Philosophers tackle a multitude of problems while stepping ever closer to what we want to believe is a rational deterministic world, with hints of indeterminate parts or at least a little wiggling room for freewill and the entropy we crave. The closer we look, the more confusing and irrational reality becomes. Language breaks down, atoms seem to have no set properties, space time becomes more and more enigmatic. One eventual comes to a point that we feel the need to escape belief.
Just how entangled are we with reality? I'm driven to say odd things like; nothingness is impossible. The nature of reality itself is counter-intuitive. The language we need to make a distinction between what exists and what does not, is absurd. We think the greatest part of an atom is nothing. Atoms are a lot more space than elemental particles. Even empty space doesn't seem that empty. String theory leads us to believe that even empty space has an energy level above zero. Lawrence Krauss puts it like this:
“We've got this weird antigravity in the universe, which is making the expansion of the universe accelerate. Now: if you plug in the equations of general relativity, the only thing that can 'anti- gravitate' is the energy of nothing. Now: this has been a problem in physics since I've been a graduate student. It was such a severe problem we never talked about it. When you apply quantum mechanics and special relativity, empty space inevitably has energy. The problem is, way too much energy. It has 120 orders of magnitude more energy than is contained in everything we see!” -Krauss
We occupy the lesser part of reality. Not so empty, empty space play a much greater role on a huge stage that is so grand that it is too large to view.
Nevertheless, that is only a small part of what is confusing. Many philosophers have argued against the notion that we are the sum of our parts. Every single part of the human body is made of atoms, but we are not those atoms. It doesn't matter if cells are dieing, atoms are coming and going, it doesn't change the notion of what a person is. Even more troubling we are not our cells. Cells act and behave like independent organisms. You can take a same of tissue from a person and grow it in a petri dish they go on living and functioning. If that amount of independence isn't disturbing. According to Science Daily human cells in a body are out numbered by bacteria cells by a ratio of 10-1. That means only 10% of our bodies are made of cells that are encoded with human DNA. By mass the human body is somewhere around 70% water. You have to have water to live, but water isn't alive. Now to top off everything the atoms we are made of are 99.99999999% empty space according to Peter Russell. Since we are approaching 0% human, and 100% just plan consciousness, reality itself is approaching zero.
Looking at the numbers nihilism becomes more and more attractive. Maybe if we were to give meaning a value it would be a really small number approaching zero but never getting there. A near nihilistic universe. Since there is very little to reality one can always say, it's almost nothing, but at least it is something. That may mean in string theory terms meaningless has a 120 magnitude more reality than is contained in everything else or maybe consciousness itself is a kind of dark energy.
