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Have you gone down any rabbit holes that gave you an existential crisis? (discuss.online)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Have you went down any internet rabbit holes only to come out with a deep set existential crisis? If so, what are they?

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (31 children)

Free will.

It's hard to accept, but free will is just not compatible with reality. It's like geocentrism. It seems obvious on its face because of our limited perspective, but nothing else in the universe makes sense if it's true. We live in a mechanistic universe and cause and effect doesn't suddenly stop when the atoms are part of a human.

I freaked out for about a week once I came to realize how much of our society is based on a scientific impossibility. Redesigning justice, ethics, healthcare, the very concept of blame, etc. to account for this is a daunting fucking prospect.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Subatomic particles act in insane ways that are absolutely not mechanical or predictible. A very limited size of object behaves "normally". I think believing that the universe mostly acts like our everyday objects is the skewed perspective.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Our current understanding is not enough to state that with confidence. We used to be so confident with classical mechanics and even claims that physics is almost complete. God knows how long our current probabilistic model will last before we find another better model. It may be probabilistic, or it may not.