Often I lie sleepless in my bed at night, not moving, too exhausted even to check my phone. My alarm clock is turned away from me, the sheets are warm and comfortable, and the only noise is that of the ceiling fan humming, yet I do not sleep. For hours, I am lost in deep thought, my mind continually weaving threads of thought together in unusual patterns. I quietly drift in the darkness through a landscape of intangible ideas, groping for meaning behind the veil of existence. What is it to be? I have spent my life with this question, privately deliberating, searching for its nature, for the shape of its answer. I have been truly haunted by Being.

Thus philosophy was a personal matter for me at first; a lingering, erratic cogitation by day …show more content…
The class let me more systematically and rewardingly study philosophy than my private readings allowed. We even briefly studied quantum mechanics and what the possible implications of it are (including the key to immortality). Fully absorbing questions were presented that I had never considered. What if my brain is the only real thing, and the rest of the universe, including the rest of my body, is merely a simulation in my mind? Is my mind a separate thing from the physical universe we know (a “soul”), or is the mystifying concept we call consciousness able to be created and destroyed by our manipulation? In fact, this specific question is what set in stone my interest in the artificial intelligence aspect of computer science. If humanity creates a program that has consciousness as we know it, it could improve upon itself and learn at an exponential speed, quickly becoming a superintelligence that would far surpass all human intelligence and vastly change civilization for better or for worse. This hypothesis has been dubbed the ‘technological singularity’, and one of my possibly naïve aspirations is to help realize