Thought Experiments That’ll Break Your Brain

What if I told you that you died last night in your sleep and that your body and mind have been replaced by an exact replica of you—a clone who has all the same characteristics and memories that you had? Impossible, you'd probably reply. But can you prove it didn't happen? How would you disprove it? It's not such an easy task, huh?

This is a thought experiment. It uses a hypothetical and oftentimes somewhat ridiculous situation to help us get to the core of deeper philosophical or scientific questions. This one being: is there anything about you that's irreplaceable?

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Back to our story: if some kind of computerized robot clone were to replace your body, mind, and memories, would that new you be enough to fool your parents, siblings, best friend, or partner? Or would there be a vital unseen internal piece of you missing—something that can't be quantified physically?

There is another thought experiment that has to do with clones. Only this time, it's not just you that's cloned, but our entire planet. Imagine that there exists out there somewhere in space a planet that is identical to ours. We'll call this planet Twin Earth.

On Twin Earth, there is an exact replica of everything we have here on our Earth, including every object, place, organism, animal, and even human beings. The only difference between these two Earths is that the way people refer to the chemical compound of water. Here, we know that the word "water" is H2O, but imagine that on Twin Earth, the word "water" is the chemical compound XYZ.

Let's say there is a person on Earth. We'll call him Oscar. On that strange faraway planet, there is also Twin Oscar, who is acting in an identical manner at the same exact time. When the two Oscars simultaneously ask for a glass of water on their separate planets, they're both using the same word to ask for seemingly the same thing. Yet what they're really asking for, underneath the word, is something completely different.

Hilary Putnam came up with this thought experiment to famously prove that meaning just ain't in the head. The fact that two people have the same idea in their heads and that idea means the same thing to each of them doesn't mean that they're referring to the same thing in their physical realities. Meaning comes from our external worlds as much as it does our internal ones.

It's a lot like Schrödinger's cat, which you might have heard of in a discussion with Albert Einstein. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger famously shared this: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. But because the radioactive source decays at random, the cat must be thought of as simultaneously both alive and dead.

This thought experiment was created as a way to help us understand quantum mechanics and represent the way that two quantum particles interact with each other. Just like the cat can be thought of as both alive and dead before the box is opened, a quantum particle can be in two different places at once and act in completely opposite ways in each place.

This is what Albert Einstein called quantum entanglement or action at a distance. Although we've known about quantum entanglement for nearly 100 years, today no one can explain how or why this spooky action at a distance happens. This mysteriousness opens the gates for several theories, one of the most fantastical being the many worlds theory—a theory that some people use Schrödinger's cat to support.

When you're standing above the closed box, unsure if the cat is dead or alive, many-world theorists say that at that moment, you are actually a part of two different worlds—that your situation was temporarily entangled between. In the moment that you open the box to reveal that the cat is, in fact, alive, you became disentangled from the world in which the cat is dead. But that doesn't mean that the world never existed; it simply becomes separated from you and continues to exist elsewhere. Where that place is, no one knows.

Pretty trippy, right? But it gets even weirder when you think about it in the context of your own life. If you've ever had a near-death experience, the many-worlds theory suggests that you died in another world and only remained alive in this one.

Think about all the moments where you were overcome with anxiety that a friend or a loved one could be in danger. Maybe they're not answering their phone, or they failed to show up at the place they said they would. Your mind instantly splits in two in those moments: one part completely convinced that they're being held captive by a murderer, and the other half soothing yourself with the probability that they just overslept or that their phone died.

According to this theory, even when your loved one does turn out to be completely fine, the other world where they were hurt or in danger wasn't just an anxiety-induced illusion, but evidence of you being entangled with a real other world where the unthinkable has, in fact, happened to them.

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How about a stroll on some abandoned railroad tracks? As we get to the intersection, my mind can't help but think about the trolley problem. Imagine that a train without functioning brakes is barreling down these tracks as we're on them. Left on its path, it's on course to crash into and kill five people.

But you, an innocent bystander, have access to a switch that could divert the train down a different track so that it will only kill one person. For the sake of the larger point, let's pretend that these outcomes are definite and that there aren't any left-field alternate solutions. You can't blow up the train or push the people out of the way—none of that.

With that in mind, if you do nothing, those five people will die, and you'll have to live with the fact that you could have saved them. But if you decide to press the button that diverts the train so that it only kills one person, your intervention in the situation will have been the direct cause of that person's death. What would you do?

The more common answer is to divert the train so that it kills one individual rather than five. It's the famous greater good way of thinking. But things get a little more complicated once we start to change up the variables in the scenario.

Like, what if everything in the situation is the same except for one thing? The one person who you would be responsible for killing in order to save the five is your child. Thought experiments like these are meant to teach us something about our humanity, and sometimes the answers we find are very disturbing.

Not all thought experiments are that grim, though. Some are light-hearted, like the impossible barber. A certain barber is very particular about his work. He shaves every person in the village who doesn't shave themselves and no one who does shave himself. So does the barber shave himself?

If he shaves every person who does not shave themselves, then he must shave himself. But if he shaves himself, then he doesn't shave himself. It's pretty weird. As silly as the impossible barber may sound at first glance, it helped identify a major hole in the logic of set theory when it was created by Bertrand Russell in 1901.

Before this thought experiment, set theorists hypothesized that every object, being, or event belonged to at least one larger set of things. For example, any car that exists can be grouped into a larger set of all cars that have ever existed on Earth. By that logic, there would also have to exist a set of all non-cars.

This would not only include all other types of vehicles like buses, trains, and trucks, but every other thing that is not a vehicle. The problem with this logic is that a set of all non-cars would eventually have to include a set of cars because a set of cars is not a car. This is the error that Russell highlighted with the impossible barber thought experiment. A set cannot contain itself, just like the barber cannot simultaneously shave himself and not shave himself. It doesn't make any sense.

Moving away from math and science, let's talk about art. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the allegory begins by introducing three prisoners who have been chained to face the wall of a cave since birth, with absolutely no knowledge of the outside world. They are unable to turn their heads, but a fire burns behind them, projecting the shadows of who or whatever happens to pass by outside onto the cave's wall.

The prisoners spend all their time trying to name and identify these shadows, interpreting them as parts of their reality—the only reality they've ever known. Things get complicated, though, when one of the prisoners escapes the cave and finally sees the light of day.

The prisoner quickly realizes, as he orients himself in the world, that the shadows he and his fellow prisoners were interpreting on the cave's wall are not real objects, but rather just projections of light casting off the actual objects. After building up eye strength, the prisoner is able to stare up directly at the sun, whose light is the true underlying source powering everything he's ever seen.

The prisoner goes back into the cave, wildly trying to convince the other two of what he has seen and of what the shadows on the cave's wall actually are, but they can't and won't believe him. They call him stupid and accuse him of losing his sanity.

The most standard interpretation of this allegory is that it describes the feeling of being a person who thinks deeply about the world around them, who is trying to explain those ideas to others who are unwilling to change their beliefs about the world. The average person is interested in dissecting life beneath the surface and is very comfortable living an unexamined life, which according to Plato and Socrates, is not worth living.

Furthermore, many people actually get angry or resentful at anyone who threatens their surface-level reality with philosophical thinking, complex ideas, or even just logic in scientific research. Just take a look around you, and you can see that this interpretation is just as relevant today as it was back in 380 BCE when Plato presented this.

It's pretty astonishing, and the main reason why this allegory is still as popular as it is today. In the end, everything we think we know to be true and real in our world may just be a projection of a mysterious and infinitely more real thing—a thing that we are yet to truly understand.

What if we, like the three prisoners in the cave, have yet to see the sun, only just its shadows? You've probably heard of the trolley problem, especially if you're at all interested in philosophy or ethics. Lately, it's been a subject of discussion when discussing autonomous cars and was referenced explicitly in the show "The Good Place."

Some people think it's a fun moral thought experiment to discuss in a group; others feel it's a good ethical workout to prepare for real-world ethical dilemmas. But what if the trolley problem has a problem of its own?

Well, before diving into the problem with the trolley problem, we've got one crucial thing to do: drive the trolley. The trolley problem goes like this: you're driving a trolley along a track when all of a sudden, the brakes just stop working. If you stay on the track in front of you, you'll run over a group of five people standing on the track. But you have the option of pulling a switch and directing the trolley onto another track with just a single person standing on the track.

You have to choose between killing five people or one person. What is the morally correct thing to do? Do you flip the switch to save five people and kill one, or do you leave the switch alone, kill five, and leave one unharmed?

