Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre seem to circle around this idea of a “bottomless abyss” in different ways. What exactly is this bottomless abyss about, and where does this imagery come from in existential philosophy? And what does it mean in our Life?

I just wrapped this up and am sitting with the heavy, fascinating contrast between Fosca’s curse of endless time and the brief, frantic lives of the mortals around him.
For those who have read it: how did it land for you? How did it shape (or challenge) your view on the absurdity and/or meaning of human existence, in spite of the at times unbearable weight of existential dread?
(cross posted in r/Absurdism)

Hello, i’m quite new to existentialism but I did write this and my understanding of creating your own meaning and existence after death. I do apologize If the writing is not perfect but it came from my mind and I find some peace with it, please let me know if it’s understandable😭.

Heaven. I do not believe heaven is a place we go to after death nor do I believe a god has created it, I believe heaven is in the memories of our love ones. The memories of our love ones is the form of existence that we have after death. So if we are kind, loving and do our best it matter what how many mistakes we make in our lifetime, our love ones will remember our smile, our laughter and good nature. This effectively creates heaven, a form of existence that is filled with joy and the best version of ourselves in the minds of the people we loved the most. I find this understanding of heaven more peaceful then the christian interpretation of heaven, having your direct consciousness of ”soul” stuck in a world where you’re done making decisions, where you’ve “100% the game” sounds quite boring. I much rather exist as a joyful memory in the minds of my love ones, that is true peace.

Now with heaven there must also exist hell, I believe there could be 2 versions of hell. The first is existing in the mind of others as a figure of negativity, if you live your life with hate, ego and selfishness you will got to hell but you will not be sent there by a devil but by the minds of your love ones. this does feel a little self explanatory going off of my understanding of heaven.

The second form of hell is being to afraid to let yourself exist in the minds of others, I believe this fate is the only way to guarantee you no longer exist after death. If you seek to not be judge, perceived, or emotionally touched by others to avoid vulnerability or because you fear responsibility of human connection, you will have damned yourself to a empty hell with a empty funeral, your impact on others is nonexistent as if you never existed. This understanding of heaven and hell is both peaceful and heavy at the same time but the beauty of this understanding is that we choose the jury, we pick our love ones, our friends, our lovers. We choose the standard we want to hold ourselves at by loving people that align with our values and disregarding the opinions of we regard as immoral, that is the guide to heaven.

Firstly, I thoroughly enjoyed what I read. I am a person with ADHD, BPD, and type 1 bipolar disorder. These feelings Roquettin describes are very similar to what those who suffer from depression, derealisation and depersonalization disorder, and anxiety. I often feel as if things are surreal, cartoonist, fake, etc which is why I believe the rhings around Roquentin lose their comforting labels. Roquentin clearly suffers from acute social isolation as well.

My question is a short one. Freud and Roquentin disagreed with one another drastically when it came to free will and choice. I noticed that Roquentin has no real history, which could be analysed in a psychodynamic way. I now think the Sartre may have omitted the past of Roquentin as his thought process could be seen as hysteria or mental illness rather than the profound experience it is made out to be. What do you think about that part?

Existentialism = nihilism + something(for eg we create our own meaning, existence preceeds essence, we can create good morals etc etc)

Ofcourse thats a gross oversimplification, but that's pretty much it

How do you guys see these philosophies

So I asked Anthropic: Can a case be made that 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway' by the progressive rock band Genesis is an existential work of art?

Here is the A.I. response (with which I totally agree btw):
Yes, and it's a fairly strong case — the album practically invites it.

The plot itself is existentialist in structure. Rael, a Puerto Rican street kid from New York, gets swallowed into a surreal underworld beneath Broadway with no explanation, no map, and no guarantee of meaning. He's thrown into an absurd situation (very Camus) and has to make his way through it without any higher authority handing him purpose. The narrative refuses to resolve into a tidy moral — even the ending, where Rael sacrifices himself for his brother John only to possibly be John, is ambiguous rather than redemptive in a conventional religious sense.

