Here are some things that might sound crazy:
1 – We can only experience reality through stories. (Yuval Noah Harari)
2 – We live in a hallucination. (Anil Seth, Donald Hoffman)
3 – Everything is pre-determined, and we have no free will. (Robert Sapolsky)
But I believe them.
It means my life is largely an illusion — my introverted personality, my taste in complicated music, and my love of vegan chocolate chip cookies are all made up.
I cling to them. Desperately. They’re my identity, my ego.
But Carl King is only a character in a movie I’m watching inside my brain, created out of 3D pixels called atoms and empty space. I’m the observer in Buddhism, the homunculus in the Cartesian Theater.
Our brains construct stories to make sense of our lives. But those stories are largely subjective fantasies. Explanations for what we think we saw. Explanations for why we think we did things.
Even typing this blog right now is one pool ball hitting another, hitting another, hitting another, going back 13.7 billion years. Nothing but causality. It feels like I’m doing it, but I’m not. Evidence suggests the expanding universe is doing it.
So I can’t take credit. For anything. Because there is no I.
Okay. Now what?
Setting aside my lack of free will, what should I do? How should I behave in the world? How should I treat others? What should be my goals?
If we’re all living in our own fantasies, why not lie and steal and manipulate?
Maybe I should play the game: portray myself as an eccentric rock star who spends his days being praised for pretending he’s at the top of the social dominance hierarchy. If you can be anyone, why not be that?
Heck, I’ll be gone someday. Shouldn’t I take the goat’s advice and “Live Deliciously?”
Something stops me.
I like to think it’s ethics, that I’m intelligent, and that I choose to be an honest, genuine, good person. But automatons can’t choose a code of ethics. It’s genes, environment, cause & effect. Same as any plant or animal. Or machine.
Whatever I do, I was already going to do. Even my character’s realization of this is written into the dang screenplay.
As Sapolsky says: “Show me a neuron, or a network of neurons, or a brain, that did something completely free of its history.”
So, why did nature even bother with sentience? What benefit is it to natural selection and survival? Why make the movie actors feel aware, like Neo in The Matrix? Why not just a video game that plays by itself, with only NPCs?
My best guess right now is Epiphenomenalism.
ChatGPT, another helpless robot like me, described it like this:
Byproduct of Complexity: According to epiphenomenalism, consciousness arises as a byproduct of the brain’s complex information processing. While it accompanies physical processes, it does not influence them causally. Conscious experiences (qualia) emerge from neural activity but do not affect the underlying processes.
Non-Causal Accompaniment: Consciousness provides a narrative or subjective experience of what is happening, but the actual processing and decision-making are carried out by neural circuits operating below the level of conscious awareness.
Cool, man.