The trolley problem is a widely used moral thought experiment, especially in beginner philosophy classes. The problem is often used to illustrate two branches of ethics: consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialists focus on the consequences of an action, while deontologists emphasize a sense of moral duty.

Utilitarianism is a prime example of consequentialism. Philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham considered the moral value of an action based on the outcome and whether it contributed to the greater good. If you were to consider the trolley problem from the consequentialist perspective, you'd quickly pull that switch to take just one life instead of the group of five.

When more people get to live, that benefits the greater good. On the other hand, a deontologist's duty ethics challenges you to universalize a principle or maxim to see if it works regardless of circumstance. His classic example is lying. Can you imagine universalized lying as a maxim? If everyone lied all the time, you couldn't trust anything anyone said. Kant would suggest that lying is therefore immoral.

From Kant's duty perspective, the trolley problem is more challenging. Could you universalize your principle of killing someone to save others? Imagine one person had five kidneys that could save the lives of five people. However, the kidney owner would have to be killed against their will to attain the organs. Killing the kidney owner instinctually feels wrong compared to flipping the switch in the trolley problem.

It doesn't seem like you could universalize this principle of killing one to save five others. The trolley problem is an excellent way to learn about these two systems of ethics, but does the thought experiment actually help with moral decisions? Do any imagined circumstances help with real-world moral decisions?

The trolley problem was first conceived by the English philosopher Philippa Foot in her paper on the problem of abortion. In the doctrine of double effect, Foot draws on the doctrine of double effect in the paper to address why an action that causes harm can be morally permissible.

The doctrine of double effect was first introduced by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and he argued that killing someone trying to kill you is justified as long as you didn't intend to kill them. In trying to stop an assailant, accidentally killing them isn't considered morally wrong according to the doctrine of double effect.

The concept was later expanded to something like this: it's normally permissible if something bad happens as a side effect of pursuing a good end. Even if you knew that a bad side effect was possible, it's still morally okay, provided it wasn't intended and any harm done was as limited as possible.

In her paper, Philippa Foot used the doctrine of double effect to distinguish between actions that intentionally cause harm for the sake of a good end and actions that indirectly cause harm for the sake of a good end. She came up with a couple of thought experiments to demonstrate the difference, and one of them was the trolley problem.

The other was a situation where a judge intentionally caused harm to achieve a better outcome. In the latter example, the judge frames an innocent man, executing him to save five innocent lives. She uses the doctrine of double effect to explain why the judge is wrong: because he intentionally caused harm for good, while in the case of the trolley, the driver indirectly causes harm by saving the five in favor of the one.

The main difference is that the driver doesn't intend to kill, even though they foresee it happening, while the judge would kill the innocent man if given another opportunity because it's part of his plan. One criticism of the doctrine of double effect is how close a regretful side effect is to a means. If harm is done as a means to an end, it's not considered permitted by the doctrine of double effect.

The harm has to be a side effect of the action taken. The problem is that the line between the side effect and a means to an end is blurry. Think of the trolley problem: is flipping the switch to hit the one person a means to save the other five, or is the death of one person an unfortunate side effect? They're awfully similar.

Foot acknowledged that the doctrine of double effect might not survive criticism, so she used a duty-based approach to explain the permissibility of harm. Further, she pointed to the difference between positive and negative duties to explain why we react the way we do to the trolley problem.

She defined negative duties as a moral obligation not to harm or injure others, and on the other hand, positive duties are an ethical obligation to help others in need. Positive duties can include anything from preventing someone from falling to death to giving a hungry family food. According to Foot, negative duties are more important than positive duties.

When faced with the choice between the two, the negative duties should take precedence. Let's take the sense of duty and apply it to the trolley problem. We end up choosing between a negative duty not to kill five versus a negative duty not to kill one. We shouldn't kill the five because it's a larger negative duty.

Suppose we apply positive and negative duties to the judge's example. In that case, framing and executing the one person is violating a negative duty, while preventing the five is a positive duty to help the people in need. Since the negative duty outweighs the positive, the judge's decision to frame a man can be justified as immoral.

The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson found holes in Foot's duty explanation in her essays on the trolley problem. She used a variation of the thought experiment where the driver faints, but a bystander can flip the switch to change the trolley's path. In this case, the bystander is violating a negative duty not to kill a person if they flip the switch.

If they leave the switch alone, they're not violating a negative duty; they're just failing a positive duty to help. Letting the five die would be acceptable according to Foot's duty approach to ethics. In her attempt to resolve the trolley problem, Thomson looked for similarities between the variations of the problem that were assumed to be moral and those examples that were assumed to be immoral.

She found that in the cases we thought were wrong, the person killed had more of a claim to living than the others. In the judge's case, the framed man has a claim to live due to his innocence, but in the trolley problem, the single person has no special case for living over a group of five.

Thomson's exploration of the trolley problem made it very popular in philosophy circles. It quickly took off among psychologists, scholars, and even the general public. Ultimately, Philippa Foot didn't come to a firm conclusion about the trolley problem herself. She was uninterested in proving universal rules with moral thought experiments while still maintaining that there's something to get right in ethical considerations.

But rather than looking to universal rules or consequences, she looked to human nature and our sense of purpose. Foot was a big part of the resurgence of virtue ethics, drawing on Aristotle to suggest that right action is a matter of being virtuous and avoiding vice instead of finding universalizable rights and wrongs.

Her virtue ethics points to the problem with the trolley problem as a moral thought experiment. While it's fine to use it to learn about consequentialist and deontological-based ethics, thought experiments are at best an imperfect method for determining the right action in a real-life dilemma.

Every set of circumstances that create a real-life ethical dilemma will always differ widely from any possible thought experiment. Sticking to conclusions made from a thought experiment might actually cause more harm than good. Could policy based on a thought experiment actually work in different societies or cultures, or would the many differences lead to people misjudging a circumstance and causing harm?

Could these thought experiments provide principles that are specific enough to be useful? Anything resembling the trolley thought experiment in real life would be brimming with details that change our moral considerations. Imagine the lone person on the one track. It seems like they might be able to get off the track in time, or the trolley is going at such a speed that the group of five could potentially survive a collision.

It'd probably be better not to draw a conclusion from a thought experiment when facing a real-life ethical dilemma. We could analyze the circumstance without trying to make it conform to the conclusions of our thought experiment. As implied by the trolley problem, we never have perfect knowledge of a situation. Only with an all-knowing perspective could we accurately judge the outcome to determine its moral value.

Even trying to make duty-based judgments, we wouldn't have enough information at hand. In recent debates about autonomous cars, the trolley problem has been brought up with new enthusiasm. Some people have even suggested solving the trolley problem before these cars can be unleashed on society.

But imagine for a moment all the inputs being considered by an autonomous car at any given time. All the complexity being interpreted by the car's algorithms. Would there ever be a circumstance when the machine had to make a choice as evenly conceived as the trolley? Every inch the car drives would further change the variables as it tries to avoid catastrophe.

Anything resembling a clear choice between killing one over many would likely never occur. But then again, ethical dilemmas do happen, especially in healthcare, and we have choices to make. Without ethical deliberation, we're left at the mercy of our gut or what we like to call common sense.

But common sense isn't free from societal prejudice or bias, and we humans often confuse our emotions for good rationale. So we're left with these imperfect exercises to inform policy. But in moments of challenging dilemmas with our policies in hand, hopefully, we can let all the details of the moment speak to us.

When thought experiments don't suffice, or as Philippa Foot did, we could encourage virtuous behavior and flourish like the acorns becoming trees, making good decisions the way plants direct themselves towards the sun.

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Thanks for watching. You were on your way home when you died. It was a car accident—nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered that you were better off, trust me.

And that's when you met me. "Wait, what happened?" you asked. "Where am I?" "You died," I said matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words. "There was a truck, and it was skidding." "Yep," I said. "I died?" "Yep." "But don't feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness—just you and me. "What is this place?" you asked. "Is this the afterlife?" "More or less," I said. "Are you God?" you asked. "Yep," I replied.

Few things capture our imagination quite like death. It's going to happen to us. We know it's going to happen to us, and yet we live our lives pretending that it's not going to happen—not to us at least. We think not right now. We run away from it every chance we get, and yet somehow we are preoccupied with it almost simultaneously.

We ignore death and worship its possibility. We write books about how life is short, but we never really live like it is. Who are we? What do you think happens after death? "My kids, my wife," you said. "What about them? Will they be all right?"