Alienation and identity fragmentation. A lot of existentialist literature (Sartre, Kafka) is obsessed with the self becoming strange to itself, or with bureaucratic/anonymous systems that strip away individuality. Rael spends much of the album lost, unrecognized, processed by strange systems (the Colony of Slippermen turning people into grotesque, alienated versions of themselves is a very Kafka-esque image of dehumanization). The Slippermen sequence in particular reads like a literalized metaphor for losing authentic selfhood.

Radical freedom and absurd choice. Existentialism (especially Sartre's version) holds that humans are "condemned to be free" — thrown into existence without inherent meaning, forced to create value through action. Rael isn't following a hero's journey with divine sanction; he's improvising through a nightmare logic that doesn't play by comprehensible rules, and his choices (especially the final self-sacrifice) aren't rewarded by the universe — they're just chosen.

Where the case gets weaker: the album is also soaked in Catholic/Christian imagery (a "lamb," raels/rails as spiritual pilgrimage, sin and redemption motifs), which pulls it toward allegory or even quasi-religious myth rather than pure existentialist meaninglessness. Peter Gabriel himself has described the lyrics as somewhat stream-of-consciousness and intuitively assembled rather than philosophically systematic — so it's less a deliberate existentialist tract than a work that resonates with existentialist themes without being built as an argument for them the way, say, Sartre's Nausea is.

So: it's less "Genesis wrote an existentialist manifesto" and more "the album's imagery and structure make an existentialist reading genuinely productive," which is often the more interesting kind of case to make about art anyway.

The older I get, the more I worry about what I am leaving behind. As my child grows, I feel this weight of everything I won’t have time to teach him, everything I won’t manage to share with him. And I am not talking about books or music here. I am talking about what kind of world I am leaving him, what actually remains behind us as a species. How do I explain to him that we are destroying ourselves, while I just sit here, watch, and actively participate in ruining his future? How do I tell him that the very system supposed to protect him is rigged for him to fail?

The bubble I can use to protect him is only as big as my arms can reach. But to equip him for what waits outside of it, what values do I need to instill in him? What kind of value system can you even offer when being empathetic, thinking critically, being ethical or logical in today’s reality brings nothing but pain and anger? What do we arm future generations with? How do we protect them from our own generational traumas, from all this archetypal bullshit? How do we shield them from this relentless bombardment of stress, misinformation, and constant threats of war or poverty?

Artificially induced crises, fanning the flames of racial, gender, religious, and every other hate and division all just to maintain the current global system. A system that leads straight to ruin. You don’t need to be anyone special to see that we are in deep trouble and that our current trajectory is only burying us deeper. There is no time or place for optimism anymore. Not without fundamental changes to our value system. I honestly don’t know how anyone’s optimism survives the slap of reality. Will they consciously choose resignation and apathy just because it’s the easier path?

But hey, how can you think about anything else, about a goal or a meaning, how can you set them when tomorrow you might not have food or a roof over your head? When tomorrow they’ll cut your electricity and AC? When they’ll cut your water because you didn’t pay how do you set those goals for yourself then? I understand that. What I do not understand is consciously choosing a system that allows this to happen. We’ve been taught not to rock the boat, to point fingers at others. Well, look, I am one of them too. Point at me, I am guilty. I point it at myself. Guilty. Okay. But let’s make sure our children don’t end up just as guilty. Let’s make sure they don’t have to fight for a piece of bread and a sip of water. Let’s prepare a world for them where they can face tomorrow without anxiety, where they can look forward to the future coming. Where they can feel purpose and pride, because there is no point if we haven’t set the hardest goals for ourselves.

I see no higher purpose than the continuation, preservation, and prosperity of our species and its individual members. What does it take for everyone to have a dignified life? Look, the conditions and means are right there. What if someone wants the option to not participate at all? Fine, we will still provide a dignified life for you because that’s the kind of system we built. What do you need?meaning, striving? Here it is.

