Many years ago I was chatting with an esteemed philosopher, a man far more intelligent than myself or anyone else I've ever met. He asked me a pretty fundamental question "Do you believe you actually exist?". It wasn't a questiul ul on that I had considered at all. Ever. My glib answer was "Well of course I exist, because I wouldn't be stitting here with you having this conversation". He persisted "But how do you know any of this is real?". Maybe it is all justa figment of your imagination. Maybe, you are somewhere else completely, with no eyes, no ears and just a vibrant imagination and you've constructed a massive fantasy". I responded "I am sure if that was true, it would be far less mundane and I'd be leading the life of James Bond, rather than painting window frames in the rain in Golders Green (my job at the time). Although the good professor was fascinated by the nature of existence, I wasn't at all and I am not sure I am now. However truly intelligent people have spent their whole life agonising over the meaning of life and existence, why we are all here and what is the purpose of this journey. My problem with this is that the time I spend worrying whether all of this is the figment of my imagination and I am really in a coma in hospital ward imagining it all, or just a few lines of code in Gods massive AI generator, is time I could far more productively spend playing my guitar and writing new tunes for the bands next album.
The good professor was most disappointed with my lack of curiosity about the nature of existence. He knows my eldest brother who could hypothesise for hours on such matters and enjoys such discussions. This weekend I was at the wedding of a friends daughter. It was a wonderful event. Lots of people gathered together having a marvellous time. As is my want, I ate and drank far too much and today I was rather tired as we travelled back on the train today. I love trains as you get time to think. I started to think about the good professor and his fascination with the nature of existence. That conversation was nearly fifty years ago. I started to wonder if I'd have answered the question in a different way if we had the conversation now (not a possibility as the professor has passed away). I think I'd still be a massive disappointment. If anything, I am even less interested now than I was then in such questions. My defective dyslexic brain can only deal with tangible concepts. I am fascinated with minutae of recordings by punk rock bands fiftey years ago. I can spend hours discussing the sociological impact of music on society and how rock and roll has redefined the world. I am fascinated by the way the collision of Punk and Reggae in 1977 tore up all of the old rules of music and popular culture and gave rise to a completely different type of music, clothing, writing and art. Subjects I am sure the good professor would find banal beyond belief, but that is what excites me. But I did start wondering about whether, should the professor be correct and all of this is a figment of my imagination, why so much of what I've invented in my head is so utterly crap. Why invent all of the people who annoy me? Why don't England ever win the World Cup? Why don't my dead mates magically come back to life? Why has the dog become incontinent? The only reasonable explanation is that I am a figment of someone else's imagination and they don't like me. Some friends have become very animated about the concept that we all live in the Matrix, a huge computer simulation and they constantly seek glitches. My problem with this is I worked in commercial IT for 37 years and if we were living in a computer simulation, then surely all of the code I had to fix in those years would have been properly written if are all just in an AI simulation on the Matrix.
And then I got around to the basic question "Why are we all here?". If we are not and we are all just the musings of a giant brain in jar of junk, it is actually quite reassuring. If that is true, there is nothing to worry about, is there? But then again, next time my daughters train is delayed and she is late home, or Donald Trump starts another war and I start fretting, I will realise that sadly if it is all a big simulation, it is not one we are supposed to enjoy. If we really all are just bits and bytes in a big computer, if it doesn't want us to know, it will simply delete our RAM when we start to figure it all out. Maybe that's why the dinosaurs disappeared!
My philosophy is rather simple and rather dull. Enjoy the good times and in the bad times keep the faith that it is just a passing phase. Whether it is all real or not is actually pretty irrelevant.
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