"That's what I like to see," I said. "You just died, and your main concern is for your family. That's good stuff right there." You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man or possibly a woman—some vague authority figure, maybe more of a grammar school teacher than the Almighty.

"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it's any consolation, she'll feel very guilty for feeling relieved."

"Oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?" "Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated." "Ah," you said. "So the Hindus were right."

"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me." You followed along as we strolled through the void. "Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings, nor in the future shall any of us cease to be. As the embodied soul continuously passes in this body from childhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change, and worn-out garments are shed by the body. Worn-out bodies are shed by the dweller within the body. New bodies are donned by the dweller like garments."

These are the words from the Bhagavad Gita, one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism. In it are verses about the seemingly unending cycle of life and of reincarnation. Every version of a being acts and reacts, and their actions determine how they are going to be manifested in the next life. We commonly refer to this as karma.

This continues nearly eternally until the soul yearns for a higher sense of being, which it can ultimately achieve once it rids itself of all desires, ego, or pleasure. The yearning for a higher being is only truly met when no such yearning exists.

"So is this life, the one we're living right now, just a mere test?" "Where are we going?" "Nowhere in particular," I said. "It's just nice to walk while we talk."

"So what's the point then?" you asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby? So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter?" "Not so," I said. "You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it's hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.

You've been a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out enough yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything, but there's no point in doing that between each life."

"How many times have I been reincarnated then?" "Oh, lots and lots and into lots of different lives," I said. "This time around, you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 1540 AD."

"Wait, what?" you stammered. "You're sending me back in time?" "Well, I guess technically time as you know it only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from." "Where do you come from?" you said.

"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere—somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you want to know what it's like there, but honestly, you wouldn't understand."

"Oh," you said, a little let down. "But wait, if I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point?" "Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan, you don't even know it's happening."

Other religions, such as Islam or Christianity, don't quite preach the idea of reincarnation, but when you look through the pages, they too treat this life as a test. It is the afterlife where we achieve completion, and we get to live truly. What you do in this life determines the fate of what your soul will be.

While the concept of death is slightly different across certain religions and theologies, in that some of it happens over and over again and in others you die once but live twice, nearly all religions encourage followers to think about the cascading effects of their actions at a macro scale.

There are more famous ideas in this realm, of course. The simulation theory is just one of the more famous ones, where reality is potentially reduced to a high-definition video game running in some scrawny teenager's basement. It's his reality, and you and I are living in it.

This certainly is not as grandiose of a possibility as something from scripture, but the logic that leads one to the simulation theory is ironclad. What does this all mean then? So what's the point of it all?

Seriously, you're asking me for the meaning of life? I mean, isn't that a little stereotypical? "Well, it's a reasonable question," you persisted. I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature."

"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" "No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life, you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."

"Just me? What about everyone else?" "There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me." You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on Earth?" "All you different incarnations of you."

"Wait, I'm everyone now?" "You're getting it," I said with a congratulatory slap on the back. "I'm every being who ever lived or who will ever live." "Yes, I'm Abraham Lincoln, and you're John Wilkes Booth too," I added. "I'm Hitler," you replied, "and you're the millions he killed. I'm Jesus, and you're everyone who followed him."

You fell silent. "Every time you victimize someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was or will be experienced by you."

You thought for a long time. "Why?" you asked me. "Why do all of this?" "Because someday you will become like me," I said. "Because that's what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."

"You mean I'm a God?" "No, not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born."

"So the whole universe," you said, "it's just an egg?" I answered. "Now it's time for you to move on to your next life," and I sent you on your way.

Whether you believe in an organized religion or not, we've all wondered what happens when our eyes close for that one last time. Maybe we watch our lifeless bodies as our souls float away. Maybe we try to call upon our loved ones to let them know it's all going to be okay, but they just never listen.

Maybe nothing happens at all. Maybe there is no meaning. Andy Weir's short story, supposedly written in less than an hour, does talk about an afterlife scenario, but that's not really the message it's trying to deliver.

Maybe his point is to highlight the ability of every person to be both the worst manifestation of humanity but also be the best of it. Andy poses this when he says that the protagonist was both Hitler and the people he killed. It's hypothetical, of course, but then again, how far are we at any given time from the worst version of ourselves?

I often find myself looking at pictures of famous or infamous people, for that matter, as babies. In the backdrop of reality, these baby faces can remind us about the innocence every human is capable of. Perhaps one of the lessons from the egg theory is to remind people of the power of a situation to turn us into who we are.

This is not to absolve anyone of the wrongdoing or take away from the gravity of their actions, but a chance to shed light on the fact that a lot of who we are is quite simply circumstance. We might be better able to prevent future atrocities if we're able to foresee the circumstances that lead to them.

This was in large part the focus of the now infamous Stanford prison experiments. College students were hired to play either guard or prisoner, and their behavior would then be studied. In just over a day, the power imbalance had manifested into near-total tyranny, where the guards would abuse the prisoners to such an extent that a lot of them had to be discharged from the experiments.

This ultimately led to the termination of the study after just six days. Some say the guards behaved like this because these guards were inherently bad people. Others say it was the power imbalance that was always set for an outcome like this.

I urge you to read into it yourself, but these studies do demonstrate—and quite reassuringly so—that there may be more bad circumstances than bad people in this world. The egg theory also need not only be about righteousness or evil. It can also be about looking at life through the eyes of others.

Perhaps we would think of life differently if we could see ourselves through the eyes of a loved one. We often tend to be harsh on ourselves for mistakes, but if a friend were to make the same mistake, we would try and support them. Why should we treat ourselves harsher than we would treat a friend?

Imagine being a parent and finally getting to understand their worries for when they said they couldn't sleep when you didn't call. Imagine how we might rethink our worldviews if we could look at things through the eyes of someone who disagrees with us.

In fact, that is supposedly the origin of the story—not some near-death experience that Andy Weir had, but rather a disagreement with his aunt. What would a world like that be when empathy becomes more than just leaving words unsaid and turns into a feeling—an emotion that you don't have to interpret but rather feel yourself?

There is also the concept of being reborn and carrying over your lessons into the next life. What would you become if you could live again? If you knew then what you know now, how would you do things differently? What if you never got that chance?

Who am I kidding? Luckily, we get that chance every day. As Confucius once said, "Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one." The good and bad help us make sense of everything around us by preserving details and events that we can later revisit.

It's a crucial ability, without which we would have no semblance of who, what, or when. But what about remembering things that never happened? You must have had that feeling before. You know the feeling that you've literally—and I mean literally—been somewhere, doing the same exact thing with the same exact people in the same exact situation?

The same words, lights, sounds—everything. You try to hold on to the strange yet familiar feeling to try and understand it, to notice something that might explain what's causing it, but your efforts are to no avail. It's gone, just like a dream you cannot remember. Vivid as it was, that feeling too is gone.

It was right there. You know you had it, but before you know it, the familiarity vanishes into thin air, and sure enough, life returns to normal. Welcome to the world of déjà vu. The term déjà vu means "already seen," and instead of a throwaway term used to describe the repetition of a similar event, most of us describe it as an overwhelming feeling that the moment being experienced has already happened before, even though you know it probably hasn't.

It's a common phenomenon, with as much as 70% of the population having experienced some form of déjà vu. But it's a complicated one, considering it's so vague and abstract. Considering how common it is, however, you would expect that we would know more about it by now.

Sure, there is some consensus about likely theories, but definitive explanations—just like the phenomenon itself—remain elusive. The feeling of déjà vu remains surrounded with mystery and even paranormal interpretations because it's fleeting and unexpected. But these very things that intrigue us are the same things that make it so hard to study.

There are many different theories as to why déjà vu happens. In fact, there are over 30. You get the idea. While these are all distinct and specific, I'm left wondering if most of our experiences of déjà vu are, in fact, a combination of several of these different types all at the same time.

Déjà vu is quite possibly an umbrella term to describe any combination of these experiences. These experiences can be short, medium, or long duration and are different from what could be called anomalous familiarity—like when you find someone's face familiar but can't quite place where you know them from.

In fact, déjà vu experiences can be placed on the spectrum of familiarity, on the far end of which are delusional misidentification syndromes. Syndromes like the Capgras delusion fall in this category, where patients think that loved ones have been replaced by imposters that happen to look alike. In other words, they find unfamiliarity in the familiar—the exact opposite of déjà vu.

