The most enigmatic problems of this reality are unanswerable questions which one can waste an entire lifetime pondering over, but still worth pondering.
- Why does conscious experience exist?
- Who am I?
- Does God exist? If so, why does evil exist?
- Who is really in control of humanity?
Why does the phenomena of conscious experience exist?
The hard problem of consciousness asks why or how does conscious experience accompany living beings. I can empathize with my cat, and although he is not sentient, he is conscious and moral reasoning follows. If I don't feed my cat, he will suffer hunger pains, it would be wrong because my cat would experience undue suffering.
One theory may be that the phenomena of consciousness is just a consequence of our inability to perceive everything at once. Why do we experience time, and why does it sometimes seem faster or slower, regardless of the activity in our brains? Why does it feel like time has passed while we are definitely unconscious (sleeping)?
I feel that some people are actually more like automatons, they are NPCs from my perspective. This isn't even a modern idea, see The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann. There could be not enough souls to go around, so they have to simulate some people. I could be an automaton lacking divine light, but this seems impossible from my perspective since I am conscious and sentient.
It's possible that my experience of consciousness is more or less vivid than others. Schopenhauer wrote that "Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point". A heightened sense of awareness is not always a beneficial thing: ignorance is bliss. The conscious experience being far more painful than pleasurable is reason enough to voluntarily end the human species. The more intelligent people have less of a will to reproduce, translating to less or no mating effort. Every human birth isn't just a celebration, but a mourning for their suffering and death.
Note: while writing this part, a black moth materialized in my room and flew right next to me, it's been chilling on the wall. I have since grabbed it by its wings and threw it outside.
Who am I?
I've often entertained the idea that I am somehow special, or inherently possess something that some others don't (a soul, perhaps?). This idea taken to the extreme would be narcissism, and that wouldn't apply to me since I have humility. I feel that I am some entity experiencing the universe as some random human, and there are untold numbers of other sentient lives to live through and experience first-hand. This also means an untold amount of suffering, and I don't think I'd want to continue the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
Nothing I've been gifted with, feels deserved. Nor has any suffering or disability felt justified. It's just some rollercoaster of highs and lows, and it doesn't stop until death. I like to fantasize maybe that I have some superpowers, this is the appeal of comic-book heroes and myths. If so many supernatural feats have been attributed to so many people, why can't I manifest them? Or am I already manifesting somehow by staying on the timeline in which I am alive and conscious?
I didn't choose to spawn in the China server but move to the North American server, this is perhaps one of the greatest impairments of my life. The admins of the China server might actually care about the well-being of its people, while the North American server admins no longer do. Perhaps I am just one neuron in the noosphere, that all of humanity is connected. The worldbrain is capable of compassion, but also great cruelty and often lies to itself.
Does God exist? If so, why does evil exist?
These questions are seemingly inseparable from each other. If God exists but is perpetually silent, what consequence is there whether or not He exists? One can only make claims about how one's life will be judged after death. It would also be possible to sidestep the conundrum of who or what created the universe, if the universe has no beginning or end. It is also amusing that secular, scientific theories of the origin of the universe such as the widely accepted Big Bang theory at least mirror Abrahamic theology by assuming there was a beginning.
There's the fundamental unknowability of God, no matter how advanced our science and technology is, even if we give birth to artificial general intelligence, or learn how to modify the human genome to engineer future humans, or unlock biological immortality. AI researchers are trying to manifest their artificial God, but their God is not omnipotent nor omniscient (it may practically be omnipresent already though). As much as I enjoyed Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and The Possibility of an Island, I don't think that genetically engineered neo-humans would kill God in any sense. We exist in three spatial dimensions and the time dimension, but can't fathom a fifth dimension. Even if we were to discover an extra dimension, why wouldn't there be a multiverse of n-dimensional realms? Perhaps reality is recursive panentheism, always leading to unknowables.
When considering that young Earth creationists think that the Earth was created around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, it does coincide with the emergence of human civilization as we know it, and before that, the emergence of human sentience. One can think of the Jewish and Christian traditions as the spiritual underpinnings for most of Western civilization. A lot of secular people these days think that Christianity is merely useful as a tool of social control: according to Nietzsche, "the weaker folk, the majority…frame the laws [and, we might add, the morals] for their own advantage". To a modern bureaucratic bugman, there is nothing more than this physical world and secular laws.
I have never found answers for the Problem of Evil satisfactory. From the Christian perspective, the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which makes every other sin forgivable. The main argument I've heard is that God works in unknowable ways, but this is of course an unsatisfactory answer.
I think that the strongest evidence for the existence of God may be synchronicities, events which seem so meaningful yet are so improbable. Milan Kundera wrote in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" that "Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us." These aren't necessarily beneficial, they can point to a malevolent God. Early Christians or Gnostics believed that there is another deity, the demiurge, who created the material world, some may call him Yaldabaoth. So far I have only been referring to the Abrahamic God of the Old Testament, known by the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh. The demiurge or creator of the material world isn't benevolent to say the least.
Who is really in control of humanity?
The most obvious answer would be people who do not have human interests at heart. They don't fully control the world under one party, but there are blocs of alignment. A one world government would be inherently unstable as there would be elite in-fighting, but it is the dream of the narcissistic psychopaths in control. People who have empathy for others who they don't know in the abstract are rare, and these people would be even less likely to be in any position of power. I think that those who have unchecked power over others in this world have necessarily had to exchange their souls for it.
I can sense the depravity of the people who are really in charge, these people aren't necessarily extremely rich nor are they well known. I think that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut gave us a glimpse into the moral bankruptcy of those in charge: they had to prove themselves as transgressors to be powerful. Those who have the absolute power are unelected, the éminence grise behind the public faces. They are the members of the deep state who would summarily execute Edward Snowden if they could get their hands on him, and the public doesn't know their names or faces, they are above accountability.
The reason why nothing ever happens as the meme suggests, is because the powerful benefit from the status quo and want it to continue forever. They may allow performative protests and low-intensity conflicts, control opposition groups, and assassinate leaders of political opposition. The system always wins, because they plan multiple outs, not because they are incredibly competent or have such great foresight.
Systems of control necessarily rely on controlling the flow of information and suppressing the truth, much like a magic trick. Those who remain in power keep secrets, coerce others to remain silent, and propagandize the populace with lies. The entire purpose of intelligence agencies is to make you believe in absolute lies. They necessarily have to lie to you to maintain control, and are evil out of necessity.
Unfortunately most of humanity is complicit in their own slavery, I think this is one thing that the Matrix really got right: those who are slaves to the system are so dependent on it, they will risk their lives defending it. Morpheus's crew weren't just fighting agents, but slaves to the system. The most loyal slaves aren't the service workers and menial labourers of the world, it's the middle and upper class, people who work in Business Development, Sales & Marketing (BDSM), tech, finance, etc. People who directly serve the system like government bureaucrats, serve themselves first and screw over everyone else.