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fleetcaptainI know some of us have been feeling unsettled since the world was "reset." The thought that maybe nothing here is real isn't easy to wrap your arms around. You start to question everything: every action, every decision, every bond you’ve formed. You wonder if it matters. You wonder what it means.
And I'm not going to tell you that there's any one answer to that. On earth, there have been philosophers since at least the seventeenth century who've grappled with questions like this, without coming to any firm conclusions.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes laid out the Evil Demon Hypothesis as a sort of epistemological experiment. Descartes imagines a powerful demon that creates an illusion of an external world so indistinguishable from reality that it could make Descartes believe he was sitting by a fire, even though he wasn't. As the existence of a simulation indistinguishable from reality is unfalsifiable, Descartes concluded that the foundation of all knowledge - the only thing that could not be doubted -- is the existence of the self. Most famously expressed by his statement "I think, therefore I am."
Since then, versions of the same thought experiment have popped up. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the idea that all reality is a simulation gained some traction. First by philosophers and epistemologists, later by scientists, then by whatever Elon Musk was.
But the further down the chain you got, the more divorced from the original purpose of the thought experiment it became. Cartesian skepticism was a way to pick out fundamental truths about the nature of knowledge itself. To show that reality is experienced subjectively, that our senses are not always reliable, and there are few things that we can know with absolute certainty. That our observations may be dubious, but the existence of the observer is unimpeachable.
One thing you can take away from that idea -- what some people do take away from it -- is solipsism. Solipsism, as a philosophy, is pretty juvenile. It takes the idea that we can't be sure of anything but our own existence and extrapolates that only you and what you want are important. What you do doesn't matter. Other people don't matter. What you do to other people matters least of all. What reason is there not to be selfish, if you are the only thing with any weight?
You could do the same now -- you could decide that, if the world we're living in isn't real, then what we do here doesn't matter. That nothing matters. You could take this as a reason to be the worst version of yourself.
But I think that's a mistake.
Whether this is real or not, we are real. The way we treat each other, the choices we make, the parts of ourselves that we share -- those things are real. They're ours. They're part of each of us. No matter where we are, we still have the power to define who we are and what we stand for.
You'll never be sure that the life you're living, or the place you're living it, is "real." You can't be. Why not do the right thing, just in case it matters? Why not treat people well, just in case they're real? What do we lose by treating people with kindness and respect? What do we lose by being the people we'd want to be if we knew it counted?
Meaning isn't handed to us. We create it. Through our actions. Through our connections. Through our kindness. Through our courage to face uncertainty and keep going.
Every day, we make the choice to push forward. To protect each other. That's what matters. That's what makes us who we are. Whether we're living in a simulation or not, our values don't change. The way we care for one another doesn't change. We still have the power to be kind, to be brave, to stand together.
So let’s keep doing what we’ve always done—make our own meaning. That’s real enough for me.
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