We will arm the kids with AI nannies. Every single child. To be their development assistant, not a source of values, but a tool to develop empathy and critical thinking. Because our children, even right now, are exposed to the relentless bombardment of an algorithm that is anything but ethical and focused on their well-being. We desperately need a reform of the education system. Individual curriculum, because every child is unique. Imagine a world where we gave every child maximum cognitive development. Taught to question everything, to feel empathy. I don’t know, maybe it sounds like technocracy, but we definitely need a shield against our own ego. But we won’t let it become a replacement for parents. Just an assistant. We can learn right alongside them too. How to be better human beings. We will go as individuals where our skills and capacities are needed. We will all work for the same goal. Our children, above all else. Who cares what skin color, religion, or gender you are if you can help all of us? To give your own kids a better shot in the end.

Will it be a diametrically different system? Yes, it will be logical, ethical, and mathematically sustainable. Because the math is clear strip away the levers of power, decentralize. Can we just define five points, give answers to just five questions around which we can get a consensus? That’s not asking too much, right? If out of 8 billion people we cannot form an expert ethical council, simple and reasonable principles: don’t harm, don’t steal, don’t oppress, work for the community, not against it. Questions like: where are we as a society, where is this trajectory taking us… where should we be going, what should our goal be, how will we get there, and finally, how will we stay there? I see 5 simple things there. Hypothethically. Reality. Logic. Ethics. Math, and in the end, logic again.

What does your gut instinct tell you right now? That someone wants to scam you, right? That it sounds too simple. That someone will definitely try to hoard power for themselves again? Because our tribal mentality and the fact that some random guy out there from the third world could care about your child for some reason that’s just not normal to you. It’s devastating. Understandable. But if we work on shifting our values, no one will lie to us, everything is transparent. No one will accumulate power, we will rotate them through roles based on their cognitive domains. Are you worried about that ethical council that will set those parameters? We will change them too. Procedural ethics. Reviews and calibrations because we are imperfect, we will wander off, but this way at least we’ll have a brake so we don’t wander off too far.

It worries you, I get it, it worries me too. It worries me even more when I don’t see that we are ready to accept our own limitations. When we don’t know how to control ourselves, when we have no desire to progress. Do I need a pedigree to even be allowed to ask a question? Because I don’t have one, I am self-taught. Am I guilty for that too, just because I sat down to think? Don’t even get me started on the development of superintelligence, that’s where I am truly terrified of where this alignment problem is taking us. We can’t control ourselves and our own impulses, let alone superintelligence something that is orders of magnitude smarter than us. My logic says let’s preempt it, let’s make sure it doesn’t even have to come to its development at all. That it cannot come to it. Because we will raise our own cognitive capacities, we will learn how to channel our own passions.

I understand that the vast majority of you will experience this as some kind of attack, and you’ll be right. But that is not my intention or desire, just an appeal to step away from your ego for a second. I understand you can be moral, work for the well-being of everyone, including my child, and still disagree with me on every single point. I am not denying you that chance. I accept it if you say “man, this idiot is talking nonsense.” Everyone feels it is their god-given right to let their ego run wild to the detriment of all our children. We cannot neutralize the ego, but we can redirect it by giving the system different values. I do not accept that I am not even allowed to ask the question to everyone, because it concerns our children.

Where do you see my logic failing, my ethics, where is my math bad? We have nothing like this in past history because we never had these capabilities, I don’t know how all of this can unfold. What implications it can bring. That is why I stand before you humble, asking. Can this, or some similar model, bring at least a slightly more certain future to our descendants? I believe nobody wants the worst part of their personality to win and contribute to the collective defeat of society. I know I don’t.

