The Art of Living an Absurd Existence Quotes

“If you’re lucky, in, let’s say eighty years, you close your eyes for the last time. Your children, grandchildren, friends, and family, whoever you still have left, if anyone, attend your funeral. They cry for a little while. Then, they mostly move on. They have to in order to survive themselves. In two hundred years, all direct traces of you are lost. Memories of you—how you looked, talked, and acted, what you did and didn’t do, the distant blur of your story—have all dissolved away with the last person who knew of you. By then, all perceptions of you had become inaccurate distortions and projections anyway, void of any authentic connection. If you did something especially noteworthy during your lifetime, direct traces of you may endure for a little longer. But not much longer. In one hundred thousand years, the twenty-first century is but a strange section in the record of history, occasionally reflected on by individuals who no longer relate to it in any meaningful way. Five million years. Most of the Earth’s species that existed during your lifetime are extinct due to the background extinction rate. They have all been replaced with new species. One billion years. There is no life left on Earth. 5.5 billion years. The sun cools and expands, consuming Earth completely. A once-lively planet billions of years old is wiped out without a trace—a grand finale of a light show with no ovation. The sun is dead. The Earth is gone. The universe doesn’t notice. There is so much time left. One hundred trillion years. The last remaining stars begin to die, fading out and burning up. The tombstones of newly formed black holes mark their gravesites. The universe becomes an expanding graveyard of the bones of evaporating stars. One duodecillion. Black holes swallow all the remaining stray matter in the universe. They will soon be all that remains. We will be here a while. Most of the universe’s lifetime is spent in these demented elderly years. Between one googol and one googolplex. The last massive black hole evaporates. One last explosion of light and energy occurs, closing the final eye of the universe. Time is no longer. Everything that has ever happened has now, as far as everything is concerned, never happened. The universe returns to nothing, and nothing happens forever.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“The term qualia refers to the internal, subjective, qualitative properties of experiences. This includes things like colors, tastes, and sensations (love, green, sweetness, sharpness, smoothness, and so on). And so, whether what we are perceiving is an accurate representation of the world depends largely on whether qualia, or our subjective experiences, are intrinsic properties of the world or merely a product of the mind—or some combination. Even if we can use tools to measure, test, and enhance our insights about the physical world, the final stop for everything is still the mind. We are always left with and limited by our cognitive and perceptual frameworks. Since we can never experience anything outside of the mind—including the mind itself—we can never know what anything is actually like outside of it. This is often referred to as the egocentric predicament.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Loneliness,” wrote Carl Jung”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Men are so necessarily mad”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“In his novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote, “Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Famously, Sartre wrote, “Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“For example, the classic omnipotence paradox, the paradox of the stone, shows that if God is omnipotent (all-powerful), he must be able to create a stone so large and heavy that even he can’t lift it. If he can’t create this stone, how can he be omnipotent? But if he can’t lift it, how can he be omnipotent? Similarly, if God is omniscient (all-knowing), then he knows everything that will happen, including every choice, intervention, and action he will ever make. Thus, he can never change his mind. If he does change his mind, he must have known that he was going to change his mind beforehand, and therefore, he wouldn’t be changing his mind. If he didn’t know he was going to change his mind, he must not be omniscient. If he can’t change his mind, he must not be omnipotent. Lastly, there is what is known as the problem of evil, which is defined as follows: If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, why does evil, tragedy, and suffering pervade the world? If God is omnipotent, he must be able to prevent evil and suffering. If he is also omniscient, he must be able to know and foresee it. And so, he either”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Being who you are is being who you become; and then being who you become; and then being who you become; over and over. Being yourself is a continual process of being someone else. In the end, there is nothing to find or be but a process of finding and being. These ideas and questions echo throughout human history, from modern neuroscience to the Buddha, from Advaita Vedanta to ancient Greek philosophers, and everywhere and everyone in between. For as long as we have known we are someone, we have struggled to pin down who that someone is.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Together, the ship of Theseus, the criterion of identity, the problem of universals, and the sorites paradox demonstrate how terms and concepts have a much looser relationship with reality than we like to think.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“If there was an island in the middle of the ocean where a highly infectious species lived, we would all avoid it. Likewise, if we would horribly infect the species, we would avoid it. Or if there was a species that lived on the island that was capable of outmatching and killing large quantities of humans or required humans to kill the entire species in self-defense, we would also avoid it. Perhaps it is the case that, to more advanced lifeforms, we are that species, and that island is Earth.