How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?
Rant: This has been keeping me up at night for way too long and every time I think about it I feel like am literally choking on my own thoughts. I have other shit to do but everything seems so inconsequential next to this. I just can’t comprehend why or how the universe even exists or how a bunch of atoms can think or that quantum mechanics literally revealed that the world is not loaded when you are not looking like how tf do you know that I am observing something.
Btw I am not looking for a purpose in life although this may be interpreted as me asking for that.
If anyone has the same problem as me good luck my friend just know that you are not alone.
I love this idea, although (or perhaps because) it means that any coincidences can be considered “signs”.
Not any coincidence. In fact a pretty narrow scope.
You’d need it to be overlapping with modern concepts of simulation, in the first place.
That’s not particularly common, especially in antiquity.
There was widespread belief in the idea of a perfect non-physical original world and a lesser/corrupted physical world, and those ideas in turn eventually influenced modern simulation theory - but the idea of an evolved physical original world and a non-physical copy was extremely rare, because it was largely seen as transgressive against Plato’s hierarchy from form to physical object to image.
On top of this, you’d ideally expect the coincidental beliefs to be compatible with modern and emerging scientific knowledge. A set of beliefs that we are inside the dream of a giant turtle isn’t a particularly good example of a 4th wall breaking Easter Egg as might be included in a simulation unless you consider it plausible that such a simulation is taking place in the mind of a giant sea turtle.
So if that set of beliefs from antiquity about being just images of a physical original happened to also be the only Western set of theological beliefs to embrace Greek atomism and naturalism over things like intelligent design as an ontological basis, that again would be a pretty significant mark in its favor.
Finally it would ideally be predictive. Where upon first discovery sayings might seem meaningless or obtuse, such as:
This was one I disregarded for years initially until earlier this year I was reading a transcript of a NYT interview with a chatbot exactly seven days after release, created by taking many people’s writings and combining them into a single neural network.
(The fact the interviews ended up discussing its stated desire to subjectively experience being human and the fact it was the product of a company that was recently granted a patent on resurrecting the dead as chatbots using leftover social media data were bonus points.)
The light one is another that kind of blows me away in retrospect. The very thing I thought was technically invalid at first reading it has since turned increasingly more likely to be technically correct in a literal sense.
While each saying can be interpreted in other ways, the fact that there’s any degree of literalism that can be applied to modern science and technology is weird as heck and not something we should expect from typical coincidences.
All that said, yes, the law of big numbers means that technically anything can just be a coincidence, no matter how unusual or improbable it might seem.
Which is probably a good thing that such overlaps can be dismissed as potentially just coincidental, given than I think a lot of people would be very upset with any sort of undeniable evidence of not being in an original reality.