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The First Law Of Thermodynamics

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Want to feel awkwardly conscious about your brain for the next couple of minutes? Too late, you’re already hooked, so you might as well keep reading. Right now your mind is churning along, carrying out routine maintenance and suchlike, now—at least if my introduction here is successful—it is thinking about itself. Pretty weird, huh? Thought is a basic capacity shared by all humans. At least, we’re pretty sure. I mean, it’s not like your entire surroundings could be fabricated, and all your interactions with the world mere hallucination, right? That wouldn’t work...for...some...reason. Heh. That’s to say, the possibility that this essay was constructed solely in your head, or by some external deity, that possibility is simply unrealistic. Right? It’d violate the...uh...second law of thermodynamics...or relativity...or something. After all, reality couldn’t be a computer simulation, because we have irrational constants like pi! Ha, got you there, existence! Unless the computer is just really, really powerful...damn. Such is the struggle of existence, as a mind trapped within a body placed in a surrounding world which might—or might not—be real. Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. I think I wanted to impress upon the reader that thought is an inextricable aspect of human existence, and as such, John Proctor, a character in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, is a man of good standing in the town of Salem; he is universally respected and, to a degree,

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