Existential panic: How real is anything?

Existential panic is a term used to describe a feeling when a person hits the limits of existence and doesn’t know the way forward. This happens more often than people would like to admit, but it is not an invalid feeling. However, the important thing here is not repressing that feeling but finding a way to understand life’s situation in general. I have written extensively about the enormity of life, the meaning of infinity, decoding consciousness, understanding ourselves as part of nature, etc. – all from a scientific perspective because it is something I can do as a physicist.

All this knowledge may not help navigate daily life and survival but will be useful in times of such existential crisis when things don’t make sense suddenly. There are times when people question everything in existence and ask if we are actually living in a simulation because events seem unreal to the extent of being disconnected from their purpose. I am no stranger to this feeling, but I decided to pursue knowledge over fighting this feeling. The more I learned, the more I moved away from existential panic and moved towards a more relaxed territory of being comfortable with exploration. I will address this question today.

How real is anything?

One gets overwhelmed with so much existing and happening on this planet and they are mind-blown when facts about the universe beyond Earth come forward. It is even more dumbfounding to realize that all that we see belongs to just 0.0035% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This means we see everything between violet and red, but above violet exist ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays etc. and below red lie infrared, microwaves, radiowaves, etc., all of which are invisible to us. Additionally, we only hear between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. Look at the image below to understand the tinyness of the amount we can actually see and hear.

Credits: Ultrasound_range_diagram.png: The original uploader was LightYear at English Wikipedia.Ultrasound_range_diagram_png_(sk).svg: The original uploader was LightYear at English Wikipedia. derivative work: Coolth, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Original: Penubag Vector: Victor Blacus, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The sense of smell is highly advanced for humans and we can differentiate over 1 trillion distinct smells. However, that is still limited as compared to the smelling capabilities of a dog, or any such animal. A dog has over 300 million receptors compared to just 6 million in the case of a human, and their nose also functions differently than ours which enables them to smell and breathe out at the same time due to exhaled air going out via the slits on the side of their noses. Additionally, AI was able to predict smells from chemical structures; some of them were even beyond the current understanding of smells. So, even our sense of smell is quite limited. Combining just these three senses, we are limited by a large factor in perception and still get overwhelmed with all the input.

Imagine everything that we are missing out on seeing or hearing just because our range is limited. There could be a creature next to us at this instant whose body interacts with neutrinos instead of photons, who speaks in a frequency range above 1 megahertz. Still, we don’t know about their existence because of our limitations! Of course, we have instruments that compensate for our shortcomings, but there could be much more beyond the range of the instruments. This makes us question what reality really means.

Can something visible to us be non-existent in reality?

Looking at the flip side of the coin, we think about things that fall within the range of our perception. Can some of those things be actually non-existent and we simply become accustomed to it after a while? To be clear, I am not talking about the philosophical angle where philosophers may argue about the existence of a round square and get entangled in paradox. While it is an interesting concept, it is not the point of today’s discussion. I am talking about real objects existing but playing with our perception. Look at the following image of a little man on a chair:

Although it plays with the generally accepted size of humans, you see that it is a chair. But look at the unravelled image of the reality:

Do you see that the chair that you thought was existing was not a chair after all? On the other hand, we have the example of the solar system. We have grown up with the image of the solar system where the Sun is in the centre, while all the planets, dwarf planets, and asteroids revolve on the same plane around the Sun. We have learnt later that in addition, the Sun is also revolving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. So, from the point of view of someone sitting outside the solar system, it appears as if the Sun is taking the other bodies in the solar system with it like a spiral staircase (helix motion) like this:

While this is correct, this is not the only reality. If one looks from the front or the back of the Sun’s path, it would generate the model we are all familiar with. Take a look below:

I took this clip from the YouTube channel of PBS Space Time: “How Earth REALLY moves through the galaxy”. Check out the video; it is really interesting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lPJ5SX5p08)

Hence, reality can exist, not exist, and also exist in multiple forms. How do we know what to follow?

Onset of existential panic

Do I exist? Do all the people around me really exist? Am I imagining something but it actually is not there at all? How does a baby come alive suddenly in the womb? Where does the life factor disappear from their bodies when they die? Does that mean our bodies are not real? So many questions, and so little context. The real onset of existential panic happens when we understand that we are not touching anything. When we bring ourselves close to a surface, we feel a certain repulsive force from it. The closer we get, the stronger this repulsive force gets and at the maximum closeness, you feel you are already touching the thing but the atomic scale proves otherwise. At the atomic scale, each nucleus has a certain number of electrons revolving around it because electrons are negatively charged. So, electrons repel each other and when two atoms come closer and closer, they hover at a distance of 10^(-8) meters (0.00000001 meters) no matter how hard they try to come closer. And this repulsive force increases more and more as the electrons come closer. This sensation of touch is just our brain’s interpretation of electromagnetic forces at work at the atomic level. Then how do we manage to hold objects? Chemical bonds allow us to latch onto an object’s imperfections, producing friction.

