ARE there vastly many near-duplicates of you studying vastly many near-duplicates of this text in vastly many parallel universes? Is consciousness a elementary 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 among 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 elementary 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 change into true.

Which isn’t to say that each odd speculation is created equal. Quite the opposite, some bizarre potentialities are price taking extra significantly than others. Positing Zorg the Destroyer, hidden on the galactic core and pulling on protons with invisible strings, would rightly be laughed away as a proof for something. However we are able to mindfully consider the varied preposterous-seeming concepts that deserve severe consideration, even within the absence of simple empirical exams.

The secret is to develop into snug weighing competing implausibilities, one thing that we are able to all strive – as long as we don’t count on to all arrive on the identical 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…