An area philosopher is in critical yet stable condition in a local hospital today due to the acute effects of an existential crisis brought on by realizing the joint implications of utilitarianism and panpsychism.
At a press conference, the victim's mother pleaded to the public, "Before he became a philosophy, he was so happy and well-adjusted. Just like millions of other Americans, he ate meat, consumed dairy products, wore leather, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Then he became a utilitarian and things just started to go downhill." When asked to elaborate, she added, "After reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, he became a utilitarian and...[sobbing]...vegan. At first he was just a bit worried about being caught by the vegan police. I kept telling him that's absurd...but he wouldn't have any of it. I think he was just paranoid from the leftover chicken he kept stealing from the fridge."
The victim's father added, "We really didn't think very much of it, thought it was just a phase. But then he really took a nosedive and...became a biocentrist [audible gasps by the press]. Now it wasn't just animals he wouldn't eat. He kept going on about how plants have feelings, how they can hear themselves being eaten, and became...an animist fruitarian who refused to eat anything except for dead fruits that have fallen off trees. 'They're on their deathbed already', he told me, 'so eating them won't cause any additional suffering in the world.' We really hoped that would be the end of his spiral downward but...we were [sobbing uncontrollably]...so wrong."
Undercover investigation by The April Fool's Daily later today revealed the seedy underbelly of the philosophical world that led to this fully-preventable tragedy. A non-philosophy friend, who shall not be named due to concerns for his philosophical safety, revealed, "Philosophy nearly killed by friend. He kept experimenting, and I told him not to combine utilitarianism and panpsychism, as he didn't know the side-effects...but he was so convinced they are both right." When asked to elaborate, the non-philosopher added, "At first, I thought, okay, he seems okay. But then when we were pregaming before going out to see the 21st Century Monads, I told him to 'kill that beer, man'...and he freaking lost it. He turned white as a ghost, gazed deep into his beer for a moment, and burst into tears. He was inconsolable. I sat him down and said, 'What is it bro?', and he just said, 'Dude, I killed them...I killed them all...three beers...and two shots...and that's just today.' When I asked him what kind of nonsense this is, he just started going on about how everything in the universe is conscious and how swallowing that beer would cause his stomach acid to tear it apart molecule by molecule, causing the beer to suffer the worst kind of death imaginable. I kept trying to reason with him, telling him he would piss out the beer tomorrow, and it would go back in the earth and seed new life, 'balancing the utility books' as it were...but then he started talking physics.'
"Yeah...", an anonymous philosopher of scientist also at the pregame added, "You have no idea what cosmology can do to a panpsychist utilitarian. I mean, I've never actually met a utilitarian panpsychist before, but one can imagine what must have been going on in his mind. I know he likes to dabble in physics, and must have realized at that very instant--when [redacted] told him to kill that last beer--that the dominant theory of the universe's future is that everything in the cosmos is destined for heat death, relentless, inexorable process lasting around 102500 years where everything in the universe gets slowly progressively pulled farther and farther apart until for all intents and purposes everything is dead. That must be why he lost it. Imagine that...102500 years of ever-increasing pain, separation, and suffering throughout all of spacetime."
As of the time of this report, physicians fear that only a very dangerous experimental treatment--continual exposure to empirical facts, which has a consistently high fatality rate in the philosophical population--may have any hope of saving the victim. One initial treatment, exposure to the fact that after 1010^10^56 years, quantum tunneling has a non-zero probability of turning the universe's heat death into a new spacetime singularity, may be a potential cure. The thought here is that, from a panpsychist perspective, a spacetime singularity would be a single instant of infinite happiness that would, by a utilitarian token, outweigh the disutility of 102500 years of ever-increasing but finite misery. Fortunately, after a brief setback (the patient's initial response to the treatment was, and I quote, "[expletive] utilitarianism!”), the treatment appears promising, though its long-term effects are unknown. "I'm now a Kantian", the patient said happily under partial sedation, "It occurred to me that every particle in the universe always acts on universal laws of nature, respecting the autonomy of every other conscious particle in the universe and realizing a perfect kingdom of ends between the wills of every conscious microphysical entity. So, really, the entire universe if perfectly moral. Whew, I feel better already!"
When asked if he has any worries about the potential effects of the experimental treatment, the philosopher was sanguine, "Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me, and the ability to make the categorical imperative have whichever implications one wants it to have." Specialists remain uncertain on the patient's prognosis, but expressed some relief the patient has not contracted treatment-resistant Aristotelianism. "That would be the worst", one specialist said, "undeniably fatal, and a really terrible way to go."
Happy April Fool's (and Easter) everyone!
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