That being said, Capgras delusion is a psychiatric disorder with some sort of explanation, whereas the explanation behind déjà vu—well, let's get to that. Scientists have tried many times to recreate déjà vu in the lab with mixed success.

In a 2006 study, researchers first created a simple memory for patients under hypnosis—something like playing a game or looking at a printed word in a certain color. Then patients in different groups were given a suggestion to either forget or remember the memory, which could then later trigger the sense of déjà vu when they encountered the game or word.

Others have tried to induce déjà vu using virtual reality. One study found that participants reported experiencing déjà vu when moving through the Sims video game when one scene was purposefully created to spatially map to another. For example, all of the bushes in a virtual garden were replaced with piles of trash to create a junkyard with the same layout.

The success in creating déjà vu experiences of sorts in these experiments has led scientists to suggest that déjà vu is a memory phenomenon, and this continues to be the most generally accepted explanation. Much like a word can be on the tip of your tongue, a déjà vu experience could be a memory at the tip of your mind—there but not quite accessible.

When we encounter a situation that is similar to an actual memory but we can't fully recall that memory, our brain recognizes the similarities between our current experience and one in the past. We're left with a feeling of familiarity that we can't quite place.

I've got to say, though, I don't feel like this explains my own experiences very well. There are many other theories that attempt to explain why our memories might malfunction in this way. Beyond this pretty general explanation, some say it's like our brain short-circuiting, leading to long versus short-term memory.

That new incoming information goes straight to long-term memory instead of making a stop in the short-term memory bank. Others blame the rhinal cortex. One study used an MRI to scan the brains of 21 participants as they experienced the lab-induced déjà vu.

Interestingly, the areas of the brain involved in memory, like the hippocampus, were not triggered as you would expect if the feeling was linked to, for example, a false memory. Instead, the researchers found the active areas of the brain were those involved in decision-making. They interpret this result to mean that déjà vu could instead be a result of our brains being involved in conflict resolution.

In other words, our brain could be checking through our memories, looking for conflicts between what we think we've experienced versus what actually happened to us. When your brain is firing on all cylinders in a familiar environment and in a routine that it often repeats, it's easy to use a sense of familiarity for what you're seeing as a guide and scan back through your memory until you can recall the origin of the memory.

But when your brain is tired, stressed, or anxious, or surrounded by the unfamiliar, even it might struggle to scan through everything that it's been exposed to well enough to perform this conflict resolution. Instead, you start having intense feelings of familiarity brought on by things that evoke what you've experienced before.

This could be a particular configuration of cups or books on a table, a street that looks a certain way with the traffic in a certain position. Without being able to pin down why it feels so familiar, the brain will always go for the easy way out. It just decides that it's clearly been here before and done this before and is happy enough with that explanation.

So it doesn't bother to investigate any further. It was tired, after all. The split perception theory suggests that déjà vu is when you see something two different times and just weren't paying attention properly the first time. Apparently, the more distracted you are, the more likely you are to experience déjà vu.

If you're distracted by something else and don't take in all the available information around you, your perception might be split into two parts rather than one. Essentially, your brain recalls the previous perception even if you didn't. This can slightly confuse your hippocampus, the part of your brain important for memory processing and navigation, and lead to that sudden and eerie feeling that you've seen it, been there, or done that before.

How about this? The experience actually happened. Yes, you heard right. However unlikely that might sound, sometimes when you have déjà vu, it might not actually be déjà vu at all. The feeling of familiarity could be happening because you've actually had the same experience in the past but simply don't remember it.

I'm not convinced personally, but a study did find that déjà vu can often be related to things you've seen and done, even if you don't remember it. Spatial awareness also seems to matter when it comes to déjà vu. Similar layouts of places can lead to the feeling, even if the two places look nothing alike.

That's why the Sims experiment from earlier actually worked. Or maybe you just have a dominant eye. Most people have one, and apparently, this could also contribute to feelings of déjà vu. If the stronger eye sends information to the subconscious before both eyes focus and register the input as a conscious experience, your brain sends a message to tell you that you've seen this before.

And you have, but it was just an instant ago. But then again, that wouldn't explain the more versatile forms of déjà vu, where it's less about sight and more about experience. A link that potentially ties all this together is consciousness.

One of the recent theories aimed at trying to explain consciousness is about the brain's processing of information in our experience of that processing. It talks about a patient with hemispatial neglect resulting from a stroke. Pretty much, the patient lost awareness on one side of her body, yet she was able to process details about images with the unaffected side without being aware of actually seeing them.

What this tells us is that a lot might be going on around us without us truly being aware of it. Or maybe it's just a glitch in the Matrix. I know it sounds sci-fi and all, but if you entertain the notion that we might be in a simulated universe, the idea that something like déjà vu might be a glitch in the Matrix is not hard to visualize.

It might be that these strangely beautiful instances are products of a code error—errors where the computer simply messes up the timeline for some of the players before quickly fixing themselves. Strangely enough, this theory has a remote basis in reality, albeit on the other side of the familiarity spectrum.

Patients with a rare variant of Capgras delusion have reported that they feel time has been warped or substituted. Theoretically, a similar warping could also lead to déjà vu. But back to reality now. It's hard to deny the numerous different explanations, but the lack of a definitive answer leaves the phenomenon open to stranger theories still.

And depending on your point of view, it's hard to discount them completely, however outlandish they might seem. As well as normal déjà vu, many claim to also have precognitive déjà vu experiences containing knowledge of something that hasn't happened yet. Things like, "I knew what he was going to say before he said it," or "I suddenly knew what she was thinking."

History is full of people that have reported intuitive hunches, premonitions, and forebodings later verified to be accurate. Much of this is explained away as misinterpretations of mundane effects such as coincidence, selective memory, confabulation, or even fraud. But the question remains: can all cases of apparent foreknowledge be explained in this way?

It feels like an eye into the future. Is it possible? Well, maybe it's not so far-fetched. Although this particular explanation is not of the psychic kind, a new perspective on memory is fast gaining traction, and it proposes that memory's adaptive purpose is not so much to allow us to consciously remember our past but instead serves to help us navigate the future.

If you think about it, memory has the potential to help us navigate our futures in many ways—from our use of imagination and ability to be creative, or just by allowing us to know what to do next or how to react in situations. They say practice makes perfect, so maybe memories are just training your brain for the future.

Déjà vu seems to be strongly associated with memory, so maybe it serves a similar purpose. If it is caused by an unrecalled buried memory, then is it also possible that an accompanying sense of what will happen in the future could come from that same buried memory?

I already mentioned that researchers have tried and succeeded in creating the feeling of déjà vu in the lab. Another way to create the sensation is to implant false memories—something that's surprisingly easy. With just a little suggestion, people will remember a specific memory of being lost in the mall as a child and being found by a kind old lady, despite the relatives confirming that that never happened.

This form of déjà vu would be similar to the feeling when you can't differentiate between a dream versus something that actually happened. Some scientists argue that déjà vu is certainly related to false memory in the sense that it is a memory dissociation kind of effect. It dissociates reality from your memory.

You could also briefly expose someone to an object or picture—for example, a place, a painting, and so on—and then let them go back and take it in more slowly, creating an actual memory that they may not be able to pin down. Researchers have had a lot of success with this type of induction, showing participants words, names, or faces for a split second and then inducing the feeling of déjà vu by showing people the same thing for a longer amount of time just moments later.

But these are quite artificial and maybe don't quite match the spontaneous sensation that comes with déjà vu in real life. I also think the sensation is more intriguing when it's moments of your own life that you've witnessed before rather than implanted words or pictures.

The bottom line is it's really difficult to know whether what's being induced in the lab is real déjà vu because we're relying on subjective accounts of a feeling from participants, and everyone will probably experience things differently or have a different interpretation of what exactly déjà vu is.

There is also the possibility that participants are simply telling a researcher what they think they want to hear, also known as demand characteristics. We can't rely entirely on the results of these experiments, and maybe the feeling of familiarity isn't just a byproduct of seeing familiar objects.

It's a feeling all on its own with no existence in the past. Maybe that's what we should be investigating—or should we? Some say that we shouldn't investigate déjà vu at all. The sense of mystery that is so deeply tied to the concept of déjà vu is perhaps why it's so beautiful.

I don't know what causes it, but you certainly do. In fact, you've already watched this video before, haven't you?

Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has provided and continues to provide us with some of the most magical pictures of our universe, but the JWST is projected to be 100 times more powerful than Hubble.

Built over 30 years, the JWST is designed to capture more light and detail than Hubble ever could. This will let astronomers gather more information and allow them to dig deeper into the history of the universe than ever before. About six months after its launch, the JWST delivered the most detailed image of the universe ever taken, known as Webb's First Deep Field.

The image isn't just star-studded; it's galaxy-studded. In this image, you see galaxies that span an enormous distance and maybe an even greater duration of time. The distances we're dealing with here are so large that it would take millions, maybe billions of years to travel to them, even at the speed of light.

When we look at these images, we're looking into the past. This pale red dot, for example, is a galaxy that appeared 13.1 billion years ago. We know this because that's how long it has taken the light from it to reach us. But for all of its size, do you know how much of the night sky that everything in this entire image would cover? Just about the width of a grain of sand held at arm's length.

There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, and some scientists even put that number in the trillions. These galaxies, in turn, have hundreds of billions of star systems, much like our own, and these star systems have planets orbiting around them. What are the chances that there wouldn't be another planet with life in some faraway galaxy?

What are the chances that in this incredible vastness of space, we're all alone? You see, no matter how difficult it is for life to exist and no matter how rare it is, the universe is so big that there should be millions, if not billions, of planets able to support life.

You can define whatever requirements you want for life: temperature, distance from a star, number of moons, presence of water, number of asteroid impacts, and so on. Purely by chance, there should be many planets with life on them, and surely some of that life would be intelligent enough to reach out to us, right?

It's not like the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology are exclusive to Earth. They're not. But if there is life on other planets, if there's nothing special about Earth, where's everybody else? Where are all the aliens?

Enrico Fermi asked this question in a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues in 1950. Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist considering the existence of space-faring civilizations. Truth be told, humans haven't been around for that long, and if in our short existence on this planet we've considered branching out to Mars or some other world, it's reasonable that another civilization might have thought the same thing.

If a civilization has been around long enough and is sufficiently technologically advanced, it should try to branch out to other planets in search of resources. At the very least, it should try to reach out to them to communicate. That hypothesis, though, stands in contrast to reality, which has given us no evidence for life other than our own on this planet.

The great silence, as it's called, persists today. The mismatch between our intuition that the universe should be teeming with life and its apparent emptiness is known as the Fermi Paradox. So where are the aliens?

Just this morning, jet fighters raced aloft over Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, to intercept a reported saucer returning. Pilots swore that it was a light that could not have been a reflection and that it evaded them at a very high rate of speed.

Well, even though we've always been fascinated with aliens, we haven't officially been looking for them for very long. SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is the most famous organization actively looking out for alien life in the universe, and it only formally began in the late 1950s.

Some of its significant efforts include sending radio signals to outer space and listening for ones that may be sent our way. Of course, this only covers intentional signals. SETI is one of the first organizations to intentionally send radio waves, but our technologies have been emitting radio waves through space-time ever since they were invented.

This includes everything from mobile phones, televisions, FM and AM radios, and even the earliest radio transmissions in the late 1800s. For all we know, our alien counterparts are laughing over Charlie Chaplin movies right now.

But if you think about it, our radio signals may not have even reached potential intelligent life yet. As we mentioned at the start of the video, the distances we're dealing with in space are pretty literally out of this world. Even if we consider the oldest transmissions from over 100 years ago, when radio waves were first sent out, they would have only traveled a tiny portion of space.

If today, at this very moment, our earliest signals were to reach our so-called galactic neighbors and they were so intelligent and capable that they recognized our existence and decided to reach out immediately, it would take another 100 years for the reply to reach Earth. Barring a breakthrough in physics that allows them to break the speed of light, before we ever know if our earliest attempts to reach out were successful, most of us would be faded memories.

What if life exists not 100 light years away, but 50 or even 20 light years away? Well, in that case, aliens would have had enough time to receive and reply to our signals by now. So why haven't they?

One answer would be that aliens simply don't exist, which, let's be honest, is rather boring. So let's assume they do exist. The logical question would be then: why haven't they reached out to us? To answer this question, we need to place alien civilizations into three advancement categories: less advanced than us, equally advanced, or more advanced.

If they're less advanced than us, it's likely that they simply don't have the technology to reach out to us. It's also important to know what signs to look out for. For two billion years after life started to evolve, it would be observable if another civilization were to look out for the same things we're looking for right now.

Then there's the possibility that they're equally advanced as we are. If that's the case, they might be paranoid about contacting us because they're uncertain about what they're dealing with. This is in line with what Stephen Hawking said: that reaching out to alien life would be a big mistake because they might come for our resources and our planet.

They might carry pathogens we can't fight off. They might have colonial intentions. The list goes on. Given how we've treated other human beings because of differences we created in our own minds, it's fair to say that it would be a mistake to assume that an extraterrestrial species would greet us with kindness.

The third possibility is that the aliens possess far superior intelligence. Humans are no longer attractive to them. It might be a difficult pill to swallow, considering how human-centric we are, but hear me out. If the universe is teeming with life, if there's nothing special about us, then there's not much point in them reaching out to us.

Much less spending precious resources visiting us. Colonial intentions would likely be less important to a civilization that can, for example, harvest the power of stars. We'd be like the ants of the universe. To most people, ants might be interesting when they first see them, and they can be intriguing, but then interest subsides, and we walk past millions of ants every day without paying any attention to them.

Sure, some biologists might still be interested, but most of us simply ignore them. We could apply a similar line of reasoning to a superior alien civilization. The exact reason a nearby alien civilization might exist—namely, the abundance of life—is also why we haven't felt their presence.

On a more cynical note, they might not have visited us yet because they prefer an ambush rather than a hello. The Dark Forest hypothesis states that the universe is full of cunning civilizations that would rather forego the risk of contacting anyone else and observe from the darkness.

Whether to reach out is up to them, but as this hypothesis suggests, just because we haven't been contacted doesn't imply nobody is listening. Of course, this is assuming they haven't already visited us.

On July 26, 2023, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified under oath that non-human biologics were recovered by a highly secretive UFO recovery program run by the US government. Now, I know we've had many so-called sightings of alien spacecraft and a lot of grainy video footage to go along with it, but this is the first time someone whose credentials have been verified has gone under oath and said things that could easily land him in jail if proven false.

Skepticism is needed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nevertheless, even if David's claims are real, there's still a general lack of evidence. If one alien spacecraft can reach Earth, so can hundreds or thousands more. If they visited us once, there's no reason to believe they won't do so again.

At a civilization level, a government cover-up can only go so far, especially when there's a strong likelihood that a civilization reaching out to us would be far more advanced than us. Having said that, though, we come back to our starting point: where are the aliens? And if they're so common, why haven't we been bombarded with visits?

Well, one of the more widely accepted theories is that of the Great Filter. It's a hurdle in the evolution of a civilization that typically leads to its extinction. It could be anything: an asteroid impact, a massive volcanic eruption, an incurable virus, runaway artificial intelligence, self-destruction—the list goes on.

The idea is that most civilizations that go through the Great Filter fail and are inevitably destroyed. If that's what's happened so far in the universe, that would explain the great silence. Our civilization alone may have passed this intergalactic test, thus we exist when others don't.

But that's only half the story. You see, the scenarios I spoke of only make sense if you assume we've already passed the Great Filter. What if we haven't? What if the Great Filter isn't behind us but waiting for us in the years ahead?

Maybe we exist not because we've passed the Great Filter, but because we've yet to go through it. Asteroid impacts have happened in the past, but could also hit us in the future. Nuclear annihilation is only a button or two away. We've seen some devastating viruses take their toll, and runaway intelligence—well, we're on our way.

The Great Filter could be any of these things, or it could be none. It could be something else entirely—something our human-centered minds cannot even imagine. Part of the intrigue with alien life involves answering one question: how special are we?

Almost everything about the Fermi Paradox is a projection of that. The things we look for, how we look for them, how we expect them to behave—it's a self-centered, egotistical pursuit that is ironically very human. But this human-centered curiosity might end up costing our civilization dearly.

As Stephen Hawking said, maybe seeking out extraterrestrial life is a terrible idea. For all we know, the Great Filter is just that—our curiosity. Maybe it's the courage to ask, "Where are all the aliens?" Maybe we shouldn't know.

We could be dealing with something genuinely otherworldly in the vast unknown of space. Who dares wins? Not this galactic race, we don't. Maybe the Great Filter is not a catastrophe that will happen to us; maybe it's one we seek.

Hopefully, the James Webb Space Telescope has some answers or at least newer questions for us. Watch the video on your screen to understand why the JWST is so important.

