Assigment 21 - Oliver Fister - The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (spoiler alert, there is none)

One question that I find fascinating is whether or not God exists. The fact that the human race has come up with so many answers but no definitive one. It's a problem that everyone has there own answer to, and each answer, to them, is the definitive answer. After countless hours of research (mostly youtube videos) from the two "main" sides (Mainstream Christianity vs. Atheism/Agnosticism) I've come to the conclusion that I'm agnostic, even though I was raised Christian pretty heavily. After examining everything, there's simply no hard evidence to believe a god or anything supernatural exists, or is necessary for the universe to exist. Furthermore, why do so many different religions, from Christian sects to the countless other belief systems of the world, believe they have the correct belief? The nail in the coffin for me rejecting Christianity was this fact: that religious belief is almost always dependent on where you live/what your parents taught you. I also think it's quite silly for humans to think we need or even deserve some kind of savior. We're just apes that evolved to get really big brains, and we tend to believe there are things that aren't there; we created God in our image, and after hundreds of generations we still feel like we need him for answers. I personally believe there is no answer - either we live and simply die, which seems to make sense, or the answer to what we are and what existence is more profound or abstract than humans could possibly dream of.

The one thing I can't get past is the problem of consciousness. Not that minds exist; I understand fully that evolution is perfectly capable of creating brains from matter that therefore generate minds. But - and I'll do my best to explain my sentiments - the fact that I am me. I experience myself. That even though my brain is made of simply matter that I have a whole mind, confined to myself and my lifetime. That I'm aware of this at all. We've created AI that can think and accomplish tasks, and we see mice in the labs solving problems as well. Those are brains, those are minds. But we don't see them for what's on their inside. Each person experiences their own experience, their own soul, exclusive to them. That even though we are just matter we have perspective, self-awareness. If our eyeballs catch some light reflecting off an object of a certain wavelength, we don't see that. We see an orange, or a stick, or a rock, or a book. That even though there's intelligence in software and other animals made out of matter, we don't appear to ourselves to be just matter. AI can think, mice can think, but as far as we experience of them they're just software or synapse connections firing off according to programming or instinct. For all we know they're just dark, soulless machines. But each person personally observes the world; to them, to me, to you, our brains aren't just matter, it's a perspective. I hope that made some sort of sense. But if you're reading this and are alive and aware, you might know what I'm talking about. Although, I don't find this as proof of some sort of anthropomorphic creator deity - it's just an oddity of the universe, of the mind, of perhaps even a soul, that we may never truly fully understand.

I enjoy not knowing "what lies beyond". I find it futile to pretend to know. I don't fear death because with this newfound perspective I recognize that this really is the only life I've got, and I'm also able to make the most of it. And when I do die it'll simply be the next great adventure, something new to explore, to figure out. If we do have incorporeal souls, I believe that our memories and personalities stay dead with our bodies. We don't just pop into some non-physical paradise at our peak mental and physical shape and meet up with all our dead loved ones. That's just Earth, with less "bad stuff" at first glance but way more questions. Maybe we get recycled or reincarnated somehow; maybe our spirits just wander the quantum realm, fizzling in and out of existence, flowing through time and space and matter, formless, thoughtless, but still there. And if we simply go out like a candle, like Mark Twain put it: 

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”