An Uncomfortable Truth
Currently, we cannot answer the following questions:
Why is there something rather than nothing?
What is reality?
What are the material underpinnings of the first-order objects we interact with (i.e. our sensations)?
These are hard questions, but they can have answers. We just don't know what the answers are.
For example, here are some (possible) answers:
All there ever has been and ever will be is a cyclical boom-bust cycle of some medium, expanding and contracting ad nauseam, allowing for pockets of coincidence/complexity that lead to consciousness.
Reality is a set of fields with some non-arbitrary rules that just must-be-so due to high-dimensional geometry.
The brain is a "non-linear optical computer", and your qualia are simply "patches in the neuronal lattice with distinct electrostatic parameters" 1.
It's not that we can't know the answers to these questions, it's that we are born into a world where we don't know the answers to these questions.
And I think that's a really weird situation to be in.
I'll leave you with my attempt at conveying a repeated, lived experience which led me to write this post due to the amount of adrenaline it induces:
- I am on my couch.
- I stop scrolling on my phone.
- I stop stressing about myself for long enough to look beyond temporally local concerns.
- I realize this is actually happening right now.
- I realize I don't even know what this is.
- I start thinking about how ludicrous that lack of knowledge is.
- "Really? No one knows what's going on? No one knows why?"
- I then return to the present moment.
- The fact that I can return to the present moment verifies that this is actually happening right now.
- I feel extremely unsettled.
(As a bonus: Another answer to questions 1/2 is that you decided to play an arcade game at the local interdimensional Dave & Buster's called "The Road to AGI: The Tale of the Hominid and the Machine".)