Matrix Problem
The Matrix Problem is a classical example of an unfalsifiable thesis. What if this world isn't real and is simply a simulation? We have no way of knowing until we are unplugged and freed. Sure, it's a possibility but there is no evidence to suggest it. It's meaningless even if the very nature of the idea implies it cannot be provenm... that this is a simulation, means we won't be able to to prove it with any sort of data because we are inside it. The same logic can be applied to any god claim. For example, the very idea of a god necessitates that it is undetectable, hence the idea of a personal god is given with no evidence whatsoever. That's not good enough. I can make an infinite number of claims of this sort.
Snobby Food
I've been perusing videos on Youtube about some fancy food, including the Fat Duck, a very expensive restaurant that employs molecular gastronomy. Some people... many people feel the urge to troll it because it's not cooking in as strict sense as frying potatoes. People think it's snobby food, that you'd leave hungry. Do you really think a restaurant would survive if its customers left hungry? Think about it for a second, ok? Snobby, overpriced? So is the Mona Lisa and like every single famous painting, ever. Or any expensive precious stone, or expensive computer or car or house or whatever. What is the difference? OH YEAH! You don't care about food as much. So others are snobby elitists who have no life and are pretentious fools because they have different interests than you do? Or is it because food doesn't last forever? In that case, so does sex, movies, and life. Doesn't render pursuing those useless.
Death
These ideas are plucked straight from Sam Harris. But think about it. You will be no more distressed after you die than the billions of years before you were born.
'Most of us do our best not to think about death. But there’s always part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. Now, I’m sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form; you must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full time job of not dying, or of caring for someone who is... But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time — it’s not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal. This is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we’re going to waste our time like this.
There are ways to really live in the present moment. What's the alternative? It is always now. However much you feel you may need to plan for the future, to anticipate it, to mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. This may sound trite... but it's the truth... As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.
Whatever you can possibly notice in your body, mind or world has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience. I'm not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is like a dream. It is dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world and the dreams we call dreams we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world. That's why you seem to get away with everything. But you mind is all you have. It is all you ever had. It is all you have to offer other people. And this might sound callus to say when there are many other aspects of your life that seems in need of being addressed when you're struggle to find a career or you're sick, but it's still true. If you are perpetually angry and depressed and confused and unloving, it doesn't matter how much success or who is in your life, you're not going to enjoy any of it. I suspect we could all make a list of things we want to accomplish, things that really need to be changed in your life. What is the significance of everything on that list? Each thing on that list seems to promise that if you could only do it, you would have reason just to be happy in the present moment. We are all trying to find a path back to the present moment and good enough reason just to be happy here.'
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