I felt the same way about three months back. As an atheist, I never believed we were here for a grand reason. I reasoned that in a natural universe, it was up to me to invent a purpose for myself. That worked really well until I realized my purpose was a complete lie motivated by an unhealthy need to make the whole world love me. Everything I had done in life, every goal I had set for myself, had been motivated by a fear I developed as a child in an abusive home. I searched my mind for a meaningful replacement purpose but found nothing. I had my first ever panic attack.

It began with an intense feeling of anxiety followed by a very numb dissociative feeling that lasted about a day. It felt as though my ability to feel emotions had been switched off, as if I had been replaced by a machine. I reasoned that if I could believe something so delusional, for so long, that had played such a huge role in my life, then surely there must be other equally irrational beliefs buried deep down inside me. Beliefs handed down to me by my genes, my parents, society, and culture. Beliefs I had not actually formed on my own. Beliefs that were given to me at a time when I lacked the capacity to question their merit and validity. Beliefs which dictated and shaped how I formed subsequent beliefs. Beliefs that my own cognitive biases, fears, and desires had prevented me from ever questioning and may never allow me to question. I had to start over. Where would I begin? What lay at the foundation of my belief system. I had to start at the top to get down to the root of this. “I believe _____ because I believe ________ is true. OK, why do I believe that? OK, why do I believe that?” What I discovered was that every path ended in one of two places, an instinct to survive and an instinct to procreate.

Everything, had been built up on top of these two biological drives. I had considered myself a rational person, but what was rational about that? It seemed that my intelligence and rationality were merely illusory abstractions. Qualities with only one real purpose, to continue life on this planet. Live to survive. I was living to survive. Almost everyone on this planet was simply living to survive. Why was that? Why was this fear of death so compelling? When does this absurdity finally come to an end. It can’t go on forever. Is that why we invented religion and immortality? So that living to survive would make sense? The evidence points to a universe that ends in heat death. At some point, when it comes to survival, we are going to fail. Wherever we go, however we evolve, we will meet our end. Living to survive didn’t make any sense to me. Was survival meaningful in some way that I had missed? The world seemed so simple to some people. Was I wrong about the soul? It seemed an awful lot like self-important wishful thinking to me. What gave people the idea that they had a soul?

It was then, for the first time, that I recognized I had been living as though I had a soul. It was mortal and I called it something else, but it was basically the same exact thing. The one belief I had never questioned was my own existence. Not the existence of the atoms in my body, those will survive my death. If I exist now, and I don’t have a soul, what could I possibly lose when I die? What is it that I think I have right now? What is this sense of self? This sense of identity I carry around with me? This sense that I an individual being that can think, dream, and feel? What does it even mean to be conscious and experience the world? Outside of my own subjective experience, there was zero evidence supporting the existence of the thing I called “me.” As someone working in machine learning and interested in neuroscience, the whole concept of consciousness seemed like just another “God of the gaps” argument. I discovered that even though I had understood the illogical nature of “free will” I had actually compartmentalized my long held belief that it was an illusion. My belief in free will had been built on my belief in my self. What the hell was I right then that I believed I was going to stop being when I finally died? I had gone into this with the desire to build a belief system based on evidence. Outside of my qualia and my subjective experience of the world, what evidence was there for my existence?

I considered the famous quote by Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” It seemed so simple for everyone else. I considered the logic of this statement for many hours. All I can really know is that I exist? Really? Is the fact that I can doubt my own existence actually evidence of anything? I went into this thing attempting to build a foundation for my belief system built on something other than wishful thinking. But where was the flaw in the logic? How could such an egocentric position be true? If this was the only assumption that one could make, how could one gain any knowledge? With this position, it seemed that nothing could actually be known. The majority of the word had its own personal god. It seemed to me that with this proposition, everyone had their own personal reality. How was that a useful position? What other position could I take? Descartes explored the idea that nothing existed but he rejected it. Ok, if nothing existed then I could not think. That seemed like a reasonable statement. But why did he jump from that to “therefore I must exist?”

I imagined what the least ego-centric position might look like. “I don’t exist,” I thought, “nobody does.” What would the reality of whatever it is that exists have to be such that I did not exist but believed that I did? “The universe exists therefore I falsely believe I think.” What would explain that? I started thinking about what our species knew collectively. Immediately, I realized that nothing could actually be known in this life. Ultimately, one has to start somewhere. One has to take something that really isn’t self evident and pretend that it is. I picked our collective scientific observations of the universe. I reasoned that if our collective scientific observations about the universe could not serve as knowledge in this quest then nothing could.

What do we know scientifically? The universe began. Hydrogen gas gave rise to stars and galaxies. Cooling gas and exploding stars gave rise to cosmic dust. Cosmic dust gave rise to planets. And at least one planet gave rise to life. And all of this, everything, is made of the same basic stuff. Whatever word we make up to describe it (e.g. particles, waves, energy, or tiny strings), everything we experience is made out of this stuff. How can a collection of particles be compelled to survive? What does it mean for a collection of particles to be alive, conscious, or thinking? What does it mean for a collection of particles to survive or avoid death? Was there any objective difference between life and non-life? Is a virus alive? Is there any objective difference between life and death? What is that difference?

These questions could not be answered for one very clear reason. Our language was developed to describe our subjective experience to one another, not to describe how it actually is. These questions assume that a difference exists. They cannot be answered in an objective measurable way because no objective difference exists. The lines separating these things is blurry because they are abstractions. The differences are constructed in our minds. When we begin this life, we start out as a single cell. Before that, we have a sperm and an egg. At what point does our life begin? Our first cell was a collection of molecules. That first cell did not think. It did not have free will. As one cell, we were molecules interacting with molecules. Interacting with the environment allowed it to divide. Isolated from the environment, this cell does nothing. It is an input output machine that requires the input of the environment to output another cell. Only by interacting with the environment could the cell duplicate and specialize.

At what point did this collection of molecules become a separate “thing” from its environment? At what point do these cells become more than a system of input output machines interacting with one another and their environment? At what point between one cell and one-hundred-trillion does this collection of molecules become a living, thinking, being with free will? On the logic, it never does. The abstractions we have invented have blinded us from the true nature of reality. These abstractions have shaped how we perceive and think about the world. We construct a subjective experience of reality which does not actually reflect reality, each of us constructing our own version, our own personal reality. When we think of that very first cell as a living thing, we separate it from the stars, the galaxy, and the universe. A living cell implies a non-living rock. Life implies death. Body implies mind. Self implies other. Observer implies observation. Thought implies thinker.

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