/lit/ - Literature

You are part of a greater whole. There's nothing delusional about knowing that. You can break down anything in the universe from the human body to a rusty tin can to a blazing sun and it's all composed of atoms.

You could say atoms are the building blocks of the universe. Simple as. Except atoms are themselves made of protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are sub atomic particles which in turn are made of sub-sub-atomic particles which are in turn made of sub-sub-sub-atomic particles and so on and so forth. Break everything down small enough and you get to the "elementary particles" called leptons and quarks, which are the basic building blocks of matter.

So fundamentally everything is made of leptons and quarks then? All matter is, sure. But then not everything is made of matter is it? You come to the whole mind/body argument, where the body is a physical thing constructed of matter - but what is the mind? The mind - or consciousness - is simply energy. Like heat or light or electricity. Einstein’s most famous equation says that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. So energy and matter are really the same thing.

But not everything is matter or energy, not by a long shot. What about time? Is time matter or energy? Or is time just an abstract concept we invented? While we're at it, what exactly is a dream? What exactly is a joke?

It seems no scientist worth their salt can definitively claim what the universe is made up of. The entire discussion often becomes about semantics and like a dog chasing its tail after awhile it just makes your head spin. There are just far too many unknowns to wrap it all up and stick a nice bow on top.

But knowing that we're all in this together helps a little. We're all part of a greater whole, part of nature, part of the universe, part of God, programs bouncing off each other in a giant computer simulation, all uniquely coded from an infinite number of programming languages. Or are we a virus? Is Earth just a turd in the punchbowl of the universe, an experiment gone horribly wrong? However you choose to think about it is fine as long as it's right for you. But of course you're almost certainly wrong.

As Douglas Adams puts it: Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy.