It’s a stupid question, isn’t it? It’s just the ‘stuff of nature’ around us. It’s the science we stand by and the ground we stand on. Why am I bothering writing all of this down? Why am I even here?

This is what Enrico Fermi asked the world around him out of what he describes as ‘utter frustration’. He hasn’t gotten an answer yet and I am not going to try and give you an answer this question right now. Instead, I am going to do something slightly more interesting. I’m going to ask you this question in obsessive detail.

Let’s go back a few hundred years. The dawn of the European renaissance, the birth of western logic and reason as we know it. Some of the brightest minds known in human history were working on a single mission. Answer questions with logic and reason. Over the years, on the fundamentals that Galileo, Newton and Copernicus amongst others had devised, man began to build the pillars of knowledge. As a new generation began to pick up where the last one had left off, people stopped challenging the grounds on which they were building knowledge. And as we have learnt the hard way, building on soft ground may not be an excellent idea.

But why challenge knowledge? It seems to be doing it right, things seem to fit in, we have observational proof for most of our knowledge, why break it? Well if you think so, you haven’t thought primitively enough.

1.1 Assumptions

Even the simplest of statements have an incredible number of assumptions. Let’s take the statement ‘the earth revolves around the sun’. Seems fairly mundane. Except, it isn’t. Here’s a concise list of backing facts I used.

They all seem more or less obvious, with hardly any need to challenge them.

Which makes the logical next step to challenge them.

And many more. The point I wish to make here is that the methods we use to verify theories, observation, experimentation, pure thought, mathematics, the methods that are the absolute jury of new theories, may simply not be degrees which prove absolute truth. Simply put, how do we know that proving a theory mathematically means it’s true? How do we know mathematics as such power?

This idea makes truth unstable. Or at least our perception of truth.

1.2 Hypothesis

Several hypothesis in the past have challenges the theories of knowledge as we know them, Solipsism, and Last Thursdayism, amongst others.

Solipsism argues that the only thing that can be known to exist is the self. Should we take a second to let that sink in, the idea may begin to make sense. Virtual reality is a technology, where a user in immersed into an experience audibly and visually. To apply an analogy like that on reality, one may begin to consider the possibility that reality is merely a simulated illusion.

Last Thursdayism is the hypothesis that considers the possibility that the universe was born last Thursday. All the stars with their light in transit was strategically placed this way. The universe was made to look old. Sounds impossible. At first. We may never prove this theory. But the thing of interest here is how, if this were to hold true, it would destroy physics as we know it. This theory gels in just as well with the rest of physics as the theory that the universe was started 14 billion years ago. So why did we choose one over the other?

Was it convenience? Was it just too much of a mathematical hassle to go with the other theory?

1.3 A clear division

At this point, I would like to bring in a distinction that differentiates between reality and what we see as reality. The science that we stand by forms an integral part of reality. This science has been the work of hundreds of scientists, over hundreds of years. Therefore, our perception of reality is seen through the eyes of others.

Hence, a distinction between truth and what we see, is immensely important.