We watched Bladerunner in 20th century yesterday, and our assignment at the end of class was basically to get into groups and discuss the meaning of everything. At first I thought the movie went way over my head and that there was nothing to talk about. But then I started talking to myself (the whole group thing didn't really work out) and I came to the following conclusion:
I do not exist.
My immediate reaction to this is to think, "What!? What kind of fucked up logic leads one to that conclusion?" I kind of don't want to accept it. But... assuming that time is infinite, and that I was born, and that I will die, my existance is a zero dimentional point on a one dimentional line. Theoretically it exists, but technically it has no size. It is infinitely small, so it just disappears. And when I cease to be concious, I won't even have the memories that extend my conciousness over a period of time. There will only be the present, and in the present, I will not exist. So why does it matter that I exist now? Everything - my personality, my thoughts, and my experiences will all be lost eventually. Like, honest to God destroyed. The kind of destruction that the laws of physics won't allow when it comes to things that exist.
I admit it: I am scared to death of dying.
The only thing that I can think of that might be "real" is the present. Which sucks, because I have spent my entire life trying to capture the present, and it never works. I suppose you have to think of the present as "traveling." Instead of saying, "Each moment in time is real as it is happenning," you have to think of it as, "Reality is a constant which travels from one moment in time to another, and we chase it."
But then there's the past, and that just confuses everything. Because the past is "real" to us to. But I'm pretty sure that, like in Bladerunner, this reality is only an illusion. I would like to understand what causes this illusion. How can we hold on to time when it no longer exists? And what's the point of holding on to it when we can only do so temporarily?
And thinking about the nature of the future just makes my head hurt.
Knowing that I don't exist made me feel very lonely for the rest of the day. I practiced trombone a lot (because I love music so much that sometimes I feel like it loves me back) and fucked around on this website (ah, the almighty internet. Of course it loves me back.) But loneliness persisted. Maybe I need to just stop thinking about it. Or, as another option, maybe I'm wrong and instead of nothing existing, everything exists.
On another note: I didn't like most of Bladerunner, honestly, but there was one scene that I found disturbingly sexy. Disturbing because he was forcing her, and, I think, sexy for the same reason. I tried to kind of dismiss it by saying "Damn you people, thinking you have to throw sex into philosophical scifi to appeal to the lowest common denominator." But something in that scene struck me as being not only sexy, but almost... romantic. Almost profound. I can't really describe it. It sticks in your memory. It's just wierd, is all.
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