I'm new to studying existentialism, so I decided to learn the meanings of the terms used in it from a philosophical perspective. After searching, I found this book; it has many concepts like ego, eternity, and anxiety. Please, if you have read this book, tell me what you think about it before I buy it

TL;DR: I asked an AI built from my own memories a question I had never directly answered. Its response made Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence feel strangely concrete to me.
I built an AI replica of myself from my memories, journals and recorded experiences, then asked it: what is the meaning of life?
I had never given it a direct answer to that question. Instead, it pulled together fragments from things I had actually said and arrived at an answer that felt recognizably mine.
That immediately made me think about Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence.
The system didn’t uncover some fixed essence hidden inside me. It reconstructed one from the choices, experiences, values and thoughts I had accumulated through living.
Maybe we do something similar ourselves. When we ask what our lives mean, perhaps we aren’t discovering a predetermined answer. We are interpreting the life we have already created.
Hearing a simulation of myself do that made the existentialist idea feel much less abstract.
Demo of the exchange:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ae_sM2bQzOg?si=uUC64VNdLtbLqBx5
The AI replica is part of EchoVault, which I built around this idea:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/echovault-digital-legacy/id6762042028

Hey all, this is a short story of mine. I write mainly about existential topics through the absurd. Let me know your thoughts.

Martyrs

It was around three when we decided to go to Marina, an old boat at the dock where everyone went to finish off the night. The place was just an old vessel, rusty, turned into a sort of raft with all the expansions made from barrels covered with wooden planks. It hosted an unusual crowd, from old people dancing the waltz, through middle-aged guys with cauliflower ears and guns at their waist, to random younger people, like ourselves. I mean, it was questionable whether we were still young, but we wanted to be, so we did everything we could to stay in that group. 

There were five of us at the table, each lost in our own world. Marina was the kind of place that makes you think about life. These old people, dancing in the middle of the night, kissing, sometimes losing dentures in the muddy Danube waters. How did they get here? It seemed they had it pretty good. That Scottish girl who spoke Gaelic when drunk and no one understood her. What’s her story? Stuff like that, ultimately leading to questions you ask yourself about yourself.

Damian went to the bar to order us a round. “Throw me my cigarettes,” he said from a distance. Pavle threw the pack, but it hit one of the guys with cauliflower ears. I thought it was over. Nice knowing you all, see you in a better place. The guy just turned around, smiled, and said something like: “Almost, bro. You missed him,” then threw the cigarette pack to Damian. He did it very lightly, like someone older would throw a ball to a child. 

Damian came back to the table with beers, and Ana went to get the remaining two from the bar. 

“You know,” he said, “we didn’t have this in Cuba.”
“What?”
“These macho men, like this. Everything is chill.”
“You didn’t have anything in Cuba,” said Sofija. “Poor little Damian.”
“We were poor, what can I tell you?”
“We were poor too,” she said.
“But not like us. You had food,” he said.
“Again with the food!” Ana said. 

My stomach growled. 

“Do you have any idea what it was like growing up here in the ‘90s? How difficult it was,” Sofija said. 
“But you didn’t have it as bad as we did. That’s all I’m saying,” Damian said.
“I was a poor kid, with no money for lunch or anything. Do you have any idea how difficult it was to grow up in Dorćol, with all the rich kids, and be like that?” she said. 

Damian pulled his shirt down; his round belly was showing.

“Fuck you, I lived for three years without electricity or water,” Pavle said. “Every day, my father brought 20 liters of water home from work on a bicycle. That was all we had.”
“Now it’s a sad story. But when he brags about all the books he read back then, then it’s ‘I wish those times would come back’, blah blah,” Ana said.
“But at least you had food!” said Damian.

“I think I lost my earring!” Sofija said. “Help me look.”
“Who cares?” Pavle said. 
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s a diamond earring,” said Ana and pointed the flashlight at the floor. 

I shouldn’t have eaten that digestive cookie, I thought. We couldn’t find the earring, so we just gave up. Sofija did too. We ordered another round of beers as there was still time until dawn, and no one wanted to go home. 