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Even water wetting something is because hydrogen bonds are formed between water molecules and the object molecules. MIND BLOWN! We’re all magicians here. Everything got so real and unreal at the same time. How can we understand all of this in its true sense? Such confusion arises also because of the fact that as we reduce the scale of measurement, all things we consider “real” are made of stuff that appears unreal but somehow exists. One can start decoding this by understanding that nothing that we see in its apparent form is absolute. Consider energies. They are interchangeable from one form to the other and we do that daily. There are large-scale conversions of course, like solar power, wind power, hydraulic power, etc. being turned into electricity. There are other small conversions living beings do on a personal level. For example, when we turn on the television, electrical energy is converted into light and sound energy, and turning on a fan converts electrical to mechanical energy, which is then converted into wind energy by displacing air molecules. Even simply eating food is the conversion of chemical energy into mechanical energy with heat energy as a by-product, keeping our bodies warm.

Even beyond energies, mass-energy equivalence prevails. During energy conversion, some mass can be lost to thermal energy and it happens every time we burn something. Hydrogen combusts in the presence of oxygen and produces water and thermal energy, which is released. If you were to measure the mass before and after, it would have reduced. E = mc² is a very famous equation given by Einstein and is often misunderstood. We are not converting mass into energy or vice-versa. It means that for a given mass, a given amount of energy exists. So, both exist at the same time and what you need from it defines what is used. Hence, the crux of the matter is that everything exists at the same time in several forms and we get to see one form at a time. Even light exists as a wave and a particle and it just depends on the observer’s position whether it behaves as one or the other.

Not just everything in the present, but the past also co-exist. For us on the Earth, it is the year 2023. But since light also has a speed limit of 300000000 meters per second, the visuals of 2023 may not have reached an observer sitting several light-years away. If we see stars as they were millions of light years ago, an observer on a planet that far away will also see us as we were millions of light years ago. For example, an alien sitting 65 million light years away will see dinosaurs on the Earth through a telescope that powerful.

What do I believe then?

This raises a big question – what can we believe then if everything exists at the same time? What is the one true form of which the others are just a superimposed idea? The concept of unified energy comes into the picture at this point. When we talk about nature, we often talk about animals, plants, the atmosphere, climate, oceans, rivers, other water bodies, etc. But we often forget that we are part of nature, and nature is beyond the Earth. The reason we often feel disconnected from nature, Earth, and the universe is that we haven’t found a connection to ourselves. For example, you feel connected to other human beings because we belong to the same species, and so we understand their struggles and relate with them. This can be extended to an extent to other life forms like other animals and plants. But the relatability ends there. But why?

Image credits: Pablo Carlos Budassi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What binds us all together and sets us apart from non-living creatures? Consciousness. Even plants are “alive” without a conventional brain, so it is not about having a brain, but a mind. Everything culminates in consciousness. Consciousness is the biggest mystery on this planet. We don’t know what it is exactly. What does being alive mean? Is it only medical? Does a beating heart define life? Is neural activity the only definition of being alive? Where and why did life originate? Why do we exist? These are questions we ask ourselves every day but are not able to answer. These are the essential questions in life that humanity set out to find and then set out to make our life on this planet comfortable so that we can address the former questions. But then, there is no end to finding comfort. For every electronic device created to make manual labour easy, there was a remote control invented to make access to that device easier. At this point, after getting entangled with comfort and vital sub-issues that were created as a result, there are very few who are still asking questions about our origin, life, and goals as living organisms. While comfort is important, it is more important to understand why we even exist.

This is the real reason for existential panic in the first place. Foraying into unifying forces of nature, take a look at this Priyafied article: Can we reach the unifying force of nature?

Now that we know the concepts of the unified force of nature, superimposition of energies, consciousness, and the Theory of Everything are one and the same thing and only the route to reach the destination is different in each case, the choice of path is up to us. Unraveling the twisted paths is dependent on understanding the starting point and destination. While laws, formulas, mathematical rules, and grammar help us in treading the path of life, they are not the destination.

का ते कान्ता कस्ते पुत्रः
संसारोऽयमतीव विचित्रः ।
कस्य त्वं कः कुत आयात-
स्तत्त्वं चिन्तय तदिह भ्रातः ॥ ८॥

(Who is your wife ? Who is your son ? Strange is this samsAra, the world. Of whom are you ? From where have you come ? Brother, ponder over these truths.)

Adi Shankaracharya (Bhaja Govindam)

Language does not matter as long as the truth is conveyed. Trust your logic and never shut the door between your mind and brain. There can be several ways to deal with existential panic, but the way out of it is only through knowledge. Point to ponder? Be Priyafied!