ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you studying vastly many near-duplicates of this text in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a basic property of all matter? Might actuality be a pc simulation? Reader, I can hear your groans from right here in California.

We’re inclined to reject concepts like these on the grounds that they sound preposterous. And but a few of the world’s main scientists and philosophers advocate for them. Why? And the way must you, assuming you aren’t an knowledgeable, react to those kinds of hypotheses?

Once we confront basic questions concerning the nature of actuality, issues shortly get bizarre. As a thinker specialising in metaphysics, I submit that weirdness is inevitable, and that one thing radically weird will transform true.

Which isn’t to say that each odd speculation is created equal. Quite the opposite, some bizarre prospects are value taking extra critically than others. Positing Zorg the Destroyer, hidden on the galactic core and pulling on protons with invisible strings, would rightly be laughed away as an evidence for something. However we will mindfully consider the varied preposterous-seeming concepts that deserve critical consideration, even within the absence of easy empirical assessments.

The hot button is to change into comfy weighing competing implausibilities, one thing that we will all attempt – as long as we don’t count on to all arrive on the similar conclusions.

Allow us to begin by clarifying that we’re speaking right here about questions monstrously giant and formidable: the foundations of actuality and the idea of our understanding of these foundations. What’s the underlying construction…