It isn’t clear the world exists. At least, not in the form we perceive.

Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.

Descartes proved I exist as a thinking being. But no more: the physical world might be a figment and I might just be a brain in a vat.

Since then, plenty of others have thought about the “real world question.”

Berkeley argued that reality consists only of minds and ideas; physical objects exist only as perceptions. To “cogito, ergo sum,” he replied, esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”).

Christian Science—an interesting philosophy despite its impracticalities—says matter is illusory and that reality is purely spiritual. Disease and suffering stem from false belief in materiality.

Husserl took a slightly different approach, arguing that questions about whether the world is ultimately real should be set aside in favor of examining how the world appears to consciousness in the first place.

Zen Buddhism teaches that bodies, bicycles, thoughts, and laughter are real as lived experience, but lack fixed, independent essence.

So far, so good.

Then contemporary philosophy darkens the doorway. Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis assumes that (1) sufficiently advanced societies develop technologies capable of running vast simulations, and (2) consciousness cannot be assumed to be inherently biological, but may arise from organization and process alone.

The former seems straightforward enough. The latter may be a bit harder to get our minds around, but we’ve been buying and selling the notion of synthetic consciousness and artificial intelligence since way before SkyNet (1872, in fact—see Erewhon by Samuel Butler).

If both assumptions are true, simulated conscious beings might not only exist, they could far outnumber biological ones (imagine a hyper-advanced Sims running on every alien teenager’s mobile).

If I Had One Wish

All of which means:

• I know I exist.

But:

• I don’t know if I’m biological.
• I don’t know if I have agency.
• I don’t know if the material world exists.
• If it does, I don’t know if it exists as I perceive it.
• I don’t know if you exist.

I can philosophize about this until the end of time, assuming time exists.

But right now, let’s focus on what I perceive. If the world is as I experience it, people starve in the shadows of palaces. The powerful inflict pain as though it’s a parlor game. Hypocrisy is lingua franca, and speaking the truth is punishable by death.

I could go on, but you know plenty about the state of the world.

This is why I look at the philosophical theories above, and I hope, above all things, that this world is not real. It doesn’t matter if I’m a brain in a vat or if we’re all Sims. The important thing is the suffering I perceive, that I hear about, that I read about and see reported on television. For whatever reason—maybe it’s an experiment on how much an artificial consciousness can take before it melts, maybe it’s a homework project, whatever—I hope the suffering is all in my head.

I could manage the misery if I knew it weren’t “real.”

Of course, we can’t know, and there’s certainly no way to assume it isn’t and live an ethical life.

Which, I guess, is part of the torment…