Arrogance - Ignorance Paradox

Arrogance

Some have suggested that the universe doesn’t exist unless conscious beings are there to witness it

From your perspective, once you die, the universe no longer exists. That is solely from your perspective though.
For the rest of us, life in the universe will carry on just fine without you.

Stained glass window of boy

Mankind has sent spaceships into orbit and built railway lines through treacherous landscapes.
That and the creation of an unfathomably extensive world wide web has given us this arrogance to suggest that we are amazing creatures with importance.

Any arrogance that mankind may exhibit can be quashed when you point out a couple of things. We are feeble and our presence is irrelevant.
We control a lot around us and wreak havoc on this planet, but does mankind supervise what goes on in the universe?

Can we change the building blocks that make the universe work the way it does? No. We can only play with the toys that have emerged.
We can play with chemistry, biology and transform elements namely through nuclear reactions.
But not change the way fundamental particles structure themselves.

Why would the universe care about us. What importance does the universe give us.
What share do we take? In terms of mass, all living things account for 1 septuagintrillionth of one percent of all the mass that is out there in the yonder.

$If my maths is correct, there are something like forty decimal places involved. It is not one grain of sand on a sprawling beach. It is not one grain of sand compared with the whole planet, but a fraction of a fraction of a grain of sand compared with whole planet. Universe, super massive. Us in comparison, negligible by all accounts, ultra miniscule. Incomprehensibly irrelevant.$

Did we build the first self-replicating molecules or did they build us. Did we incarnate what is needed for electricity and magnetism to become active.
To be fair, the universe only needed to design one small thing with one key value being critical.
The rest automatically aligned themselves.
That key value was the only value that had any merit.

Stained glass window of boy

Incremental progress

Arrogant people forget a key principle, namely that we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
We utilise things that others before us have toiled hard to perfect.

Those that make great proclamations are feeble in their own right.
I say to them, take off your clothes and walk into the woods. Shed all vestiges of modernity and see how you get on. No knife, no stockpile of food. Naked and helpless. See if you can survive a week.
Make something to wear, find some food and filter some water without modern equipment.
Very few of us could manage for long.

The universe cares not one jot for your postulations. The universe will always be unperturbed by what we do, no matter how far we venture from this place we call home.
Besides, the universe is itself a temporary entity. Things interact, then they don’t.
Recycling on an epic scale compared with the bits of plastic junk that you put in your bins each week.

That physicality gives us a shelf life. As it does the Earth and the universe as a whole.
The lack of eternity, the temporary nature of it all, how it all will be erased entirely in due course may seem a little down heartening.
However, the ignorance paradox demonstrates that negative thinking can lead to the most positive pragmatic thinking.
Knowing vs feeble believing.

8th March 2026 © IgnoranceParadox

Logic

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Moral dilemma

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