This is a reoccuring thought I've been having recently:
Basically, I had this mad epiphany where I thought it might be possible for our entire perspective of existence to be imaginary. Every stimulation, emotion and sense we feel may all just be nothing more than our conciousness making the universe a virtual reality where our bodies are the 'computers' which process all the information we think, see, hear, smell, taste and feel around us.
Here's why I think that:
If you look at, for example, a human being. Take me, Im 6 feet tall and 10 stone 8, a perfectly average human. If we examine my body closer, we see that it's not one thing, rather many organs working for the good of the 'one'. Even the organs themselves are made of various tissues and those tissues are made up of individual cells working together as a group. Cells of course are the smallest living thing on Earth. But cells aren't the end of it, and in fact are made up of non-living organic molecules (which are basically long chains of carbon atoms bonded together). And those atoms are just individual atoms if we take them out of the chain. In those atoms there are even smaller, sub-atomic particles - the nucleus (protons and neutrons) and the electrons. The electrons orbit the nucleus, but what's in between the electrons and nucleus? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. In fact, if we use a tennis ball to represent the nucleus of an atom, then the electrons would be in orbit 2 miles around the tennis ball.
It is important to note the amount of empty space because in fact atoms aren't solid 'pieces' of matter. They are 'bundles' of energy which vibrate to a certain freqency. So if this is the case, and these non-living, non-solid atoms form molecules > cells > tissues > organs > me... Then how am I solid or living? How can something which is literally just tiny vibrations of energy frequencies give rise to something like me, as I sit here contemplating myself? It means that I am every cell in my body and every atom in that cell.
Atoms are energy. And since everything in the universe, not just living things like us and cats and plants or whatever but EVERYTHING, is made up of the same atoms, then how can any of it be real?
The big bang theory suggests that at the beginning of time, there was just one star - a tiny golf ball sized star. This star wasn't made up of many different peices like I am, rather this star was one piece. It exploded and spread outwards and every piece of this one star was split into an infinite number of smaller versions of itself - everything in the universe. So, if all the atoms in the universe came from one original atom, that means that everything is one. We are all made of the same thing (which is essentially nothing). This process of oneness can be seen more obviously back here on Earth.
4 billion years ago the first self-replicating cell came into being through millions of atoms forming organic molecules which in turn formed the cell. This cell divided and divided and became a group of cells. I won't get into the details of evolution (at least not in this blog) but for the sake of sticking to me as an example of a human, I evolved like this: There was that one cell > a group of cells (tissue) > organs > organism. The early animals were bilateral animals and couldn't move. Eventually they developed motility (probably due to predation or competition) and evolved into something which wasn't a bilateral thingy anymore. It was an early fish. Well the process repeated itself and over the next billion or so years that fish became an amphimbian which then became a reptile which then became a rodent which then became a monkey which then became an ape which then became me and you. When I say "x 'became' y", I obviously don't mean it just happened but as I said I'll talk about that at another time.
What was the relationship between the story of my evolution and the story of the big bang then?
With the story of evolution, the end result is millions of different species which all shared a common ancestor - that very first self replicating cell. The atoms from this cell are still in every plant, animal bacterium, virus and fungus today. Every single living thing is intimitely related to each other. FACT. As for the big bang theory? Well it's the exact same story. An infinite amount of atoms came to being from the explosion of one single atom. So if we trace our family tree back even further than that first cell, if we trace it back to the creation of time it means that everything in the entire universe was, at that time, one thing. And this also means that everything that exists now is still all one thing.
If we viewed everything as a system, the way I did with my cells being organised into tissues etc, and said hypothetically that organisms on earth are like cells, then the earth itself must be the organism. Since all organisms are related, we all depend on each other for survival. If there were no plants humans would die. But if there were no plants, so too would the Earth die because there would be no carbon sequestration and our planet would overheat.
Anyway, like I was saying: if you viewed individual species as being like cells in our bodies, and we all interact with each other to form various ecological systems, then the ecosystems are like the earth's tissue, and the larger climate defined biomes are like the organs - making the earth a decent analogy for an organism.
To get back to my original point about reality, I'll talk about holograms. A hologram is a real-time 3 dimensional image which looks completely solid but is completely made of light. A hologram is made of millions of tiny images of what the big picture is. If I was to make a hologram of a guitar, it would be made out of millions of tiny images of the guitar. The same image. The point I'm trying to make is that our experiences of the world outside us aren't real. How could we see things that are ouside if we view the outside world in the back of our brain? How can we touch things that aren't solid? How can we hear things hat only vibrate at a tiny frequency? and the same for taste, smell etc. The fact is that we don't. We see, touch, smell, taste and hear what our brain thinks the outside world is. What are actually sent to our brain are just electrical signals that our brains use to try and translate the frequencies of these energies outside us. So if everything in the whole universe is made out of an infinite amount of atoms, which incidentally were born from a single atom, then what is the universe?
The universe is just another atom and the universe is inside every single atom which constitutes the universe. We are and are part of the universe. We make our own existense possibly by convincing our mind that something exists out there. But it doesn't.
It's just a hologram. Nothing is alive, nothing can ever die just shift to a different energy fequency.
So chill the fuck out :-)
More to come soon. Thanks for reading!