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“In truth, for all of us, if we look into our body and mind to try to find precisely and concretely who or what we are—that central, persistent something that makes us us—we find this strange nobody-ness.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“You don’t know why you dreamt, and you don’t know why your brain created those particular arrangements of experiences, memories, and imagined concepts blended together into a specific, self-induced mental simulation of reality. In between each dream, there was nothing—a deathly oblivion that you dipped in and out of with each oscillating type of brain wave. After this roller coaster of fantastical simulations and unconsciousness, you get up. You likely stand under a spout that pours a stream of liquid onto you. You rub some slimy goop on the outer layer of your body so it doesn’t smell bad, because you might smell after having lain down and done nothing for several hours. After cleaning yourself, you likely put some stuff in the large opening of your face—almost certainly some form of dead plants or animals. You need to do this in order to keep yourself alive. You probably pushed some stuff out of a smaller hole on the opposite side of your body around this time as well. You’ll have to do some of these tasks again numerous times throughout the day. You might not remember to until your body starts creating an uncomfortable sensation, reminding you when to do things. You will likely interact with other people throughout the day. Perhaps you will collaborate with people in an effort toward some goal of work; perhaps you will more casually interact with people whom you were born in biological association with; or perhaps you will spend time with people whom you have met and liked enough to keep around. Whoever they are, in order to interact and communicate with them, you will attempt to translate electrical firings in your brain using thoughts and words by moving the bottom of your face up and down in order to reverberate the air and create electrical firings in these other people’s brains. And then vice versa. You will likely (understandably) have a fairly hard time during some of these interactions. Throughout the day, you will also pass by strangers—people you have never met and will likely never see again. Each one of these people will be moving through their own entirely unique, complex life, experiencing this moment with just as much central feeling and perspective as you. They will see you how you see them—indifferently, if at all. You will live and move across the surface of the planet throughout the day while the planet itself moves and lives across some unending space of apparent nothingness, which neither you nor anyone else throughout the history of the planet has ever had any real, accurate clue about. In every moment, the Earth will move to a different position in space, never to return to the same place again.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Perhaps philosophical progress is not found in the uncovering of truths but rather in our acceptance of the harsh reality that there aren’t any—at least none that we have access to. Perhaps we are all trapped in the fly-bottle, and no one’s coming to let us out. But through things like science and math, music and art, and philosophy, we can make the most of our time with each other in here while we are still in here.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“If the entire history of the universe were compressed into one day, modern humans wouldn’t appear until after the last single second. A blink. And each of our individual lives takes place within this second, lasting around four ten-thousandths of that fraction of a fraction of a fraction. And the universe has only just begun. Here we are, within this tiny, infinitesimal moment of time, so tied up with it, with everything we are and everything we do. We think this sliver of something means everything, because to us, it does. But to everything, we mean nothing.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“This issue is known as the black hole information paradox.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“And the perverse societal perception of loneliness only makes many of us feel more lonely—a sense that we are uniquely alone in the feeling. And so, what we need is the occasional reminder that to feel separate, to feel strange, to feel mad, to feel like no one knows, connects us all. We are perhaps the least alone when we feel alone.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“While we are here, we will experience things, we will cry, we will laugh, we will hopefully love, we will know what it means to have awoken as an embodied collection of dead particles on a strange, lushly coated rock floating through a vast expanse of energy and matter made from and destined for apparent nothingness. We will worry. We will dread. We will try. We will fail. We will move on. We will die. We will be forgotten. But for now, we are here. In truth, even if we could, to fully take in the profundity of what is going on in every moment would rupture our ability to carry out the everyday. But likewise, not considering the absurdity and insanity of what’s taking place around and through us, at least on occasion, can cause us to easily become submerged in falsity, in mundanity, in misunderstanding, in unnecessary anxiety and stress. While we are here, our lives naturally consume us. But in the end, insignificance consumes all life. If we consider our existence with this in mind, we might be able to better determine what we truly want to be consumed by while we are still here—because the rest of the universe will continue on indifferently until it ends, or continues on forever. Regardless, you almost certainly won’t be around for any of it, and it will all be over so quickly. Blink. That’s how long the rest of the universe will feel.