Are there so many people in so many parallel worlds, almost duplicates of you, reading almost duplicate articles of this article? Is consciousness a fundamental property of all matter? Is it a computer simulation? Dear reader, I hear you groaning from right here in California.
We tend to reject ideas like this because they sound ridiculous. But some of the world’s leading scientists and philosophers support them. why? And assuming you are not an expert, how should you react to this kind of hypothesis?
Things quickly go awry when faced with fundamental questions about the nature of reality. As a philosopher specializing in metaphysics, I argue that strange things are inevitable and that fundamentally strange things will turn out to be true.
That doesn’t mean all weird hypotheses are created equal. On the contrary, some strange possibilities are worth taking more seriously than others. The idea of Zorg, the destroyer hidden at the center of the galaxy, pulling protons by an invisible thread, would of course be laughed off as some sort of explanation. But even in the absence of direct empirical tests, we can carefully evaluate various seemingly absurd ideas that are worth serious consideration.
The key is to become comfortable weighing competing unreality. Anyone can try this, as long as they don’t expect everyone to come to the same conclusion.
First, let me start by clarifying that we are talking here about a tremendously big and scary problem: the foundations of reality and the foundations of our understanding of those foundations. Sho. What is the underlying structure?