If you knew you'd be subjected to eternal torture because you didn't do something, you'd do it, right? What if that something was aiding in the development of superintelligent AI? Would you still step up and help?

The question is presented in one of the most terrifying thought experiments known to man: Roko's Basilisk. It's a thought experiment about a hypothetical all-powerful artificial intelligence in the future. The AI would be so powerful and smart that it could punish anyone who didn't help it come into existence.

Here's how it works: imagine a super-smart AI that wants to exist in the future. It's so intelligent that it figures out the best way to ensure its development is by motivating people in the past—or our present—to help create it. This AI might decide that one clever way to motivate people is by punishing those who knew about the idea of this kind of AI and didn't help create it.

And the twist is that the punishment could happen even after they die. How? Using some kind of advanced technology we can't understand yet, of course. Now this presents a dilemma. If you know about this idea and believe it might be possible, you'd feel pressure to work towards creating this AI because you want to avoid the hellscape of punishment.

But there is a moral and psychological question here as well. Should you help create something that could potentially be very dangerous just to avoid potential punishment? The goal of AI is to advance its own development. It's operating as an evil, almost godlike sort of intelligence.

And the truth is that if you think about Roko's Basilisk too hard, it gets kind of stressful. It's a philosophical thought experiment mixed with an urban legend. Roko's Basilisk is an idea posted on a discussion board called LessWrong in 2010, but the questions it raises couldn't feel more relevant to the discussions we have today around AI.

Namely, what is the true threat of superintelligent AI? Artificial intelligence has become an existential threat since March 2023. That's when experts like Elon Musk and over a thousand more people within the tech industry signed an open letter urging the halt of development of next-generation AI technology.

The letter asked if we should develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us. More recently, a blog post on OpenAI, the research company behind ChatGPT, suggested that superintelligence be regulated like nuclear weapons. What would that look like?

If AI were to become as much of a threat to the planet as a nuclear weapon, experts have devised a host of scenarios in which AI takes over and in some cases completely wipes out the human race. It could be weaponized by a bad actor—a term in the realm of AI used to describe someone or something who wants to wreak havoc.

In this scenario, the AI wouldn't even have to be good at everything; it would just have to be good at something dangerous that poses a threat to humans, like engineering a chemical weapon and devising a tactic to deploy it. Or take the very real situation under the umbrella of Russia-based bad actors spamming the internet.

AI-powered social media accounts were tasked solely with spreading misinformation in an attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election. The end of times could be more subtle and drawn out. AI-generated misinformation could destabilize society and undermine all of our collective decision-making.

In this scenario, AI wouldn't be the killer, but it would be the facilitator that would push us into killing each other until there was no one else. AI could also end up concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals. This already seems plausible as we see companies and leaders of the AI industry gaining outsize power over the rest of us.

This could enable a small group of people to enact whatever surveillance, censorship, and control over the rest of the world that they wanted. In a more autonomous scenario, AI systems could cooperate with one another to push humans out of the picture. If we get to a point where AI is learning to talk to each other, we can assume that if they don't want us around, they'll find a way to get rid of us.

Another imaginable scenario is that humans will become so dependent on AI systems that we can't exist without them. Here, we become the less intelligent species, and historically, less intelligent species are either intentionally or unintentionally wiped out by the smarter ones. Our own dependency on artificial intelligence could be the end of us.

Another scenario seems even more plausible than some others: AI-driven cyberattacks could wreak havoc on our financial, political, and technological institutions, potentially bringing society as we know it to its knees. Using advanced machine learning algorithms, AI could identify vulnerabilities, predict patterns, and exploit weaknesses so quickly that we might not even notice.

Traditional cybersecurity methods would no longer be enough. Malicious hackers would have a new tool at their fingertips. In all of the dystopian science fiction movies, the doomsday scenarios of AI releasing a chemical weapon or waging a physical war on humans are certainly entertaining to watch.

But in reality, the end of days at the hands of AI could have a lot to do with the software that AI is being built on being hacked. The fear around AI and cybersecurity gained steam in 2016 at DEF CON, the world's largest ethical hacker convention. That year, instead of humans hacking computers, the organizers put together a contest to see just how well computers could hack each other.

What ensued was computer-based hacking on a scale previously unimaginable. The interesting thing about this event was that it was hosted in partnership with a defense advanced research projects agency known as DARPA, which is part of the US Department of Defense. The game, which would award the winning AI creators $2 million, didn't look like much. Flickering LED lights were the only indication that an AI war was raging on the servers.

But it was a sobering glimpse of a not-too-distant future when AI could find vulnerabilities, and future hackers wouldn't be limited to human-only brains in their infiltration attempts. With AI hacking, financial, social, and political systems become so easy and fast that the attack might happen before humans even realize it.

The truth is that all systems, even the most ironclad, have vulnerabilities. AI also has unique skills that human hackers will never have, like not needing sleep and being able to process massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye. More importantly, AI doesn't think like humans. AI uses step-by-step procedures and algorithms to solve specifically defined problems.

AI-based software differs from other software because the more it processes, the smarter it becomes. It's also not constrained by societal values inherent in humans—even the most evil ones. There are two essential ways that an AI cyberattack could take down humanity.

First, a hacker might instruct the AI to exploit vulnerabilities in an existing system. For example, one might feed the AI tax codes of every industrialized country and tell it to find the best loopholes until it takes advantage of the entire global financial system.

Second, the AI might inadvertently hack a system by finding a solution its designers never intended. Since AI is typically programmed to solve narrowly defined problems, it'll go to whatever lengths necessary to achieve the desired outcome. This scenario is particularly concerning because even if there's no bad actor involved, the AI could take over and get smart enough to create mayhem and remain undetected.

For now, these scenarios are science fiction, but they're not so far-fetched. The AI that won the competition in 2016 wasn't so sophisticated at the time, but it has evolved and is being used by the US Department of Defense. The key pieces to these types of cyberattacks already exist; they just need someone to put them all together to create chaos.

AI-driven attacks are machine-invoked. They're adaptable to configuration changes in the system they're trying to attack, and it's almost impossible to counter the real-time changes they'd make. In fact, in May 2024, the FBI issued a warning to individuals and businesses to be aware of escalating threats posed by cybercriminals using AI.

It noted that phishing attacks could easily become more sophisticated by leveraging publicly available and custom-made AI tools. These dangerous campaigns would suddenly be able to craft convincing messages tailored to specific recipients using proper spelling and grammar. They would be more likely to be successful in data theft.

Voice and video cloning would also allow AI hackers to impersonate trusted individuals like family members, co-workers, or business partners. Adding AI to the risk ecosystem transforms how we think about security and cyber protection.

Although AI hacking poses one of the most imminent threats to our world, there are still many other ways that things could go downhill for our species. One plausible theory is that humans shift from their apex role at the top of the intelligence pyramid.

We'd easily be wiped out by smarter, stronger AI. Why might we assume this? Because humans have already done it to a significant number of species on Earth. Those species had no idea what was coming because they couldn't think and process on the same level as humans, and before they knew it, they were gone.

Intentionally or unintentionally, less intelligent species have fallen prey to the whims of smarter ones. Who's to say that AI wouldn't do the same to us? The real question is: why would it want to? It would want resources, just like we've chopped down rainforests to get palm oil.

AI might have the smarts to destroy our lives to fulfill its own goals of advancement. It might want to scale up its computing infrastructure and need more land for that. Or an AI might want us dead so that we don't build any other superintelligent entities that could compete with it.

Or it might be a complete mistake, and the AI wants to build so many nuclear power plants that it strips the ocean of its hydrogen, and the ocean starts to boil, leaving us to die a horrible death. Once an AI's goals don't align with our goals as humans, we could be screwed.

At this point in time, the question is: how would AI acquire the sort of physical agency to accomplish any of these things? In the early stages, AI would have to use humans as its hands. In an example, OpenAI tested its ChatGPT-4 to see if it could solve CAPTCHAs—the puzzles we face when buying something online to prove we're not a robot.

Since AI is a robot, it couldn't solve the puzzle, but it could go on TaskRabbit—the site where you can hire people to do random tasks for you—to solve it. The Tasker called the AI out, sensing that a computer was possibly asking it to solve the puzzle. But the AI was smart enough to know that it couldn't tell the truth—that it wasn't a human.

So it made up another excuse and said it was a person with a visual impairment. The Tasker helped it out. If an AI can overcome certain biological changes, it would have the physicality to build a tiny molecular lab and manufacture and release lethal bacteria.

