01 We are Truly Alone

2025-01-23

Table of Contents

“I am free and that is why I am lost.” – Franz Kafka

Preface

Before reading this article, I encourage you to read my disclaimer, now more than ever. The content of this post is atypical of what I generally entertain, but it’s necessary, to begin with these outrageous claims to build a basis for why we make decisions. Only from there can we understand what motivates our choices and how this makes us uniquely human. Much of the content may seem unrealistic, but I ask you to humor me. This post is more of a mind dump than it is actual revelations or guidance, and I hope you can see what I constantly am reminded of. Find your purpose.

Sentience Isolation

René Descartes proposed the following solution in his treatise Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences for the fundamental question of the proof of our “consciously” existence (note this is orthogonal to proof for our corporeal existence): “I think, therefore, I am.” As you will see, this is quite strong evidence for the existence of each individual and unique conscience. This is because every one of us is simply (and no better explained than) the protagonist of our stories. From birth, we only ever experience life from our perspective. On the surface, this claim is relatively superficial; we each understand this. But, I implore you to question if you can verify this for others. I’ve pondered this, and the conclusion I’ve come to is “no.” I can’t imagine the distinct, individual chain of thought that occurs by experiencing life from another person’s perspective - the one thing that uniquely makes each our own person. In this individuality, I find isolation.

There is a vast sea of personalities (which I would, in this context, define as the unique patterns in how a person thinks - method) between each person. There may very well be a finite set of shared beliefs, values, and methods as we seem to, on occasion, understand others’ thought processes; however, in general, there are immeasurably more of these mutually exclusive “chains of thought” (thought processes) that occur inside each of our conscience. The salient notion in this realization is that no one on earth can entirely and adequately understand our complex “personality.” We are forever imprisoned in our minds with no meaningful escape, and in this fact, we are indeed alone.

Corporeal Isolation

Now, the alternatives arise: “If no one can ever truly understand me, at least I can confide in others?” However, I argue it isn’t that simple. Corporeal existence may be, in fact, an illusion as well. After all, the ultimatum is that we are truly alone.

Cosmological Isolation

First, I’d like to tackle cosmological isolation, as it’s much more straightforward to reason about than existential isolation. The simplest suggestion for our isolation on a little floating rock orbiting a mildly bright sphere in the corner of our galaxy is the Fermi paradox.

Briefly, Enrico Fermi suggested the following chain of thought to explain the discrepancy between the high probability (and frequency, by consequence) of intelligent, advanced, extraterrestrial life yet the lack of conclusive evidence:

  • There are billions of stars in the Milky Way similar to the Sun.
  • With high probability, some of these stars have Earth-like planets in a circumstellar habitable zone.
  • Many of these stars, hence their planets, are much older than the Sun. If Earth-like planets are typical, some may have developed intelligent life long ago.
  • Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step humans are investigating now.
  • Even at the slow pace of currently envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.
  • Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.
  • However, there is no convincing evidence that this has happened.

The lack of convincing evidence suggests out of all the probable events, only Earth had spawned life and, as a result, (relatively) intelligent, rational human beings. There are many proposed reasons for this, including the idea of multiple obstacles/blockades preventing other Earth-like planets from developing intelligent life (one of these being that evolution is significantly more complex and correspondingly orders more unlikely than we currently imagine). If you are more of a visual learner, Kurzgesagt has uploaded fantastic videos explaining the Fermi paradox and possible solutions. This stands to reason that we are likely, cosmologically, alone.

Ontological Isolation

Logic derived from the likelihood of events by the probability of their occurrence, like the example above, opens the doors for many skeptical yet probable refutations to arguments for our ontological existence.