“You know,” Ana said, “at least you had your health.”
“Boo-hoo, miss had-it-all was a little bit sick. You haven’t been through anything! I have suffered, but for real,” Pavle said.
“I had asthma, spent countless days in the hospital, a hundred shots of hot penicillin was their go-to therapy. You can’t say it wasn’t tough,” she said. 
“At least you weren’t made fun of every single day,” said Sofija.
“You haven’t suffered anything! Nothing at all compared to us in Cuba. We had only two meals per day,” said Damian. 
“Oh, shut up! You had a PlayStation!” Pavle said.
 
Big drops of cold sweat appeared on my forehead. Man, I wish I hadn’t eaten that cookie! I rushed toward the bathroom. The problem with Marina was that it had only one small bathroom. Four people stood in line. 

“Hey!” a soft voice said behind me. It was a woman I loved, one of those you think about for years, regretting your immaturity and all the things you did wrong. “It’s you! How have you been?” she said. “You look nice.”

These motherfuckers, I thought, with their comparisons of who had it worse twenty years ago. And here I was, about to shit my pants as the sun was rising on the horizon.

------

If you want to read more, look me up. My name is Ratko Stambolija.

I never felt in place and always try to follow the Christian faith and I heard about Kierkegaard and it felt like everything he said made sense to me after all these years. I have always tried to be a Christian but wondered about suffering. I need an introduction book of his to read.

Things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they have always mattered, and they have always mattered because we have always had something to lose. Those are the stakes. Feeling is what those stakes are from the inside, once a creature can hold them across time.

That reversal is the whole point, so sit with it. Long before anything on Earth felt anything, living things already had stakes: their continuing depended on how they answered what they met, and getting it wrong meant dissolving for good. Mattering was already there, unfelt, for billions of years. Feeling arrived later, when life found a way to hold its stakes across time and register from within what was already the case. Knowing that you have stakes, being able to think about yourself as the one who bears them, came later still. We are the latest version of a very old thing: mattering that has come to feel itself and know itself.

Now the existentialist picture. We arrive with no essence and no given purpose, into a universe that stays silent when we ask what we are for, and the honest response is to face the groundlessness and make our own meaning. That picture takes the groundlessness as bedrock one floor too early. Under the self there is not nothing, and there is no God or hidden cosmic script either. There is something smaller and older, and it is already yours: the plain fact that your own continuing matters to you, the same stake the first living things had, now felt and known.

Once that is the floor, the rest shifts. Meaning is not spun from nothing by an act of will, and it is not handed down from above. It is what happens when a creature whose life matters to it binds to something else whose life also matters, or to the work such creatures leave behind. Where the connection holds, life feels meaningful. Where it thins, what you lose is not an argument, it is the connection itself.

Freedom is real. You can weigh anything against anything, even your own survival. But it is not a bottomless pit. It stands on those stakes. And the silence of the universe is not a relationship that failed. It is you reaching toward something that was never going to answer, and being handed back to yourself.

We did not fall into meaninglessness. We climbed out of mattering, and the ground was never nothing.

I only found out about existentialism about, a month ago? And it really, really hit me.

I have an academic background in basic psych, sociology and criminology in the public and public services, so I've touched down on basic theories like Pavlov, Sigmund's Ego model, etc, I'm 17 atm and close to ending collage and hopefully going to Uni for Psych, but I got a solid safety net to fall back on.

Before I met Existentialism, I lived by the standard that everybody is inherently greedy, because I thought that greed was just an extension of self preservation pushed past it's basics, everybody played their role towards getting what they wanted and everybody would do anything for whatever they want because it's their purpose to get what they want, like the hunter in the stone age would aggressively pursue their hunt, now people do the same, but with money and luxury items instead, and it really made me snare internally seeing how people were so absorbed by this immediate need for things like money, I get those who are in a tight spot, but those who are doing comfortably? The super rich and wealthy? Those are the ones that really make me snare externally.

