3) Is Our Universe Real?

The immediate and natural response to the question “is our universe real?” is “Yes, you utter moron”. But that’s not very helpful. Could it indeed be that you are the only sentient being and that the cosmos, the planets, the idiots in Sainsbury’s are all part of your convoluted imagination as you float about in a vat of super-cooled camel’s milk?

Well… I’m guessing no, but I can’t prove it and neither can you. The question of whether we exist or not is as old as philosophy itself but recently, with the advent of virtual reality and films like The Matrix people have discussed it more openly.

So-called Modal Realists theorise that if the world around us behaves consistently and follows rules and laws then it must be “real”. They reckon that if it were a true dream state things would be wishy-washy and weird. The problem with that stance is that if we are living in a dream then we are comparing our dreams within a dream to the reality dream we are living in… if you see what I mean? On top of that, if this is a top-notch, water tight computer programme then the Modal Realists can’t help at all, programmers would have programmed out the wishy-washy-ness at the start.

My knee-jerk reaction to that type of question is that the simplest answer is normally the best. But what is simpler, a complicated computer programme running in a single cell in a dish, or an immeasurably huge universe filled with particles and life?

4) Do We Have Free Will?

The general premise of this debate goes like this: atoms and molecules move about in probabilistic ways, our brains are made up of atoms and molecules, so can we really have free will? That’s another annoying question isn’t it?

Determinism is the belief that our thoughts and decisions are just a long chain of chemical reactions and that the outcome is set in stone. Indeterminism is the belief that our actions are under the influence of chaos and therefore random. Either way that means we don’t have free will.

Neuroscience has jumped into this argument with some experiments up its sleeve. They’ve shown that people actually make decisions before they are conscious of them. That’s mad isn’t it? Your brain is making choices without asking you first. That sort of doesn’t help in this discussion but it makes you take a step back and say, hang on a minute, who’s driving this thing?

My personal feeling on the free will debate is that free will is a concept made up by humans before we realised how complicated things are. Our brains are so hideously complex that we can’t know what’s going on in there. It gets up to whatever it likes, within reason. Free will doesn’t exist, but we are free to make decisions, whether our fully conscious brain makes it or our reptilian brainstem is another matter entirely.