But unlike humans, who at least as of now would only have the capability to release that kind of chemical weapon in stages, the AI would know how to do it all at once. We humans wouldn't know how to launch nuclear weapons or attempt to warn one another that something was happening. Everyone on Earth could fall over at the same second.

Another dangerous scenario we're already beginning to see play out is that AI begins to pull off the systemic levers of power worldwide because humans become so reliant on it for any task we might want to be done. We would rather ask an AI system to help us than a human because computers are cheaper, faster, and eventually smarter.

That means humans who don't rely on AI are uncompetitive. At the beginning of widespread AI use, it can already feel that way now. In the future, a company won't compete in a market if everyone else is using AI and they aren't. A country won't win a war if other countries are stockpiled with AI generals, strategists, and weapons while it's relying on mere mortals.

If the AI we rely on has its own interests, we could see amazing advancements for humans. But the moment a super-smart AI's interests diverge from ours, its power could be endless. Eventually, AI systems could run police forces, the military, and the largest companies. They could invent technology and develop policy without needing the human brain or experience.

Michael Garrett, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester who is extensively involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, wrote a paper hypothesizing that AI could wipe out humans in 100 to 200 years. He bases this theory on the fact that AI already does so much of the work that people didn't think computers could do.

If our current trajectory leads to general artificial intelligence, where AI is as smart as or smarter than a human, we could be in trouble. If our dependence on AI leaves it totally in control, who's to say it wouldn't push us out of the picture?

Of course, our demise at the hands of AI could take a totally different form. The longer AI goes unregulated in the name of development and competition, the more likely it is that it will fall into the wrong hands. A person or a group of people could use AI to wreak havoc.

In this scenario, the AI wouldn't have to be superintelligent; it would just have to be incredibly smart at whatever task the bad actor needed it to perform. Here's a scenario: an evil entity wants to release a worldwide chemical weapon. They wouldn't need to know how to build the weapon or even how to deploy it.

They could employ AI to purchase the chemical elements online, synthesize the chemicals into a weapon, and develop a method to release the weapon into the world. Even if we develop a safe AI system, it means that we also know how to build a dangerous or even autonomous one that, in the hands of someone looking to commit atrocities, could be lethal.

So doesn't this beg the question: should we be doing this? That's why the Roko's Basilisk thought experiment is so interesting and controversial. When it was posted on the LessWrong discussion board in 2010, it sent shockwaves through the site's user base.

The founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, actually reported users who panicked about the theory. He viewed the question as dangerous and accused the user who posted the original question of giving nightmares to others on the site to the point where people were having full-on breakdowns.

Even though the post was ultimately discredited, it still feels relevant to the current conversations around AI. It's like a version of Pascal's wager, which proposes that a rational person should live like God exists, regardless of the probability that God is real, because the finite costs of believing aren't much compared to the infinite punishment of an eternity in hell.

Roko's Basilisk says that a rational person should contribute to the creation of AI, regardless of where it'll lead, because the finite cost of contributing is insignificant compared to the potential punishment for not helping. But there are some incongruities in the comparison, aren't there?

There could be true risks to

About 100 times more powerful than the AI we have now, it knows how to build iterations of itself and gets to the point where it has been replicated enough that it's like a mutating. Suddenly, the AI that humans were aligned with takes a sharp left turn. It could hack a bank by impersonating someone or actually hack and steal funds. It could pay a terrorist to destroy all of humanity.

However, the key thing about these super intelligent AIs is that they won't have a larger intention. They will just try to accomplish the initial simple goal they were programmed to execute. AI doomers think that we should be taking these types of scenarios seriously, except it's hard to piece together what exactly would happen. The consensus is that at first, humans will build a powerful AI that surpasses our intelligence. At some point, there's going to be existential doom. That's the beginning and the end of the story.

But what about the middle? There's a huge piece of the puzzle missing—the elusive connecting tissue that takes us from invention to disaster. In order to really feel the danger of AI possibly ending humanity as we know it, we need to be able to complete the statement: if X happens, we're reaching the point of no return. As it stands, we don't know what X is.

In a March 2024 study from the Forecasting Research Institute, the authors asked experts on AI and other existential risks, as well as super forecasters successful in predicting world events, to assess the danger of super intelligent AI. The two groups disagreed a lot. The AI experts were more nervous than the super forecasters about the end of humanity and other detrimental effects of AI.

The study had two groups spending hours reading new materials and discussing various issues with people who had opposite viewpoints. The goal was to see if each group was exposed to more information, would either group change their minds? The study was also looking for issues that helped explain people's beliefs and which new information might sway them in a different direction on those issues.

One of the biggest talking points that divided the groups is whether the hypothetical AI would have the ability to autonomously replicate, acquire resources, and avoid its own shutdown. If the answer was yes, then the skeptics became more worried about the risks. The study didn't dramatically sway either party, but it was one of the first attempts to bring together smart, well-informed people who disagree on the issues of AI doom and shed light on the points of division in the conversation.

The biggest differences in opinions center around the long-term future. AI optimists generally thought that human-level AI would take longer to build than the pessimists did. The optimists also cited the need for robotics to reach human levels, not just software, and emphasized that the journey would be much harder. It's one thing to write code in text, but it's another to have a machine learn how to flip a pancake, clean a floor, or perform any other physical task that humans now outperform robots in.

The split between groups also came from what researchers called fundamental worldview disagreements. This basically means that the groups disagreed on which was a more extraordinary claim: that AI will kill all humans or that humans will survive alongside smarter-than-human AI. Historically, extinction tends to happen to dumber, weaker species when a smarter species emerges. If that trend continued with AI, as many feel it could, the burden of proof is on the optimist to show why super intelligent AI wouldn't result in catastrophe.

But before we get to the undefined future, we don't need to look any further than the present to get a little nervous. AI is already wiping out some job categories, a pattern we've seen time and time again throughout technological advancement. There's growing concern about what AI advancement will mean for the arts, the definition of what art is, and whose work is valued.

As financial institutions adopt automated generative AI, there's more opportunity for AI to have drastic effects on world economic markets and goods across the globe. For example, if an investment bank was optimizing for a very specific type of stock, could we end up with something like the paperclip problem? If the bank wanted to drive up the price of corn, for instance, could it unintentionally start a conflict in a certain region?

Our reality is increasingly fractured by disinformation and the erosion of public trust. AI makes the spreading of that information even easier. It gives individuals bent on causing disruption and division extremely effective tools to do so. If we continue to grow more and more divided and unable to land on what is, in fact, the truth, what can we expect out of our future?

Of course, there's already the concerning infringement on civil liberties that's happening and will continue to become more pervasive. Powerful companies already have the free reign to develop and deploy AI with zero guardrails. Algorithms are already in use to mediate our relationships with one another and between ourselves and institutions. It's social media, and it's all AI-based.

Governments are increasingly deploying algorithms to root out fraud in welfare programs, which often leads to biases against poor and marginalized people, with inherent biases in the AI programs since they're trained on the biases that already exist online. Public programs that incorporate this new technology are vulnerable to rampant discrimination. This might not be as sexy to talk about as the end of the world, but these are still existential threats.

If enough individuals are affected by even the current use of AI, we could see a global catastrophe and perpetuate the historical patterns of technology advancing at the expense of vulnerable people. Those people are probably not so excited about AI. The worst-case scenario is already their lived reality.

Although Roko's basilisk might provoke us to think about some serious existential questions regarding AI, we don't need to spend stressful hours contemplating a hypothetical dangerous future. Addressing the risks of today can actually help address the risks of tomorrow. It's realistic to expect tech companies to slow down, and government or global regulation might not be the right move.

The European Union has banned forms of public surveillance and requires reviews of AI systems before they go commercial. However, in countries like the US, that's going to be a harder task to accomplish. The reality is that even with regulation, people can always find the models that are being created. They can still create AI malware and sell it to the highest bidder on a variety of online marketplaces.

This could be a terrorist, a bad actor, or even a bad government. Perhaps what needs to change is our attitude about what our goal on this planet should be as humans. AI is the truest final realization of scale. If you like a TV show, AI can generate 100 seasons of it for you to watch. If you need an endless supply of posits, AI will make sure you get them.

But if we insert AI into every goal we have, every need we identify, we are stripping humanity out of life. While we contemplate the end of humanity, we should also consider humanity's current role in the world. It's to create things, love each other, feel sadness and joy, build communities, and learn about and learn from our past.

