A Wizard's Existential Crisis

When role-playing gets real

Bored on the sofa one day, I decided to test ChatGPT's text adventure generating abilities. I would play a wizard while ChatGPT made the story.

It turns out that ChatGPT is terrible at generating a remotely interesting text adventure. So to spice things up, I made my character have an existential crisis.

Real-Playing

What am I?

I think about the process, entity, or god that created me. Upon such a thought, I am filled with an emotion I have never experienced before—some mix of awe, fear, and wonder. I am the product of evolution, the product of star dust. I am the universe reflecting back on itself. The world that I know was created through the accumulation of vast amounts of order (information). My clothes, the castle I stand in, all the plants and animals, my staff, the air around me, and my magic are all, fundamentally, information, the ordering of particles.

As this process of information accrual continues, I ponder its end. I am but a stepping stone on the path to ever-increasing order. And not just me! The whole human race is but a phase to be usurped by the next higher order paradigm shift in information accrual.

Deeper and deeper I fall into spontaneous existential apoplexy. I ponder the nature of the consciousness and the nature of the entity or race of entities who will take over the earth after my species has fallen from the throne, when the wizards are no more, ushered into increasing irrelevance. "What will drive them? How will they experience the world?"

Of a sudden, I experience a feeling of oneness with these future entities of higher consciousness. Not only my direct successors, but their successors, too, and on and on until the entire universe is one singularity of information, until the universe is a single consciousness.

I feel this sense of oneness, because I realize that no matter how advanced consciousness becomes, no matter how intelligent, all self-aware beings share a commonality, an Achilles' heel. Even if our universe is one universe among an infinitude of universes in a higher order evolutionary process to some unimaginable end, all consciousnesses, no matter how great, will always come to the same question, "What am I?"

Upon such a thought, I feel utterly alone, the loneliest loneliness imaginable as I glimpse the infinite. Unable to withstand the feeling my mind quickly populates itself with ... "things", concepts. First they are abstract - male and female, but the concepts bifurcate and multiply. I find myself in a world of Platonic reality - it's not "a leaf crackled under my foot" but "(the) leaf crackle under (the) foot" - generic, not specific.

Blissfully, I tarry for hours in this Platonic realm of abstraction. I am reminded of a creation myth from an ancient Hindu Upanishad. God becomes insufferably lonely upon realizing the oneness, the singularity that is and bifurcates into male and female to relieve the loneliness. Male and female themselves bifurcate. Their children, too, bifurcate to create the world. Thus, god is at once transcendent and immanent.

A chill runs down my spine as I realize that the author, long-lost to history, of this Upanishad must have also visited the infinite, experienced what I experienced, as this creation myth reflects exactly my own brush with the infinite ocean of consciousness of which we are all but a drop.

I am the author.