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Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Atoms Aren't So Bad

Someone said to me a few days ago that it made them uncomfortable to think that our brains are just a bunch of atoms. I wondered, "why is that so bad?"

I've never really heard the argument for why it would be so terrible to be made out of atoms. After all, we have to be made out of something. Atoms seem like an okay thing to be made out of to me. The only issue would seem to be our mortality (given the ability of atomic structures to be disrupted) - but somehow the obsession over what we're made out of seems to transcend even concerns of mortality, which seems strange.

It seems like so many people in our world are searching for a kind of understanding of existence that would indicate a hazy sort of universe where nothing is fully definable, and the human will and mind is some sort of power that exists self-evidently and independently in that haze; caused by nothing and beholden to nothing. This seems quite bizarre to me and I really doubt that such an understanding is the only one that a human being can have a happy meaningful life within.

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