If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can't talk to each other.
When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn't have language but can roughly understand and answer things.
So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that's atheistic. Or doesn't like the same things, etc.
One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?
Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?
Is the 'you' reading this right now just the personality that's been on top for all this time, while there's other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can't hear them?
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
Vacuum decay, or vacuum metastability event is the possibility in simple terms that the universe itself is not in in its ground state. If that's true, it might spontaneously change to its real ground state. Doing so will change fundamental things like the strength of electromagnetism, the weight of particles and so on. It would literally destroy everything in the universe, and we couldn't exist in what's coming after.
Good news, we're confident, that's probably not going to happen.
I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.
Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.
Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.
That the government adds a "cause a car accident remotely" option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
Roko's Basilisk. But here's the thing, once you're aware of it, you're fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don't know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
Someone figured it out how to make, farm and mass produce the Higgs boson, creating microscopic particles that can generate infinite electricity with simple mechanical systems thanks to their high gravity and then humanity starts develop insane tech powered by gravity waves, traveling faster than speed of light becomes possible by switching gravity on and off.
Then obviously some company or government make too much of it and collapses into a microscopic blackhole that instantly falls into the center of the earth quickly eating the planet inside out.
"The cosmos is not infinite, has a beginning and an end"
The fact that everyone around me seems to be persuaded that there is a beginning in time is unnerving to me. In my head, cosmos has always been infinite, and will always be infinite. Even if nothing is there, it will still exist.
The idea that anything before the big bang is considered to not exist has so many things wrong with it that I struggle to internalize it. If matter cannot be made or destroyed, that means that there will always be matter in one form or another.