President Kennedy's Assassination & No-thingness

[Albert Rossi]

Thomas Ligotti, in his book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, takes the "puppet show" theme to more pessimistic extremes, where nature has accidentally created self-conscious puppets who have the illusion of free will.

There are many others who share this view. One of the more elegant is Douglas Hofstadter, esp. his recent I am a Strange Loop. What is original there is that he moves in the direction of saying that, illusory as it may be, consciousness is miraculous because it allows us each to contain a bit of everyone else, through memories, perceptions, language.