“You Are Not Alone”
Michael Jackson (and others)
During discussions with my Tutor group on so-called Blue Monday last week, the Director was introduced to the Existential Crisis Iceberg, an idea meme-type-thing that has apparently been garnering lots of traction on social media platforms. Ever one to hitch a ride on the bandwagon, I thought that today’s paltry words might take a look at this latest incarnation of the post-modern fascination with meaning in life, or its lack thereof.
The iceberg presents a collection of topics and ideas that are meant to cause existential crises. Depending where these ideas are on the iceberg the more likely the idea is to sink us. The higher up the iceberg they are, we might just experience a momentary sense of panic over our coffee; the deeper below the waterline, the more likely it is that we will be thrown into paroxysms of what the Germans, in their inimitable way with words refer to as weltuntergangsstimmung. On the image of the iceberg which I was shown, there are 23 topics which of course we do not have the time to go into here. So in the time we do have together, let’s look at a few. Maybe the top three. Or should that be the bottom three?
At this point in the column, I am duty bound to offer a trigger warning. Some of my dear readers may subsequently wish to ignore the following potentially crises-inducing ideas and cut to the good bits at the end.
#3 The Simulation Hypothesis (the tip of the iceberg so not too much to worry about on the completely made up ECS: Existential Crisis Scale).
This is the claim that we are all living inside a simulated world. This idea, popularised by philosopher Nick Bostrom, says that given humanity’s technological progress up to now, it’s inevitable that we will at some point be able to simulate human experience and inevitably therefore simulate entire worlds on computers. If these simulations of the world are up to scratch then the world in the simulation, will itself develop the ability to simulate worlds. And the world which that simulation simulates, if a proper simulation, will itself be able to simulate worlds and they in turn will be able to simulate worlds and so on and so forth, potentially ad infinitum. The only ‘real’ world therefore would be the one that started it all off. Bostrom asks us to consider, which is the more likely conclusion, that we happen to be in the original real world or that we’re in one of the potentially billions or trillions of simulated realities?
As we can see, the simulation theory is really a matter of faith rather than science so we probably don’t need to ask Occam if we can borrow his razor in order to excise this particular notion. Obviously the hypothesis is based on the assumption that one day we will be able to simulate human consciousness. And the jury is very much out on whether or not we will ever be able to do that. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knows what consciousness is. But also, if it were true that we were living in a simulation, we could by definition never know. It’s an inherently unfalsifiable hypothesis. And do we really spend our time anxiously worrying about unfalsifiable hypotheticals? If you’re anything like the Director, and Lord help you if you are, you will frequently be ‘losing’ socks in the wash. Now, we could speculate that a “sock gremlin” was responsible for the missing garments. By definition, you couldn’t ever prove or disprove the existence of this mischievous being, so it’s unfalsifiable. But you don’t spend your life agonising over it; you just get more socks or wear odd ones and shuffle on. Similarly, the Simulation Hypothesis might be fun to think about, but since you can’t prove or disprove it, it doesn’t make for a very potent existential crisis inducer.
#2 ‘You are Alone in your Brain’ (the midpoint of the iceberg, so fairly scary on the completely made up ECS: Existential Crisis Scale).
How might you, dear reader, answer the question: Where do you exist? Those of you with a more materialist bent might answer that you are the same thing as your brain and so that is where you exist. And where’s your brain? Well that’s easy; it’s locked away in your skull, sitting all alone there in the dark.
It’s true that you have sense data; most of us have eyes to see and ears to hear. But when you think about it, all of those sights and sounds are just going through nerves and being translated by your brain. Your experience of the world is essentially an illusion. Your eyes, I’m told, see things ‘upside down’ and the brain flips them over. It’s a similar story with sound; you don’t directly engage with sound; a vibration hits the eardrum and sends a signal down a nerve which then gets translated by the brain into an experience of sound.
