There is one thing I know for certain, and that is that I am not Raymond Burke. I am not forty-three years old. I do not have a son named Merck, who recently dropped out of art school to become a drug peddler. I am not married to my college sweetheart.

As for the other details of my life, those are anybody’s guess. I have no idea of my actual name, the names of my children (or whether I even have any) or my spouse(s) (or whether I even have any). The story of my life, my real life, as near as I can tell, began about two hours ago on a lonely beach in a woefully uninhabited area. An hour before that, I was Raymond Burke, husband of Shannon Burke, father of Merck Burke.

This is what happened: I was driving down the highway, when my car broke down. I pulled over to the shoulder, and after I realized that nobody was going to stop and help me, I attempted to cross the road. I saw the car coming, only briefly, before it hit me.

I thought I was dead. I kept expecting to feel that final blackness close in, that eternal fading to nothing. But, instead, I woke up on this beach, surrounded by the remnants of what appears to be the small plane I was flying. No other survivors. No drivers license in my pocket. No memories of ever flying a plane, no memories of a crash. Just the memories of the Burke life, the life that didn’t happen.

How did this happen? How did I hallucinate forty-three years that didn’t happen? Is this kind of confabulation even possible?

What if I’m not really on the beach? What if the Burke-life was the real one, and I’m in a hallucination now? How can I tell what is real? How can I possibly know?

Why can I hear the beeping of a heart monitor? Why can I hear doctors yelling about hit-and-runs? Why can I see sterile fluorescent hospital lighting rushing by overhead?

Why can I still hear the waves? Why can I still feel the sand?

…

Imagine another situation: a person receives a similar brain implant, but this time, the implant causes them to believe that they are someone other than their “true” self. They have all the memories, all the habits, and all the potentials of this person. Is it not reasonable to say that the “old self” has been replaced by the “new self,” and that the person really is now the person they have been deceived into being? If personal identity can so easily be faked, then is it really a good thing to rely on in our daily life?

Films such as The Matrix raise a whole constellation of intriguing philosophical questions, not all of which merely concern whether or not our reality is an illusion. Here are a few:

• This is the primary question that often goes along with The Matrix: what if our reality is an illusion, or worse, a deception? And if it were, how could we face this fact, and how could we deal with its ramifications? What if we were to “wake up” from this dream-world? Would the “real world” we find ourselves in be anything like the one we came from? What if, in the “real world,” humans breathed chlorine rather than oxygen? What if there were laws of physics in the  “real world” that didn’t even exist in “The Matrix”? Or, perhaps most frightening of all, what if the “real world” was no more real than the world we woke up from? What if there was no end to the recursion, and each world that we had assumed to be real was just another simulation, within another simulation, ad infinitum?
• To what extent do our senses reflect the true nature of the world? Isn’t it entirely possible that there is a huge component of the universe of which we are completely unaware, merely because we have no senses to apprehend it, and it is so distant or otherwise removed from us that we haven’t even considered the possibility of constructing such senses? Suppose that, in addition to the four physical forces with which we are familiar (gravity, electromagnetism , the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force), there was a fifth force with a profound influence on the world, but an influence we were incapable of seeing?
• To what extent is reality actually “real”? How much of reality is non-objective, but is merely a product of our own minds? If you are aware of the existence of something, and I am not, does that mean that we inhabit two separate worlds (such that in your world, the thing would exist, but in mine, it would not)? What can we really know about other people? Were the solipsists right, and our own minds are the only things of which we can be certain?

It is unfortunate that more films like The Matrix with both a broad appeal and a deep philosophical message are not made.

I’ll try to explain it as best I can for readers who know little or nothing of physics. I’ll start with some fundamental physical principles:

1. The universe is composed of constituent particles. Every object consists of particles of different sorts, all held together by forces. (Atoms, for example, consist of a nucleus held togehter by the strong nuclear force, and a cloud of orbiting electrons, held to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force).
2. The forces, however, turn out to be the result of the exchange of force-carrying particles. (Think of two people throwing a really heavy ball back and forth: each time the ball is exchanged, it pushes them apart. In the case of attractive forces, think of a rope instead of a ball).

So, the things we call “physical laws,” such as the force of gravity and the strength of the electromagnetic force, are all really just approximations of the result of particles sloshing about. So, in reality, there are no laws of nature. There is only stuff, exchanging particles (which are also stuff) with other stuff.

This worldview seems to take care of a problem that has been irritating physicists for years: Where does time come from? We can’t observe it directly. And what’s more, our physical laws work essentially the same way whether time is running backwards or forwards. Physicists like Julian Barbour have attempted to solve this problem by constructing physical principles that don’t depend on time, but perhaps the only real physical principle is embodied by a tremendous web of particle interactions, unchanging in time because this web is completely timeless.

Now, for someone such as “myself,” “who” was raised with Western philosophy, this kind of writing rapidly becomes disorienting. It is like a drug, and it can easily allow “you” to slip into an altered state of “consciousness.” So, try it! The next time “you” write an e-mail, try to do so without reference to identity. Let the nouns dissolve and melt away. Stop naming things, and simply express things. As far as “I” understand it, this is one of the central tenets of Upanishadic Hinduism: finally coming to the one truth, the truth that ALL (“Brahman”) is all.

I am the Bumbling Philosopher. Hello.