation:-) go I, or any of us really.
It’s just brains in storage lockers all the way down
but how many of them are occupied by catgirls
I would imagine the answer to that is a non-zero number.
welcome to Blade Runner