Existential in sentence

463 examples of Existential in a sentence

Elon Musk warns that it's an existential risk and one of the greatest risks that we face as a civilization.

And it raises an existential question, which is, if I'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness, why am I not visible in the photograph, and where is this time and place?

From my family looking in from outside, what they're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question, which is, how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they're looking at to an actual mind, which I define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head.

And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9/11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security.

Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security.

Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security.

So from a relatively young age, I found myself looking to fill an existential hole, to connect with something bigger than myself.

And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call.

Yeah, so a couple of years ago I was turning 60, and I don't like being 60. (Laughter) And I started grappling with this existential angst of what little I had done with my life.

The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important.

I feel like my job to make this happen is to help foster the things that seem to lead to compromise, to not talk about this in those vague and scary terms that do polarize us, but to just talk about it like what it is, not an existential crisis, not some battle between two fundamentally different religious views, but a math problem, a really solvable math problem, one where we're not all going to get what we want and one where, you know, there's going to be a little pain to spread around.

And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me.

So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right?

That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way.

Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst.

Part of it might be, and there are terrorists, but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them?

Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat, we are ready to do anything at all?

Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now "up there looking down on us," and if I should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator.

But I was scared, and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept.

Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator.

A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much.

And that can leave many of us with this deep existential angst.

Now the third area is the one that I want to focus on the most, and that's the category of existential risks: events like a nuclear war or a global pandemic that could permanently derail civilization or even lead to the extinction of the human race.

How bad would it be if there were a truly existential catastrophe?

And by the way, our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question, and it's this: Consider two scenarios.

It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable, and in fact, that's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks.

Imagine the existential pressure on us to live up to that, to be elegant, not to pull down the tone of it.

Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis.

We know, for example, from research what's most important to people who are closer to death: comfort; feeling unburdened and unburdening to those they love; existential peace; and a sense of wonderment and spirituality.

They posed an existential threat to no one.

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