My old redneck friend, Tim Moore,

used to say "What if the entire universe is just a science project in God School?" Not that far from Kurzweil's conjecture, is it? Did that insight come from the horrifying night in Vietnam when he earned the Silver Star and killed forty men, or from all the acid he dropped after he came home? Does it matter?

This theme has been explored repeatedly in science fiction, in films like "The Matrix" trilogy and novels like Simulacron-3 (the movie "The 13th Floor"), and "Inception", "Existenz"and more recently, in some of the work of Iain M Banks. And we've talked about it here repeatedly on the Zone.

But it doesn't really matter, does it? We all have to deal with the world as it presents itself to us, how the world "really" is is not only unprovable, it is irrelevant. Even more important, we get to pick the kind of world we want to have meaning for us, we then live in it as if it really mattered. If you are an athlete, or an artist, or a scientist or politician, you see yourself as an actor in a universe you have created that has great meaning and importance for you, yet may be sheer nonsense for anyone else.

Just think, a chess master is obsessed with the game, its history, and its subtleties. If he competes at a high level, he worries about his standings, his matches, his reputation, his training and his opponents, etc. If you don't play chess, it all means nothing to you. If you are devoutly religious, your relationship with God is the single most important fact in your life. To the atheist, it is all an elaborate fantasy. And who's to say who's right, whatever that means?

To a very great extent, we all construct the universe we live in. And the real universe manifests itself in so many different ways, who's to say which is the right one? Do we reside in the universe of the physicist, the chemist, the biologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the anthropologist, the historian? Each of these realms encompasses the universe beneath it, all nested like the layers of an onion. We all seem blissfully unaware of these other layers, except when we're being mugged, or divorced, or when we have a toothache, when our child dies or when our doctor gives us the really bad news.

Understanding that at the molecular level is what true freedom is.