What if there is no reality and this is all a bad Netflix series?
A couple of years ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a debate at the Hayden Planetarium in New York on the hypothesis that our universe might be a Matrix-like computer simulation designed by a superior civilization. (Conclusion: Unknowable, but not disprovable. Whether our awareness of this possibility was evidence against it — can characters in a video game become self-conscious? — also proved to be a circular conundrum.) The discussion was a lot of fun, although that particular thought experiment has always struck me as a way for physicists and cosmologists and so on to talk about God without invoking religion or getting stuck in questions about “turtles all the way down.”
Most scientists incline toward atheism because they have concluded that a divine creator — or an alien race of higher-order software engineers — is not necessary to understand the physical universe. But isn’t that exaggerated faith in the power of Reason an example of human hubris in its most refined form, one that is contradicted by recent history and lived experience? I am reminded here of Mormon historian Terryl Givens’ ingenious formulation: His church had never claimed that its outlandish theology was plausible, he argued, only that it was true. Which, as we see around us every day in the United States of America under President Donald Trump, is an entirely different matter.
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/03/what-if-there-is-no-reality-and-this-is-all-a-bad-netflix-series/
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I can only hope it’s a very bad dream..
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