So when you think about it, you’re actually disconnected from it all, like being a person locked in a control room with a monitor. There are cameras outside, so you can see the world and there are speakers and microphones so you can hear everything that’s going on too, but you’re locked in that room and there’s no way for you to get out. If one day the monitor turned off and the microphone stopped working you would just be sat there all alone in the dark.
The scary thing is that you are in that situation as you read these paltry words. The monitor is switched on and the microphones are still working, at least for now…
Blimey
But hang on a sec, of course you could never directly experience anyone else’s consciousness. If you could, then it would be your consciousness you were experiencing, not theirs. Obviously. in many ways what we’re actually being misled by is the way language tends to work. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about my experiences to suggest that perhaps we own them in some way. I think our friend Wittgenstein talked about this, but that’s for another column.
And anyhoo, there’s a very simple answer to the cause of this potential crisis: Read a book!
One of the most striking aspects of literature is its ability to immerse readers in the thoughts, emotions, and perspectives of others. Unlike everyday conversation, which is often limited by social constraints, literature lays bare the internal world of characters and narrators. Through reading, we can come to realise that our emotions, fears, and even our existential crises are not unique; others have felt the same, across different eras and cultures. And always will. If absolute solitude of the mind were true (it’s not), literature wouldn’t resonate the way it does. The fact that words written centuries ago can still move, comfort, or unsettle us shows that while we may never fully escape our own monitoring room, we are far from alone in our experiences.
#1 The Boltzmann Brain (the bottom of the iceberg, very scary on the completely made up ECS: Existential Crisis Scale).
Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) was an Austrian physicist and one of the key figures in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. His work helped explain how the behaviour of individual atoms could determine the macroscopic properties of gases. As you will be aware, the Boltzmann constant (k₆₆₆) is named after him, and his equations laid the foundation for modern physics, including quantum mechanics. Boltzmann’s work suggested that order in the universe arises from probability, not design. The Boltzmann Brain wasn’t actually his idea but was inspired by his work on entropy.
In a nutshell, here is the super scary idea: given infinite time and random fluctuations in a great big universe, a fully formed, self-aware brain could spontaneously arise, complete with false memories, perceptions, and a sense of reality that isn’t actually real. So this notion doesn’t just suggest that you’re alone in your thoughts but that your entire reality might be an illusion.
Now ‘traditional’ brains take a looong time to develop. As we have discussed before, they need the evolution of galaxies and stars and planets and simple life and the evolution into human life and the evolution of consciousness etc. etc. So, the hypothesis goes, these spontaneously existing Boltzmann brains with their fake memories are going to happen much more commonly than actual brains which have been evolved in the traditional way. And we know the conclusion that’s going to be drawn from that, don’t we..? As with the Simulation Hypothesis, it’s going to be much more likely, dear reader, that you’re a Boltzmann brain than a traditionally formed one with real memories. You aren’t just alone in the monitoring room of your thoughts, your entire reality is an illusion, and right now you are just a spontaneous arrangement of atoms in an infinite universe that at any moment is about to disassemble and you will exist no more.
Crikey
But not really.
Let’s have a look at how a few writers have dealt with the idea of reality as an illusion. Firstly, no stranger to these columns, and always worth a read, our friend Jorge Luis Borges. One of my favourite authors, Borges, is a master of labyrinthine realities, often suggesting that the world is a self-generating illusion.
Spoilers Ahead!
In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a secret society creates an imaginary world so convincingly that it begins to overwrite reality itself. If enough people believe in a fiction, does it become “real”? In The Circular Ruins a man dreams another person into existence, only to realise he himself was dreamt by someone else. A Boltzmann Brain awakening to its own artificiality? In The Library of Babel we are presented with a universe-as-library where every possible book exists, including books containing pure gibberish and books that accidentally form complete, coherent histories.
Borges’ answer to existential despair? Embrace the labyrinth. Reality might be an illusion, but if so, it’s a beautifully complex and endlessly fascinating one.
