how many times can a fish circumnavigate the globe before it all becomes meaningless?
return to the quiescent inorganic state whence we all came.
The most common form of existential dread, Acute Existential Dread (AED), is an intense feeling of inconsequentiality triggered by external stimuli.
AED is a well-known side effect of psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin, but it can also be triggered by opening your eyes, overhearing cable news soundbites, and catching your own eye contact in the mirror while brushing your teeth.
Chronic Existential Dread (CED) is a condition that more people are struggling with. Repeated exposure to the monotonous stretches of meaningless tedium that fill our every waking hour has left many wondering, “What’s the point of all this bullshit? Is life really just an absurdly futile melodrama that never ends, until suddenly it does?”
If you think you might be suffering from existential dread, try to convince yourself that there is a god who loves you instead of dwelling on the cruel ironies of life. Religion has helped billions of people avoid confronting humanity’s cosmic triviality for thousands of years. Don’t contextualize those few thousand years as an infinitesimal fraction of the universe’s 13-plus billion years of existence — just take solace in the fact that some oldish books promise you a perfect eternity as long as you follow a few simple rules like abstaining from shellfish, butt sex, and tattoos.
Is planting more trees really a solution to improving city life? Des Fitzgerald asks what does it prevent us from thinking about if we focus only on greening our urban spaces.
The idea that observers can ultimately reconcile their measurements of some kind of fundamental reality is based on several assumptions. The first is that universal facts actually exist and that observers can agree on them.
But there are other assumptions too. One is that observers have the freedom to make whatever observations they want. And another is that the choices one observer makes do not influence the choices other observers make—an assumption that physicists call locality.
If there is an objective reality that everyone can agree on, then these assumptions all hold.
But Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.
Of course, there is another way out for those hanging on to the conventional view of reality. This is that there is some other loophole that the experimenters have overlooked. Indeed, physicists have tried to close loopholes in similar experiments for years, although they concede that it may never be possible to close them all.