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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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[-] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 29 points 4 months ago

The universe. The Big bang, time, quantum mechanics. Is our universe infinite? Is it the only universe? Did the Big bang start ours and will it end with a big crunch and will that collapse just cause a big bang that repeats and if so what iteration of that cycle do you suppose we are in? And does each universe behave the same, similar laws and physics and such? Stars, planets, etc?

Deconstructing from religion. It was a lot. I'm better now, but being stuck in it all was overwhelming and was like being in an existential crisis every day until it ended. I just went along with it and kept it all inside for decades and it wasn't fun.

Consciousness and our sense of self. Is consciousness an illusion? What even is "me"? It includes all the gut bacteria and mitochondria with different DNA than us and our brains are these amazing pattern recognition machines that also have abysmal memory storage and recall, but can notice the tiniest of nuance sometimes, but also can't remember where we put the thing we were just holding 2 minutes ago. And all the while our brain is confidently telling us "I am me" and is processing all the inputs like sights and sounds and interpreting all that into what we think we see and what we think we heard. But did we? How would we know if upon seeing the color red our brain interprets that as blue and we confidently declare we see red.

[-] pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

Well we know nowadays that the universe isn't infinite, but is expanding, and the speed of expanding is accelerating. We don't know if that will keep accelerating, if the universe will keep expanding forever.

[-] Colonel_Panic_@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago

How can you know or prove something isn't infinite if you haven't even seen all of it yet? Isn't proving it impossible? We could prove it to NOT be infinite, but it's like proving the non-existence of something, you can't really prove an edge doesn't exist just because you haven't seen one.

[-] pumpkinseedoil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

Because of the cosmic microwave background.

Here, this covers it quite well on a very basic level https://www.space.com/33892-cosmic-microwave-background.html

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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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