Comic Strips

I am still torn about free will. Some of my darkest crashes in life have been realizing that I don't know the "source" of my own thoughts and cognition, meaning I found my "rails." I realized that my thoughts are being generated and I'm only responding to them.

But even if we're just riding along on basically a movie with the illusion of free-will, we are still experiencing it, and that is something that lay outside even our interpretations of the universe and freedom of choices. Sure, your entire cognitive experience might be generated by neurons simulating a reality from deterministic information input, but there is still some "thing" that gives you a singular experience of the universe out of that. It might not be free-will, but maybe our notions of free will are lacking, maybe there's something else that means more than whether or not you can actually decide out of "nowhere" if you're going to walk into the next room. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness and why no matter how many tests we do and how many brain patterns we scan, we can never actually know if you see blue the same way I do.

This is the only thing that's separate from our memory, our experiences, our timeline, whether or not it's on rails. Everything else is a simulation your brain is running and the structure of that brain evolving through time.

Forgetting doesn’t fixes mental problems, it can actually exacerbate them since you wouldn’t have the memory to explain why you have these seemingly random fears.

Sure, I agree but we're still just talking about brain structure. There are massive parts of your brain, countless "layers" of thought, recognition, analysis and reasoning, but you're not aware of them. This is why trauma can haunt you even if you don't remember it, this is why someone who has a head injury can sometimes develop an entirely new personality, this is why if you have your hemispheres separated, someone can show your non-verbal hemisphere a picture of a cat, then instruct your verbal side to draw a picture and you will draw a cat without knowing why, and even make up a memory on the spot for why you decided to draw a cat.

six flags

Maybe unrelated but since we're jamming with random ideas about consciousness, it's a good time to make a small rant about how time-travel is portrayed in fiction. It's utterly impossible to "go back" in time, since every point in time is just a potential configuration of space and particles. The only way you can see the past is reassemble the entire universe from starting conditions until it has that configuration again. If you were able to "rewind" time, your brain would also rewind and you would just be experiencing that configuration again without any knowledge of future events.

But really, we can't even say for certain that six flags exists. We can't say for certain that the universe didn't spring into existence 5 minutes ago, and your brain is just assembling a reasonable explanation for your world, six flags and quasars and elephants and childhood trauma and all... it may be doing this at every moment.

All we can say for certain is that you are experiencing something right now and everything else is branching off that experience. This is idea can send people (like myself) into deep spirals of solipsistic despair, but I think at the end of the day I will take this over the alternative.