Another author? There are many to choose from. How about Samuel Beckett?
Beckett’s plays and novels kind of strip reality down to its core components, often featuring characters trapped in self-repeating loops of thought, unable to confirm or indeed deny whether they exist at all. They’re often very funny too. In Waiting for Godot we see two characters waiting indefinitely for someone who never arrives, trapped in an endless, seemingly meaningless existence. A Boltzmann Brain might feel the same. In The Unnamable, a novel-length monologue, we have a speaker questioning whether they exist, whether they are speaking at all, or whether they are just a voice generated by nothingness. Honestly, they’re often very funny too.
Beckett seems to respond to the possibility of all this being an illusion by suggesting that if there is no escape we should nevertheless keep talking . Existence may be absurd, but as long as consciousness persists, we endure.
We could talk of Kafka’s work as a response to the anxiety of the unknowable world. Or Philip K. Dick’s characters doubting everything but continuing the search for truth in a world full of illusion. Or Stanisław Lem’s novels questioning whether our no doubt limited human understanding means our experiences are any the less valid.
But these are topics to be explored elsewhere, if the universe permits such things.
As for the Boltzmann brain, you will, dear reader, have noticed that it relies heavily on the idea that there is an infinite past of atoms bumping into each other. To the Director’s feeble mind, the philosophical and scientific evidence that the universe is not in fact infinite, is enough to do away with this particular hypothesis. But even if it were philosophically the case, as opposed to really the case that the universe is infinite, I shall give the last word on this matter, to another friend of the column, dear Douglas Adams. In his wonderful Life, the Universe and Everything, he has fun with the notion that in an infinite universe, everything has to exist somewhere. And so we read of the planet Squornshellous Zeta which is home to a species of sentient, marshy mattresses. These swamp mattresses lead tragically dull lives before being harvested, dried out, and turned into actual mattresses for the inhabitants of the Galaxy to sleep on. The mattresses themselves don’t seem particularly bothered by this fate. One of these mattresses, named Zem, befriends Marvin the Paranoid Android, one of literature’s greatest embodiments of existential despair. Marvin, of course, is utterly miserable, while Zem the Mattress just sort of… exists in its slow, swampy way.
Douglas Adams seems then to be suggesting that the universe may be random, infinite and absurd, but that doesn’t mean it has to be miserable. In fact, it might just be really funny.
My regular reader will not be surprised that this Director will say the biggest mistake of existential despair is to assume that life is a thing, a fixed category, something static that can be measured, evaluated, or even negated. As we have discussed previously, life is not a thing, it is a process, a movement, a relationship. The Crisis Iceberg sinks people because they believe they are trapped inside something, as if existence is a cold, isolated block of meaninglessness.
But what if that’s just the wrong metaphor?
If life is not a thing but a process, then meaning is not something we possess but something we discover through relationships; with others, with ideas, with the absurd, and with above all, the unknown. The whole premise of for example, You Are Alone in Your Brain assumes that consciousness is self-contained, when in actuality, it is only intelligible in relation to the world around it. A human is not a brain-in-a-box (or a monitoring room) but a being-in-relation always connecting, responding, interpreting.
The universe of course is nothing at all but not because it is meaningless, but because it is not a thing in the first place. The desperate search to define the universe, to pin down its essence, to demand an answer to “What is it all for?” is the root of the misunderstanding.
The answer to existential despair is not certainty, but participation. Meaning isn’t something we uncover by standing apart from life, analysing it like a detached observer, in the way of aTiffinian faced with a poem. It’s something we live into, something we generate in the act of being, relating, and imagining.
The real mistake of existential despair is thinking there was ever a fixed answer in the first place.
Until next time Happy Reading/Being!
Thank you to a Mr D Lali for what turns out to be a topical joke from this week’s Director’s inbox. Keep ‘em coming!
Why don’t scientists trust atoms?
Because they make up everything.