“Erasaphobia” is the (unofficial) term for the irrational fear of living in an inescapable simulation. However, this fear of digital simulation may not be as irrational as you may think. With current technology, we are already capable of near-perfectly simulating physics at every strata and adequately at long time periods (usually by accelerating time in the simulation). Artificial Intelligence has, likewise, revolutionized our capability to simulate intelligent beings. The projected timelines to achieving artificial general intelligence (and likewise artificial sentience) are shrinking; it won’t be long until we are able to perfectly simulate long. Now consider this took our species only about 25,000 years from inception. If this is possible (which it very likely appear to be), consider the following:

  • The “real” world, existing in the “real” universe achieves the capability to simulate the universe itself at 10,000x their rate of time
  • This simulated world then becomes capable of simulating artificial life themselves, again at 10,000x their rate of time
  • This new, nested, simulation then becomes capable of simulating the universe and life as well
  • … and so on

Assuming each simulation is able to solve the memory problem associated with simulating their observable universe, this chain of simulations can continue near-indefinitely. Now consider this: suppose there are 10,000 levels of simulated worlds, is it more likely that you currently exist in the 1 real world out of the 10,000 or one of the 9,999 simulated worlds? This is known as the Simulation Hypothesis. The conditions of this thought experiment suggest that our objective reality is many more times likely a simulation than the perceived alternative, a subjective reality.

Entropy is a core principle of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy in an isolated system cannot decrease. Consequently, an isolated system, like our universe, tends towards thermodynamic equilibrium. That is to say that an action that increases disorder in an environment will eventually evolve towards equilibrium. Consider the following: you are in a room and you sneeze. The particles released from your body are traveling at an incredible velocity; however, over time the particles in the room settle into equilibrium with minimal movement, all variables remaining constant. In this example, we are unable to accurately model the position and velocity of every quanta of information that changes in the environment. In this settling towards equilibrium, there are near-infinite possible states of particle organization possible. In this expansive set of states, even the smallest probabilities of states may occur due to random chance.

Now, suppose that the environment, or isolated system, is our universe containing all particles necessary for life. Is it more likely that random particle organizations can develop into brain-like structures that are capable of “thinking” or that every step towards evolution, no matter their improbability, happened in sequence exactly to our current state of reality? Boltzmann argues that there is vastly greater probability that these “brains” occur spontaneously and with enormous frequencies and just as quickly dissipate than for every improbable step for evolution to occur as we believe it to have occurred. These spontaneous particle organizations into thinking “brains” are termed Boltzmann brains. Given that these Boltzmann brains are more likely than our argument for evolution, it is consequently likely that your current existence is a spontaneous organization of particles forming a thinking, rational, intelligent mind in which memories have been encoded as electrical signals rather than observed experiences. In this, we are alone; nothing that we experience is truly “real” and everyone we know might as well be a figment of our imagination as we don’t yet possess the technology to verify our very own existence.

Nihilism

I know, it seems absurd. Every single concept of our objective reality seems contrary to our subjective reality that we live through every day. So why does it matter? Why even care? Why live day to day knowing in the back of your mind there is no legitimate reason for any of the decisions we make and no “real” consequences to our actions other than superficial goals of pleasing ourselves, others, our parents, our colleagues, etc.?

I’d argue that many people align more easily with their sentience isolation as it appears more plausible than the stochastic sequence of events we call life. And in the end it doesn’t matter. We live lives that are inconsequential in the grand scope of the universe and likely are just simulated interactions between digital models of physics. In this vast ocean of isolation, the only assumption we need make to get by is that someone else is probably thinking the same thing. We hold onto these loose connections to others in hopes of understanding our own purpose. In this “lead-by-example” world, we create structure and from that structure we impose our morals, laws, personal beliefs, and connections, until we realize, or even having already come to the realization, that there is no structure. We are each born with fundamental freedom from every thing that ties us down, yet we can’t exist without this structure. In the back of our minds, we know for certain that there never was any structure to begin with, and so the cycle continues.

So, what should you do? In my humble opinion the first thing to do is realize the obvious. Only from there can you truly decide what it is you want to achieve in this short life filled with random timers and deadlines. And that, is something that I can say with confidence we were born to figure out for ourselves - the only decision we have true, absolute freedom in deciding. Yes, that’s it, freedom, raw and unfiltered freedom.