I think a lot about the Topeka problem.
It comes to me via Dr. Charles Lewis, my favorite professor in college, from whom I took classes with titles like Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche and Philosophy of Religion. Dr. Lewis’ teaching style had all the theatricality of my own dad’s performative lectures, and despite their disparate subjects—Dad taught chemistry—I saw a lot of my father in Dr. Lewis. Which I guess is why I thought so highly of him. And craved his approval.
Dr. Lewis’ classes changed my brain, cracked the code on critical thinking for me in a way that nothing had before. One of the big questions I carry from those classes is, “How do we know what we know?” Or asked another way: “How do we know when we know something?”
For example, Dr. Lewis would say. Prove to me you’re not a brain in a jar in a lab in Topeka, being fed all the electrical impulses necessary to simulate everything you think you’re currently hearing, seeing, touching, feeling, and experiencing. Maybe those scientists at the, whatever, Topeka Brain Institute—maybe they’re feeding your brain random electrical impulses, but because it’s a human brain, or at least possessed of some form of intelligence, its heuristic nature knits those sensations together into some kind of storyline.
It’s a version of the simulation hypothesis: The Topeka Problem. Prove to me—more importantly, prove to yourself—you’re not a brain in a jar in a lab in Topeka.
But you can’t prove a negative, right? Prove to me you’re not a brain—can’t be done. Or prove to me you’re not some random collection of sensations fed to me by those Topeka brain scientists—or, let’s be honest, their interns. You can’t prove to me you’re not a figment of my imagination, a character on the holodeck, a glitch in the matrix, an NPC.
Okay, so let’s posit for a moment that I’m a brain in a jar in a lab in Topeka.
There are now two realities. There’s the reality in the jar in the lab in Topeka, where I’m a brain, being fed electrical impulses.
But there’s also the world I appear to see and hear and touch and feel and experience, where there’s a keyboard under my fingers and air in my lungs and a chair under my butt.
Even if I allow that it’s not real, that it’s a simulation, it’s still the only one of the two realities where I have—or at least appear to have—any agency. Perhaps, because it is simulated, all my choices are preordained—but from my perspective, it doesn’t seem that way.
All of which is to say, as with all questions of meaning, of spirituality, of the great unknowns, my answer is, as always, “I don’t know.” I don’t know if I’m a brain in a jar in a lab in Topeka or a bunch of bits in a universe simulation. Probably am.
But since I at least have the appearance—if not the actual reality—of agency in this world, I’ll choose to participate in it. I can sense it, feel it, relate to it. It seems real to me, and I seem in some way, evolutionarily at least, suited to it. Done conscientiously, intentionally, it’s a leaning toward absurdity—perhaps it’s all meaningless! But what else are you going to do, really? Might as well get in the pool.
It’s fall here now, and I keep catching that musty, frosty smell of autumn leaves cold and damp, and it grounds me. It feels like a tether to something more real than real. The veil always seems to be down somewhat this time of year, whatever that means. The things we can’t see seem glimpsable in the corners of our eyes, the corners of our homes at the witching hour.
I ground myself in the reality I was made for. What is the nature of its—of my—existence? TBD. But accepting what’s in front of me, so to speak, seems like a good—though not perfect—solution to the Topeka Problem.
Too bad I can’t send all that back through time twenty-five years so I’d have it ready to go for Dr. Lewis. I like to think he’d like that answer.