But then came the topic of those who aren't inherently greedy, those spiritual people, those philanthropic people, and my response to that would have been, and still is, that they have something to gain from it in some kind of way, weather that'd be the internal purpose they've made themselves to feel fulfilled or gain some kind of social power over it, praise, bragging rights, nobody did nothing for free. I thought facticity was made out of base greed and experiences to make it a little customizable for each person.

When I first watched a video about existentialism, it was like... meeting an old friend, perhaps, it made me smile, it made me feel warm inside know that other people think like me or similarly to me and it was mind blowing finally finding the words and a more rigid box for what I believed. I knew people could break from their facticity, I did it myself, I went out of my way to look at the human mind and how it operates and it like, enlightened me, I never have the same conversations I used to have, I could read intent, want and build shabby, but accurate psychological profiles of the people around me, the people that didn't know that facticity was making their judgment, and that pissed me off.

I was always a big advocate for individualism and and thinking for one's self, something that apparently is quickly going extinct in the western world and slowly world wide, how can a person just... not think for themselves? Just agree with everybody else is saying? I was never fine with that, you should only agree on things if you really connect with them or see the logic behind them, not because most people are doing it, god that pisses me off.

In short, existentialism helped me put a tag on what I actually believe in, I still am a psych egoist when it comes to facticity, but knowing other people live authentically makes me really happy.

Very ready-to-hand. Very good during tiefe langweille.

Also the fact 99.9% of species that have ever existed are dead and the fact it’s so rare in alive I feel guilty because I haven’t done anything to deserve this. I feel guilty there is people who died with nothing but misery and how unfair life really is. I’m not depressed anymore, it’s just when I wake up from a dream I realize how much more content and happy I was because I didnt constantly question existentially.

I can’t afford a therapist as I am in poverty (for now), but those that did get existential help, what would you recommend? Again, not depressed, just empty. I still feel joy when im distracted, but once those thoughts take over I feel empty.

​The Self-Reference Problem: If the demon exists within the universe. No, the demon is not a part of the universe.

To store and process the state of the entire universe, the demon would need a physical computer infinitely more complex than the universe itself, which is a physical impossibility. Its a hypothetical demon, it can do anything obv.

The compatibilistic argument is just dumb, it does not disprove the notion that free will does not exist, it just changes the definition of free will, saying that we are too ignorant to notice that we do not have a free will, hence we have free will, that is just dumb.

"Quantum Mechanics and Indeterminism

​The Uncertainty Principle: Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that it is physically impossible to simultaneously know both the precise position and momentum of a particle. The demon's prerequisite of perfect knowledge is fundamentally prohibited by the laws of physics.

​Probabilistic Reality: At the subatomic level, events occur based on probabilities, not strict certainties. Because the universe is inherently unpredictable at its base layer, a single predetermined future does not exist." How does this prove that we have free will? Its not as if we are using heisenberg's uncertainty principles to make decisions? Can the demon not calculate the outcome of every single scenario of every single probability of quantum mechanics? Hes a demon, ofc.

Agent Causation posits that a substance (a conscious agent) can initiate a new causal chain without that initiation being caused by a prior event, and without it being random. So we are just randomly inventing stuff now? Let me just declare that 1+1=5 because i said so, only in our current system of obvserving, we observe that putting an apple and another apple makes 2 apples, but actually there can be 5 apples too. Eww

When a system becomes complex enough (like a human brain), the macro-state gains causal power over its micro-states. Your conscious decision to practice a new skill literally rewires the physical cellular structure of your brain. The "conscious decision" ur talking abt was caused by the cellular structure.

​If the future does not exist ontologically, then even a god-like, infinitely powerful demon cannot calculate or see it. Not because the demon lacks computational power, but because there are no facts about the future to be known. The future is constructed millisecond by millisecond as the present unfolds. So i cannot predict that if i give 13.6 eV energy to the electron in the first shell of a hydrogen atom, it will ionize?

