Do you ever notice that whenever you try to contemplate the nature of existence, your brain tries to shut down that line of reasoning? Go ahead. Try to think about what it means to be a thought-producing organism. Try to identify the exact origin of anything you think or feel. Try to ascertain what a thought or feeling even is. See how far you get.
Where do thoughts come from? Where do they go? If emotion is chemically driven, then what does it mean to be sad? If deciding is merely realizing what has already been decided by electrical impulses, then is that a decision at all?
“Nope!!” says your brain. “We’re not going there! Let’s think about something else! Anything else!” And the subject is hastily changed.
Brains pull out all the stops to get us to steer clear of metacognition, to avoid existential thinking, to ignore the wealth of evidence that says consciousness is an illusion, not an actual thing. Belief in existence is the religion of our times. Highly believable. Socially requisite. And false.
