This Shouldn't Exist. And Yet...

We Live in a World That Shouldn't Exist

"Now I die and vanish, and in an instant I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs — it will create me again! I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent — not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I eternally come again to this identical and selfsame life, in the greatest and even in the smallest, so that I again teach the eternal recurrence of all things. Let all things recur eternally — this is the highest possible approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being: the peak of contemplation." — On Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche

Let's start with a well-grounded theory: space and time do not exist beyond the boundaries of our own consciousness.

From the scientifically established fact that Earth violates the symmetry of the universe - meaning there exists an insane number of physical constants that had to align perfectly for us to exist, with these extraordinarily complex, self-aware brains capable of observing their own existence - the probability of this event occurring is zero to the power of zero🌚

The simulation hypothesis and the holographic principle - my personal favorites in the department of reality being fundamentally not what it appears - trace back to a thought proposed by one brilliant scientist: Ludwig Boltzmann. The Boltzmann Brain: the idea of a mind spontaneously crystallizing out of the void. In other words: why hasn't the universe already produced random, fully-formed analogs of human consciousness out of sheer fluctuation? Theoretically, assembling a single brain is far more improbable than generating an entire Earth populated with them. The random fluctuations required to kickstart natural selection are far simpler and less precise than those needed to conjure a Boltzmann Brain into existence.

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy must increase over time - everything tends toward disorder. And yet, in certain pockets of the universe, order can spontaneously emerge through random fluctuations, provided that other regions simultaneously become more chaotic. We happen to inhabit one of the most extraordinarily ordered corners of existence. Consider: even a short strand of DNA is so precisely structured that the probability of it appearing through "random fluctuation" of physical matter is almost incomprehensibly small. However, one cell contains billions of base pairs. Complex organisms contain trillions of cells. Earth sustains millions of species.

Maybe the answer lies in infinite time and infinite space. This idea, that fluctuations become inevitable given enough of both, brings us to Nietzsche's pitiless doctrine of eternal recurrence: the Ouroboros I so desperately want tattooed on my ankle.. — which is cognitively destabilizing not because it can't be true, but because if it is, we might as well abandon any attempt to understand the universe and just keep trying to make sense of things anyway, because nothing means anything.

And yet, Nietzsche's concept of the Übermensch can say yes to exactly that world. Only the Übermensch can continue living after shedding every consoling illusion that religion, science, and philosophy have offered us as comfort.

For a literary portrait of this figure, I'd point you to Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire. For the physics underpinning all of this - Katie Mack's The End of Everything.

So. Can you say yes to a universe like that? 👁️👁️