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“you’ve ever explored this subject, you’ve almost certainly heard the quote attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Currently, these two pillars work very well on their own but don’t often work very well together, and their unification is generally accepted as one of science’s great contemporary challenges—the overcoming of which (in the form of some unifying equation) would be potentially deemed the theory of everything. Both of these pillars, however, appear to find themselves in a rather strange situation inside black holes, where neither seems to work. Based on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes create a singularity. However, a singularity is impossible. You can’t have an infinite density or infinite gravitational force or infinite anything in physics. Infinity, to our knowledge, cannot be real in a physical, measurable sense, and when it appears in equations, it’s essentially a sign of an error or impossibility. And thus, Einstein’s theory breaks down. At the minute scale of the singularity, typically quantum field theory would step in. But quantum field theory can’t work here either because it can’t yet explain gravity, and the functions of black holes and the singularity are primarily based on gravity. And so, it seems that somewhere between the edge and core of black holes is either the collapse of both theories, destroying much of our understanding of everything, or the unification of both theories, creating a supposed ultimate theory of everything. In this sense, the primary answer needed for the complete understanding of the universe happens to potentially be contained in a place that nothing can seem to ever enter and come out of—a final frontier of human knowledge guarded by a mammoth-sized, galactic beast.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Math is often considered to be the language of the universe, and so, if something in math reveals a quality of reality that seems to exceed the limits of our comprehension, does that reveal something that nonetheless exists as a function of objective, physical reality despite our mind’s inability to comprehend it, or does it reveal that logic and mathematics are, at least to some degree, contrived or manipulated by the human mind and, when taken to the extreme, fail when applied to actual reality? The concept of infinity reveals either our genius or our insanity.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Loneliness,” wrote Carl Jung, “does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“All of the ideas and questions found in this hallway of thought experiments—the Chinese room, created by John Searle in 1980, Mary’s room, created by Frank Jackson in 1982, and the brain in a vat, created by Gilbert Harman in 1973 (inspired by René Descartes’s evil demon)—reveal the inherent difficulty of understanding the mind from within the mind. They reveal how little we truly know about what makes us who we are. They reveal the potential limits of language and knowledge as vehicles powerful enough to transcend the bounds of their origins. And perhaps most beautifully, they reveal the brain’s desire and ability to try anyway—to experiment with itself in novel ways and to attempt to use the material of its own thoughts to manufacture new vehicles.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“This experiment, referred to by the agency as Mary’s room, attempts to explore and demonstrate the knowledge argument, which is the claim that there are truths related to conscious experience that cannot be described or known by mere knowledge of physical facts.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Similarly, if God is omniscient (all-knowing), then he knows everything that will happen, including every choice, intervention, and action he will ever make. Thus, he can never change his mind. If he does change his mind, he must have known that he was going to change his mind beforehand, and therefore, he wouldn’t be changing his mind. If he didn’t know he was going to change his mind, he must not be omniscient. If he can’t change his mind, he must not be omnipotent.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Activation-synthesis hypothesis argues that dreams are merely a product of random neural activity taking place in the brain stem, and that the cerebral cortex then attempts to make sense of the meaningless activity by forming thoughts and stories out of it. Other theories suggest that dreaming helps memory, learning, or forgetting unnecessary or harmful information, dreaming either being a primary or secondary phenomenon that arises out of these neurobiological processes. Theories like threat simulation theory and social simulation theory argue that dreams serve as sort of practice to develop one’s abilities and improve the likelihood of success in threatening events or important social situations.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“between reality and non-reality blur, and an entire, self-created realm of existence is experienced. But what exactly is this realm? What are the implications of experiencing it—something that seems so real but isn’t? Why do we experience it? How do we experience it? Why do we even sleep and dream at all?”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“over the eighty-year course of an average lifespan, the average person spends around twenty-three years asleep, or about one-third of their lifetime.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Being who you are is being who you become; and then being who you become; and then being who you become; over and over. Being yourself is a continual process of being someone else. In the end, there is nothing to find or be but a process of finding and being.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“Perhaps the most fundamental thing that makes us feel like the same person across our lifetime is our memory.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think

“essentially all the cells that comprise your body are replaced anew every ten years or so, and so your body is never physically the same anyway.”
― Robert Pantano, The Art of Living an Absurd Existence: Paradoxes and Thought Experiments That Change the Way You Think