Introduction

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Can God create a rock so heavy He can’t lift it?

If a tree falls in a forest a no one knows about it, has it really fallen?

What happens if an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object?

What would happen if Pinocchio said: “My nose will now grow longer?”

Other than being annoying and useless, these questions seem impenetrable. They seem to hide something valuable, a profound piece of wisdom missed by any reasonable analysis. And indeed, there is something that ties them together, something deep beneath the surface that links them with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, with Alan Turing’s Halting Problem, with the Mandelbrot Set, with the Free Will Problem, with René Descartes’ fundamental proposition “I think therefore I am”, with the one axiom that holds mathematics and logic together, “x = x”, and even with God’s self-description in Exodus Chapter 3, Verse 14: “I am that I am”.

Along with the questions above, there are many more that have been able to dodge even our best attempts at cracking them:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Is math invented or discovered?

What is it like to be a bat?

Do we have free will?

Do we live in a simulation?

Can we travel through time?

Can AI become conscious?

What’s the meaning of life?

Can anything be truly altruistic?

Can morality be objective?

Does God exist?

We live in a peculiar time, maybe the most crucial turning point in human history until now, one that doesn’t involve a global war, the development of the nuclear bomb, the spread of a religion, or a planetary catastrophe, but rather a much simpler and more complex problem — the terrible awareness that comes with self-consciousness.

If tossing a peach pit into a lake was nothing 500 years ago, when people didn’t know the extent to which self-consciousness was spreading across the planet, now it’s a problem — we can’t toss a peach pit into a lake, because “if everyone did it” there wouldn’t be a lake anymore. The more self-consciousness expands, the more we are tormented by the morality of our actions; the more we increase out impact, the more we get stretched between two opposite positions: refusal and acceptance of existence. That’s why it became moral to say that humanity is a cancer, or to adopt an anti-natalist, voluntary-extinction, there-are-too-many-people-on-the-planet stance.

Some people are sarcastic about this: “So… we told an entire generation that truth is relative, that reality is optional, that morality is subjective, that love is a chemical reaction, that good and evil are opinions, and it didn’t work out? That’s surprising”. But the problem is not that we told an entire generation those things — the problem is that reality did. The evidence for this is overwhelming: there is no Absolute truth in math, there is no Absolute truth in science, there is no Absolute truth in language, there is not even an Absolute truth in religion, given how many there are, so… why would there be an Absolute truth in morality? You can believe there is, sure, but that’s not a proof — it’s a subjective speculation, a personal opinion, and we are back to the starting point.

We have spent essentially the entirety of our history looking for the Absolute, the One, the Equal-to-Itself, the reference point that can be considered “unmovable” and that can indicate us the direction no matter where we were, like the North Star (which, indeed, we believed to be Absolute and fixes, while we know that it didn't point North 5.000 years ago, and it won't point North 5.000 years from now); we looked for the Absolute in stories (think about the Spring of Eternal Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, the Holy Grail, and so on); we looked for the Absolute in astrophysics, we wanted to find (to be) the center of the universe, the ultimate point of reference, the perfect pivot of the cosmos — for the Greeks it was the “Omphalos”, a sacred stone at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, for the Church it was the Earth itself, around which even the Sun orbited, then it became the Sun with the intuition of Copernicus, then it became Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (we thought our galaxy was the entire universe in the 1920s, before Edwin Hubble’s breakthrough), and so on — after a while we understood that there is no “center” of the universe.

We looked for the Absolute even when creating our units of measure, by establishing some arbitrary quantities — like the International Prototype of the Kilogram — to be the ultimate and global standard; we looked for the Absolute in physics, by considering space and time Absolute, with Newton, and then relative, with Einstein, whose theory suggested a new Absolute: the speed of light.

So... that's it, right? The speed of light doesn't change: we found the Absolute. Right? Well, not really — first, we can't be sure Einstein's theory is right, someone might come up with a better one; second, we can’t be sure the speed of light is the same in all directions of space: we can only measure the speed of light by making light bounce on something and come back (two-way speed of light), so there’s no way, due to relativistic effects, that we can measure the one-way speed of light. Some people tried, but failed. Even pseudoscience is interested in the Absolute, and there’s a surprisingly high number of people who are convinced that they can find or create a perpetual motion machine, or access an inextinguishable source of knowledge into the future.

We looked for the Absolute in mathematics, with David Hilbert and the Formalists, who wanted to create a perfect mathematical system of symbols.  We looked for the Absolute in philosophy, or rather: even the most rational minds stumbled upon a necessity for the Absolute while exploring the nature of existence: think about Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”, or Anaximander’s “Apeiron”, or Thales’s “Water”, or Heraclitus’s “Fire”, or Parmenides’s “One”: we have always looked for the Absolute, the “principle of all things”, the “ultimate nature of reality”, and we looked for the Absolute, of course, in the religious realm. ,

In essence: we have looked for the Absolute, the perfectly stable foundation, the ultimate principle, the North Star of existence, for millennia, but in the past decades uncertainty and undecidability have ravaged through every single discipline, furiously shattering every axiom or absolute reference point we came up with. Today, after millennia of research and a terrifying sequence of astounding logical proofs and results, we are more and more aware of a brutally simple fact: the Absolute does not exist. We can keep looking for it, we can write stories about it, we can “have faith” in whatever we want — even Isaac Newton spent hundreds of hours studying alchemy — but we will never find the Absolute in this life. And while this is no big deal for math, given that skyscrapers still stand and bridges still work even after Gödel and the death of certainty, it is a big deal for morality and the principles that we adopt every day to conduct ourselves in the world. We need reference points, fixed stars that point the way. Without them, we are lost. Today’s generation has found itself in front of this terrifying monster more than any other generation in history. We have no reference point, not anymore, because the concept of “Absolute” is not believable anymore. Nietzsche saw this coming more than a century ago: God is dead, so morality is dead, too.

So… now what?

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