On the surface, video game enthusiasts, Monday morning quarterbacks, pop philosophers and quantum physicists may not have anything in common. However, once you peel back the superficiality of each label, we reveal a characteristic that infects every human being: overactive imaginations.

Consider Dr. Nick Bostrom’s article “Are You Living In A Computer Simulation?” which examines the likelihood of the scenario popularly proposed by the Wachowski brothers. After computing the probabilities of various statements, Dr. Bostrom arrives at the conclusion that one of the following is true:

(1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero
(2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero
(3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

A neat argument but I was surprised by Bostrom’s comment in The New York Times: “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.” Thanks to his bemused prediction, we are likely to remember Bostrom for posing an intriguing Gedankenexperiment – if we reach a point in history where Statement (3) comes to fruition, we’ll merely chuckle and proclaim him to be a great thinker.

Not so for Rob Bryanton unfortunately. This musician-cum-philosopher has been ridiculed for his presumption that there are only 10 dimensions. While quantum mechanic string theory practitioners may gripe about Bryanton’s faux-science, simplifying complex concepts without academic rigour, I think the real issue at hand seems to be the flashy animation he uses to explain his theory.

In a nutshell – they are jealous that he has been able to succinctly communicate his ideas. Thanks to the emotions of an exclusive clique of thinkers, the idea that the totality of all possible existences can be represented as a dot on the 10th dimension will probably never be taken seriously.

Shouldn’t we praise thinking outside of the vat? Is that not what all intellectual discourse be about? Stay tuned for part 2 – where fictional characters come to life and human beings lose their individuality in the swimming pool of creativity.