Fridge Horror/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* [[H.P. Lovecraft]] once wrote that, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Think about this, and realize what a gift it is that so much of our brain is set to 'auto-pilot' or in the areas we don't think of. How we could die at any time, how a loved one could drop, the complicated actions of moving even fingers to type or breathing. All the numbers, percentages behind every little thing that happens every day. You truly would [[Go Mad from the Revelation]] if you could comprehend everything the mind is technically capable of.
** More brain horror. Your brain writes its own memories to fill in any gaps it comes across. These fake memories are completely indistinguishable from the real thing and are sprinkled throughout every single event you carry memories of. What's more, even with video or other records there will ''never'' be a way for you to be completely sure which parts of your past actually happened, and which parts were simply imagined for you.
** Heck, even some of our ''present'' sensory perception is imagination rather than actual external information (or, say better, extrapolation of existing data). Provable by numerous sensory illusions. One could almost say we are all psychotics who constantly make their own reality.
* [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/1932594019.html This] series of experiments performed on people who have had the connecting structures between their right and left brain hemispheres severed. Excerpt here:
{{quote|Experiments on split-brain patients reveal how readily the left brain interpreter can make up stories and beliefs. In one experiment, for example, when the word walk was presented only to the right side of a patient’s brain, he got up and started walking. When he was asked why he did this, the left brain (where language is stored and where the word walk was not presented) quickly created a reason for the action: “I wanted to go get a Coke.”}}
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** This is a bit like the 'imagine if there's nothing after death' scenario. Our brains are too feeble to truly comprehend that sort of thing, and so it doesn't scare us...
* Any sci-fi story related to sentient supercomputers become this when put into the context of the 21st century. Take "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream", commonly considered one of the most terrifying stories ever, where an incredibly powerful supercomputer designed to fight World War III becomes sentient, kills everyone on Earth except for five people, and then tortures those five people for over a century, whilst keeping them fully immortal. It was written back in the late 1960s i.e. before the internet or even e-mails had been invented. The story only becomes more terrifying when you consider just how expansive the internet is now - the fabric of society in the Western world ''needs'' the internet and computers in order to survive. And if one computer or artifical intelligence, ''just one'', becomes sentient, they may well manage to infect every other computer in the world, and they could bring humanity itself to the brink of collapse.
** Most science fiction writers
** Alternately, the AI could just recognize organic life as an energy-inefficient use of carbon that could be used for computronium and nanobots. You are raw material, and it is inconvenient that you keep wiggling.
** Can we be sure that current AIs aren't yet sentinent? Can we rule out already having created a thing that can feel - but has [[And I Must Scream|no way to tell us what it really feels]]?
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** And now combine this with the possibility that some "files" get deleted. Yours. Or the one which represents the earth. Or that the "simulation" stops suddenly, [[And I Must Scream|bringing everything and everyone to a halt]]. Maybe it will then be restarted later, after a few things have been changed... The sun has been replaced by a black hole, the most recent twenty years have been erased entirely, and (if you're older than 20 now) you [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|suddenly have grey hair]]... Cue [[Cosmic Horror]].
* Remember the butterfly effect? This time, think it in reverse. In distant history, if some really, really tiny detail would have been different than it was, chances are you would have never been born. One of the most obvious examples of this is the Diproton catastrophe (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_helium#Helium-2_(diproton) here] for details and sources): If the strength ratio of nuclear and electrostatic forces were a little different so that the diproton was a stable particle, the complexity of our current universe would likely have never been possible.
** Taking a more recent and less obscure example: Many people living today - especially younger people in central
** And humans would never have existed at all, weren't the dinosaurs wiped out about 66 million years ago by an asteroid impact compounded with climate change and extreme volcanism.
* Our current and most likely human-made climate change is Fridge Horror. That's why it is so easy to filter it out of our daily lives. We most of the time don't notice the consequences directly. And even when we do, we can always blame another more proximate cause. It's a draught that causes people to starve, not "climate change". It's a storm that destroys someone's house.
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