i do not exist

Stephen Hawking has convinced me I do not exist.

In his new book, Hawking omits all references to "God", saying he's not needed any more. He also takes some jabs at philosophy.

Well them be fighting words, Stephen.

I've been toying around lately with the idea of fundamentalist agnosticism -- that there is no way we can know whether a concept called "God" exists or not, and we can never know. That this deep state of unknowing is a necessary condition for a balanced life.

As part of that, it also occurred to me that i do not exist.

Think about it: in the grand scheme of things i am but one person in billions, living for a flash of an instant on a fairly young rock that's already hurdled billions of times around its star and will hurdle billions of more time. I might get to see a hundred of such voyages. This rock is most likely one of trillions of such rocks -- each of them perhaps supporting billions of other beings.

i'm not trying to be morose, just looking at things objectively. A hundred years from now you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody who knew me. A thousand years from now anything that i might do will be eaten away by the sands of time. Even if i were the greatest person alive -- even if I were the greatest person that ever lived -- ten thousand years from now i am invisible. And i and not the greatest person that ever lived.

If i exist at all it's only in the sense of a sub-atomic particle, winking into being for a minuscule instant and winking out again. A flickering speck of smoke.

Others, on the other hand, do exist. Mankind as a species is growing up, becoming something it was not before. Over time as we mix with machines to form an extremely long-lived, super-intelligent super-organism, we stand a chance at getting out, growing into new, unknown things. Becoming part of a universal community.

Everything we have and do now is created by others. Others will cure cancer, others will write great books, others build great cities, others make important observations. Other people -- other beings -- do and experience everything of importance.

Other people, in the general sense, are very real. i am not.

Philosophy should be left to old and ornery people like me, not given out to teenagers and unexperienced kids like candy. Why? Because philosophy is having a beer with a really smart person. When you're young you tend to idolize them. You use philosophy as some sort of tool for finding out ultimate truths. You think of it in the same way as you do the other subjects you are studying. You think philosophy is going somewhere in a straight line, like physics or math. Ultimately you become very disappointed.

When you're older, philosophy is like a suit of clothes: you don't take it so seriously. You try on whatever seems to be comfortable and convenient at the time. Life is too short to go down in the weeds with all this bullshit, but it can still be lots of fun to kick around new deep concepts, or to take old ones and put them together to synthesize new ones.

Most philosophers had a handful of good ideas and spent the rest of their life taking those ideas too far. (i exclude Socrates from this because he obviously felt he didn't know anything and that questions were more important than answers) Give a young person too much philosophy? You've either created somebody without any footing in reality or a sad, closed-minded cynic.

So yes, for all intents and purposes, i either do not exist at all, or exist in only the most microscopic of terms, virtually indistinguishable from nothingness. But I still own my choices, and from that comes joy.

Fundamentalist agnosticism, existentialism, anti-solipsism. It's not "duty, honor, country", but it'll do for now.

Stephen Hawking's new book begins "Philosophy is dead", but Stephen is still smoking from that old cynical physicist's crack pipe. Philosophy, like God before it, is not dead, it's just getting started.