“How do you know you’re reading this sentence, and not floating in a vat on a distant planet, with alien scientists stimulating your brain to produce the thoughts and experiences you deem real," asks one of the world's foremost physicists.
Professor Brian Greene says “these issues are central to epistemology, a philosophical subfield that asks what constitutes knowledge, how we acquire it, and how sure we are that we have it? “Think of the universe like a deck of cards,” adds Greene while explaining “parallel universes” and “the deep laws of the cosmos,” and why there’s alien life and “another life” in what “popular culture has brought to a wide audience in the films such as The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Vanilla Sky. He then asks: “How do you know you’re not hooked into the Matrix?”
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction-action film featuring Keanu Reeves -- in the photo that accompanies this story – that’s gained resurgence in Europe this summer with a new wave of university students discovering it. The Matrix is about a future where reality that’s perceived by most humans is actually a simulated reality created by sentient machines from an alien race whose job is to pacify and subdue the humans with technology. Thus, the “Matrix” is a film fan favorite for those who enjoy the cyberpunk and hacker subcultures, where philosophical and religious ideas – such as “the brain in the vat thought experiment.”
Green and Einstein think you “can’t know for sure” when it comes to parallel universes
“The bottom line is that you can’t know for sure. You engage the world through your senses, which stimulate your brain in ways your neural circuitry has evolved to interpret. If someone (alien life forms) artificially stimulates your brain so as to elicit electrical crackles exactly like those produced by eating pizza, reading this sentence, or skydiving, the experience will be indistinguishable from the real thing. Experience is dictated by brain processes, not by what activates those processes,” writes Greene in his new book that’s been compared to the writing of Albert Einstein.
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