We sit here, somewhere in the vast and trackless thing called reality, thinking ‘Jeez, am I just a computer simulation? Do I even exist?’

Yes, you do exist, of that you can be sure. In fact, as Descartes pointed out around 500 years ago, it’s the only thing you can be sure of. Only, this you that exists could just as easily be a computer simulation as a physical organism, or the dream of a big blue turtle for that matter. To be perfectly frank, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is you are, it’s real.

The good news is that none of this affects the most interesting question, which is ‘Why me?’ That’s the great mystery. How did you, or I, end up as the conscious center of this – whatever it is? Here sits an individual, discernable entity like a huge fat spider with its web buzzing with variable vibrations which the entity perceives as information about a reality outside and separate from itself. For all practical purposes, the deepest meaning of reality is that there are only two things in it: you and not you. How is it that the barrier seems so clear, psychotropic drugs aside?

Don’t even think about the odds against you existing at all; they are astronomical. A chance encounter, a condom, an interruption, and a completely different sperm might have gotten through the defenses of a completely different egg, even assuming that the same two people who generated you are involved. Little wonder that some people have invented a God who created your soul and just stuffed it into whatever embryo was handy.

And isn’t this computer simulation theory the same thing slightly altered for a more secular aesthetic?