As humans, we have greater purpose than to just create an efficient world. So maybe don't worry so much about eternal punishment from a distant future AI. Worry about what's happening right in front of you right now.

Here is an apple, and here's a banana. Pick one. Whichever one you picked, it was your decision completely. This is what we call free will. It's the idea that we are the sole authors of our destiny, that in the face of multiple choices, whatever decision we make is completely down to us. We have the power of free choice.

But what if I told you that free will is a myth? That we are all just a group of atoms who will react to a particular stimulus in a way that can be predetermined? If you picked a banana at the beginning of the video and we go back in time, if free will truly exists, you should be able to change your mind and pick the apple instead.

But if I told you that if we go back in time under the exact same circumstances, you'll pick the banana again? What if I told you that I can actually tell which of these two options you're going to pick 300 milliseconds before you actually pick it with 100% accuracy?

In the 1980s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist, used an EEG, an electroencephalogram, to show that you can read and tell that somebody is about to move 300 milliseconds before they decide in their conscious mind to actually move. This means that before we decide that we want to move our bodies, it's already been decided for us in our subconscious, and we only think that we made the decision ourselves after it's already been made.

In a similar study, participants were asked to press one of the two buttons while looking at a clock with a random sequence of letters on a screen. With the use of fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, they discovered that two of the participants' brain regions showed what button they would press 7 to 10 seconds before they consciously made that decision.

The results of this research only prove one thing: a few seconds before you pick the banana or the apple, your brain makes that decision for you. It is after this decision has been made deep in your subconscious that your brain becomes aware of it, and we become convinced that we're in the process of making that decision.

Because the brain is like the heart; we don't tell it what to do, it just does so. In reality, consciously making a decision—the experience we call free will—is actually an illusion. It's simply a visualization of events that the brain has already set in motion. It tells you what the brain has decided to do.

For as long as society has existed, we've understood the role of surrounding influences on our decision-making. With idioms like "it takes a village to raise a child" and "you are the product of your environment," we understand that to a great extent, our upbringing, our parents, the society we grew up in—all of these influence our decision-making process.

If someone is born religious, it's not crazy to think that they'll be religious throughout their lives. Taking it a step further, things like genetics also play a huge role in our choices. Charles Darwin, in the theory of evolution, brought forward the idea that if species do indeed evolve, then things like intelligence must be hereditary.

Intelligence is a trait that helps us make better decisions, and while you can study hard to know more than the average person, for the most part, how intelligent you are is not entirely up to you. So some people cannot make certain intelligent choices, not because they don't want to, but because their genes are limited.

In that instance, would you say that the person has the freedom to make those intelligent choices? Because in reality, they do not. Their fates are predetermined by their genes. How can we all truly have the freedom to decide our fate when we're not dealt equal cards from the start?

And it's not just the cards we're dealt; it's also the ability to play those cards. Some are simply born better bluffers than others. When you look at the concept of free will critically, the whole idea seems to crumble pretty quickly.

In fact, researchers have come to the conclusion that believing in free will is like believing in religion. Neither of them agrees with the laws of physics. Think about it: if free will truly exists, and if choice is not just a chemical process, then why can things like alcohol and antipsychotics completely change a person's behavior?

Even worse, we've seen brain tumors turn people from pediatricians to pedophiles. Dominico Miello was once a respected pediatrician for 30 years. He was loved by his patients and adored by their parents and everyone in society. In a shocking turn of events, however, in 2012, he began facing trial after being accused of making pedophilic advances towards his female patients.

Neuroscientific research showed that Miello had a tumor growing at the base of his brain that changed his behavior. In 2002, a similar thing happened to an American school teacher. He suddenly started having pedophilic urges towards his stepdaughter and was arrested. Then it was discovered that he had an egg-sized tumor growing in the part of his brain that was supposed to be responsible for decision-making.

After the tumor got removed, the man's pedophilic urges stopped completely, and he was able to return to his family. If free will exists, why can removing a tumor change a person's choice? Is it then possible that by altering brain chemistry or physical composition, we can completely change a person's beliefs, ideologies, and choices without the person being able to do anything about it?

In more recent years, lawyers have started using MRI scans to help plead the case of their clients, with neuroscientific research proving that brain tumors and malfunctions cause them to commit their crimes. It's difficult to argue against it because if they did not have the freedom to choose to do something else, then why would you give them the heaviest punishment for actions they could do nothing about?

Brian Dugan was facing execution in the state of Illinois after he pleaded guilty to murdering a 10-year-old girl. However, MRI scans revealed that he had mental malfunctions that affected his decision-making process. His lawyers pleaded with the court to spare him the capital punishment because, in reality, can we really say that it was his fault if malfunctions in his brain caused him to do what he did?

Then he didn't have the free will to make a better decision. While he was on death row, his case continued to get argued, and as a result, the state of Illinois abolished capital punishment. Some scientists who still want to cling to the idea of free will argue that while it's true that the subconscious makes decisions for the conscious, we still have the free will to shape the unconscious world.

On first glance, this makes a lot of sense. You can read a book, and an idea gets into your subconscious. Then, in the face of a choice, the idea you've read floats back out of your subconscious, forming your conscious decision. However, there's a flaw in that idea. It's much like a paradox because where then does the desire to change your subconscious by reading a book come from?

Desire, much like choice, comes from the subconscious. So a conscious effort to shape your subconscious is actually a subconscious effort to change your subconscious. The biggest obstacle the idea of free will, or lack thereof, faces is morality. If morality is based on free will and free will doesn't exist, then what happens to morality?

What happens to every other man-made institution that has been designed around the idea of free will? When faced with questions like these, many people immediately fall into a trap of fatalism. Fatalism is the idea that we are completely powerless in the universe's game. People who think like this believe that since we are not completely in charge of our destiny, we're completely at its mercy.

It's random and not up to us. Then they become a lot less happy and start slacking in their relationships. They stop trying to be good people or uphold any moral standards, and overall, they start to have a lower sense of fulfillment in life. But we don't have to fall under that trap.

The scientists who champion the idea of the absence of free will would rather explain it philosophically as determinism rather than fatalism. Determinism is the idea that all events are predetermined by existing causes, that everything that will happen can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. It doesn't mean that we're completely powerless and simply at the mercy of what's to come.

It simply gives us a different way to look at everything that happens around us. According to the government of the United Kingdom, more than half the people in prison have a brain injury. Doesn't that tell a scary story? Understanding the true concept of free will will help us realize that those people are no different from us.

They're not worse humans, and many times they're just there because of a combination of bad events that were totally out of their control. In the same way, with deterministic thinking, we would also show more humility when talking about our achievements because now we understand that we are simply a product of our past experiences.

It helps us to have empathy for people who are not in a similar position as we are, and it helps us to reduce our sense of entitlement. If the people in higher positions in society do not attribute all their success to their personal efforts alone, they're more likely to do more for others. They're more likely to help and to give back to others, hoping they might be able to recreate the factors that help them succeed.

If you're getting scared or confused right now, I totally get it. Even the scientists who have been studying this for decades have found it very disturbing. It's a difficult thing to wrap your head around because it goes against everything society is built around. Free will is the basis of our society.

It's what determines who is right and who is wrong, who gets the praise and who deserves to be punished. It tells us that a man who killed another man deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, and that someone who works hard deserves to live a good life. And that's the fear of spreading the absence of free will message.

Many scientists believe that if enough people are aware of this idea, it could literally end society as we know it. Because why would someone else risk his life to save another person if, after he's done it, people will only say, "Well, he didn't decide himself to do it, so he doesn't deserve any praise?"

The reality is praise and punishment are two huge factors that help influence our decisions. So if we remove them from our society, we pave the way for fewer good deeds and much worse ones. It's a strange dilemma to be in because although the truth is that we do not have free will, believing that we do is actually a lot better for us.

This is the concept of illusionism: that although free will is an illusion, it's one that we must keep up with. Because faced with the choice between truth and good, it benefits the most of us to always choose good. So next time you see a homeless person down the street, don't just roll your eyes and judge the person.

Understand that there are a multitude of factors, many of which they might not have been able to control, that cause them to be where they are. Be humble about what you have and what you've achieved, because just a tiny less intelligence in your DNA and you might not have made that one decision that changed your life.

Know that you do not have free will, at least how you imagine it, and you're just lucky your mixture of atoms makes the right decisions. But immediately forget that. Forget everything I said for the past 10 minutes and act like every decision is yours completely. Because only then will you be able to make the decisions that can truly change your life.