#probably smoothed my slide into atheism (which is NOT a can of worms I'm opening today)

[greatwyrmgold]

A few existential YouTube videos lead me down a rabbit hole of introspection.

I've always been interested in science, particularly stuff like astronomy and biology, particularly the bits about the history of life on Earth and how people work. You might note that the crushingly hollow void of space, the inconceivable depth of time, and the mechanics which make the human mind tick are arguably the three parts of science most prone to causing existential crises. And the way I internalized that stuff has definitely influenced how I interpret others' existential crises.

Let's back up. When I was a kid, I read a magazine article reporting on an experiment which indicated that the brain signals for deciding to do a thing came after the brain signals for making the body do it. It made the argument that what the brain is actually doing is rationalizing what it did, rather than thinking about what to do. This was framed as both something scientifically interesting and a challenge to free will.

To put the response I settled on into words: "Okay. But there is still something that triggered the neurons which caused the body-controlling brain signals. Free will and the self must reside in that something."

When confronted with existential crises, I learned to unconsciously work backwards from the conclusion I needed. Free will exists, the self exists, humanity matters, I matter. I just need to find the definitions that would allow those things to be true, and the existential crisis vanishes in a puff of logic.

All of this is second nature to me, but most people don't read old science books from their great-grandma's bookstore when they're in grade school. Most people have a firm sense of the world before they're faced with existential crises. Or at least, I assume that's what happens to most people, because most of the existential crises I see seem really weaksauce.

Like, take "the trouble with transporters," summarized in this CGP Grey video of the same name. A transporter doesn't move you, it destroys you and makes a copy of you somewhere else! Oh no! There are many variations on this theme, ranging all the way down to "Sleep is an interruption of consciousness, therefore you're arguably a new person every day". And my reaction to all of them is the same: "If the thing at the other end looks like you, acts like you, thinks like you, and thinks it is you...how the hell is is something else?"

To me, this is natural. Work backwards. There must be some continuity of identity, both through sleep and through the process of basically every cell and atom in your body being replaced. Ergo, identity must be something more fluid, found in abstract patterns rather than anything material. The same logic applies to transporters and teleporters, ergo there must not be an existential crisis there. If there was, then ordinary existence would induce existential crises, and that's an invalid result.

If challenged, I think I could defend this approach to philosophy. But that's not really my purpose here. I'm just trying to think about the way I think about stuff, force myself to clarify those thoughts, and then post them to justify that forcing. But hopefully you still find it interesting.