Ask HN: What do you think is all this? (this reality, existence, space-time, us)

Practically speaking, it seems to be a bunch of tiny balls kind of like Legos in that they like to stick to others in various ways according to their types. According to the rules of matter and physics we get a bunch of emergent phenomena, basically contraptions made out of the Lego-balls. That's animals. But there's something else funny about it... it's not just a bunch of wild contraptions getting made by tumbling Lego-balls in the dryer for a long time. There's also knowing. It's not the Lego-balls doing the knowing, but certain very complicated configurations of the Lego-balls seem to be needed for the knowing to happen. So there's a vast physics playground, and contraptions are curling up out of the muck, and via their unusual configurations (made by evolution out of necessity to try to keep the contraptions functional in the merciless, remorseless physics playground), knowing arises, to whatever extent the configuration of the contraption allows. If one were to try to zoom out and see the whole progression I think it might look like a mind constructing itself, gradually rising up out of an unbelievable, incomprehensible mass of bloodshed and suffering, to be shining and bright, boundlessly kind, compassionate, joyful, and balanced, like a perfectly clear eye to watch what happens in the playground as if it was a flower in a process of endless blooming, clearly knowing that everything that happens is perfect.

If you don't want to answer the question you could've spent the time writing your comment instead on "any number of more useful endeavors."

But really, it's not irrelevant. It's a valid question that can be the motivation for "useful" questions as you might call them.

I try not to take the following thoughts too seriously because ultimately I'm living this life. Also, I'm making some huge assumptions. With that said.

Life isn't real. It's real right now, but only for the time you're alive.

Before you were born you didn't exist, then you were born. Now you exist and start gaining memories. When we go to sleep all of that is gone. In that sense I have the hunch that to some extent sleep simulates what it's like to be dead. In other words, there will be nothing. Going from there to infer what death is like (a huge assumption), I come to the conclusion that all of what you did is forgotten by you. In fact, you will likely not experience anything anymore.

If that's true then it's basically like you haven't lived at all. In other words, life isn't real.

It's a thought I play with, mostly the questions it raises. Sometimes I play with different assumptions. It's a fun pastime, not something to take seriously IMO.

The first paragraph of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged--the same house, the same people--and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”

Thank you. I gained perspective from this passage.