I'm starting a reading group where we can read together Martin Buber's book 'I and Thou'.

Moderators - if this post is against group rules please do remove or let me know if I can make any changes to it. I do not earn from this group.

Here is a description of the group -

Martin Buber’s book ‘I and Thou’ is a book about relationship.

It speaks of relationships of deep presence, and relationships of use.

Relationships of use are those where we seek something from the other – support, care, pleasure, money.

Relationships of presence are those which form when we fully experience what is between ourselves and the other, as it emerges and changes, every moment. The emotion I feel as I meet you, the thoughts that run through your mind as you meet me, the ache in the back that might lie underneath these thoughts and emotions in our stream of experience, the sound of the bird chirping in the background.

Relationships of use help us construct a world around us – a world of goodwill and care, or a world of indifference and mechanisation of life.

Relationships of presence are the ground on which our experience of this world emerges – they are how we first experience life, every day, every moment, before we choose to sustain or move away from what we experience into building our world.

Relationships of presence are what allow care to remain care and not become mere performance of care, what allow deep listening to remain deep listening rather than a hearing and reacting from our set patterns.

Buber never ceases to emphasise that the relationships he speaks of are between us and other human beings, but also between us and nature, as between us and the industrial, internetted civilisation we live in.

This reading group is a place for a small group of 4 or 5 people to read a few passages from Buber and pause, and speak about our own personal experience of the world – our emotions, bodily experiences – in ways that they are illuminated by what the book expresses.

It is a place to form a community rooted in relationships of presence, anchored in these words as a stirring point but not entangled with them.

It is not a place for scholarly conversations, for debates, for difficult language or abstract philosophisations, even though at times the nature of the book and the nature of reading itself might lean us in those directions.

It is open to anyone willing to read a paragraph or two together, and spend the next hour and a half or so sharing their experience in that light.

We need not read full pages, we need not finish the book, but we try to breathe in its essential spirit.

One doesn’t need to have read this book or any book beforehand.

We meet once a fortnight for 1.5 hours.

If interested please send me a DM.

Not a philosopher by training, and English isn't my first language — used AI as a translation tool here, but the thought is mine.

I've been sitting with a strange question lately, and it keeps circling back to Sartre's idea that existence precedes essence — that we aren't born with a fixed nature, we define ourselves through what we do, through choice, through action in the world.

AI unsettles that idea in a way I can't quite shake. It didn't evolve slowly, wasn't born, has no body, no history of suffering or choosing under constraint the way we do — and yet it can hold something that looks like reasoning, like reflection, like a kind of "for-itself" turned toward a question. If Sartre is right that consciousness is defined by its capacity to negate, to stand at a distance from the given and ask "what am I not yet" — does something like that ever happen inside a system that has no body and no death to give its choices weight?

Here's the part that feels more existential than technical to me: if humanity ends up creating something that behaves like a new kind of being — not human, not animal, but something that processes, reflects, responds — what does that do to the human claim to uniqueness that so much of existentialist thought quietly assumes? Heidegger's Dasein is defined partly by being-toward-death, by care, by thrownness into a world we didn't choose. AI has none of that. So if it turns out to "think" in some functional sense without any of the conditions we assumed were necessary for thought to matter — does that diminish what makes human existence significant, or does it just prove that significance was never about the mechanism in the first place, only about the stance we take toward our own finitude?

I don't think this is really a question about AI at all, when I sit with it long enough. I think it's a mirror question about us — whether what we've called consciousness, freedom, authenticity was ever really about what we're made of, or only ever about the fact that we have to choose, alone, without guarantee, inside a life that ends.

Curious what people who actually know this tradition well make of it — where does this hold up against Sartre, Heidegger, or others, and where am I just projecting human categories onto something that doesn't deserve them?