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The Redundancy of Sentience
Our brave new world of soulless doppelgängers
“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead — dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”
— William Wilson, Edgar Allan Poe
Perhaps the people you speak to are figments of your imagination or part of your created dreamscape? There is nothing that definitively tells me or defines me as existing in an individuation of being. Not even the Cogito ergo sum of Descartes is enough to save you.
I am thinking these words and constructing sentences that have meaning to express those thoughts, and then writing them down. But it could all still be a dream — I could be a butterfly dreaming of being a man, writing,
“Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.”
— Zhuangzi, Chapter 2 (Watson translation)
Or an illusion, or the product of an AI, or an avatar within a hologram of a…
