There are always these questions, questions that never lead you to any destination but leave you astray. I came to the realization that I do not know what Tolkien meant when he wrote “Not all those who wander are lost”. How do you know whether you’re lost or not when you don’t know the destination? Even the idea of a destination sounds rather illogical, the divine purpose was always a lie to make us feel better about the mundanity. 

Meaning is just a human construct, it has no validity beyond us and our subjective experience. When you dive deep into the whole “search for meaning” you end up in a state of helplessness. 

All I could ever comprehend at the end of the day was this reality of how everything is nothing but a result of some simple neurochemical computation. All the happiness, the sadness, the love, the despair, the calm, empathy, everything is simply the existence of certain chemicals inside the brain. When you are lucky enough to be the one with the good genes, it makes the whole survival a bit easier. Apparently, nature does have favorites. 

Humans are nothing but these prediction machines that are running wild as if the subjective experience associated with these computations is blessed by the divine.

There is this beautiful definition of life someone said, “Life is simply an information processing system in the flesh where we represent ideas about the world in the quaternary representation and nature is the one that selects whichever representation is better suited for passing it down”.

One plus one is two, but you don’t know what you feel about it. You don’t really feel anything, one plus one is two and that’s the end of it, there is no feeling associated with that reality (unless you are a woke Karen with a liberal arts degree, then there is this whole privilege theory and how math is racist and sexist and stuff. but let’s just skip that to keep our sanity). 

Maybe we are evolved to feel that way, never to understand the underlying computations but only to understand what they make us feel. It is quite a beautiful process when you think about it. An elegant reward process to make us survive the complex physical systems that we are embedded in. 

Deep down you are happy only because of certain chemicals, you are miserable because you don’t have certain chemicals. And when you are smart enough to figure out how to change these chemicals inside the brain for your own devious plans, the whole world is yours to play with. Smart people and corporations and the algorithms that run the world know enough to trap us in these illusions of choice and freedom. That is a heavy burden that we shouldn’t ponder too much about it. 

One of the most beautiful things about all of this existence is, how we are billions of years of lineage. Billions of years of casual history that is compressed into the genome and keep passing it down to the next generation. Maybe it could be one of the most beautiful pieces of art that were ever created, we are just too dumb to understand the beauty of it. 

Maybe we do have our own ways to understand the beauty of it all. When you see someone on the mountaintop watching the sunset in silence, you don’t think about the causal history of existence, you don’t think about the lineage or the genome or all the computations that are happening inside the brain. All you are thinking about is the same old cliches and cringe poetries about the way they smile, their eyes, and that deep human connection that just makes sense in that simple moment. 

We are always haunted by the questions to make sense of the complexities of all this. From the obvious questions like, what is intelligence to why this subjective experience is associated with the way we perceive the world to are we some agents bounded by the genome and the environment, or are we something more?

One thing that I have learned over the years is that when you start asking deep questions about life, it branches into more questions rather than giving an answer that you want to hear.

We are aware of this existence but are completely oblivious to its mechanics and nature. There is this sense of helplessness about it that we rarely ponder about, yet we walk like we know the destination.