speaking topics / philosophy

Philosophy speaking topics

226 real topics. Every one is sourced and deep enough to talk about for 10-15 minutes. Click one to see its detail page, or practice in the app.

• The decision you are making right now may have started as chemistry in your brain a fraction of a second before you became aware of it. So when you say 'I decided', are you really just the audience for a decision that was already made?
• In an orchestra, the music is not in any single note; it lives in the relationships between them. Maybe 'you' are not in any single part of your brain either, but in the melody the parts play together. So when the melody stops and the instruments fall silent, where are you?
• The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.
• A person who never exists suffers nothing and loses nothing. So is bringing someone into the world exposing them to every possible pain without their consent? Is being born really a gift, or a choice made for someone who could never be asked?
• Let him who would move the world first move himself.
• There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.
• There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
• Wittgenstein's beetle: everyone has a box containing something they call a 'beetle', but nobody can look inside anyone else's box. When we use the same word for inner feelings like pain, are we really talking about the same thing?
• Do we have free will, or is it an illusion we cannot live without?
• Virtue ethics: does asking 'what kind of person should I be' capture morality better than 'what should I do'? Is it rules that make us good, or character?
• The doctrine of double effect: is intending a bad outcome different from foreseeing and accepting it? If a drug given to ease a patient's pain hastens their death, does intention make the act legitimate?
• The past no longer exists, the future does not exist yet, and the present is an instant too short to measure. If no part of time actually exists, how do we manage to feel that we live inside it?
• The unexamined life is not worth living.
• The Chinese room: a person who speaks no Chinese sits in a room matching Chinese symbols according to a rulebook, producing flawless answers. Do they understand Chinese? Is producing the right output ever the same thing as understanding?
• Acts and omissions: is there a moral difference between doing harm and failing to prevent it? Should pushing someone carry the same weight as watching them fall?
• The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
• Moore's naturalistic fallacy: is it a mistake to reduce 'good' to pleasure or to what is natural? If 'good' cannot be fully defined by anything else, how do we know it?
• Mutineers on a ship each think 'my one blow won't sink it', and together they sink the ship. If no single person is to blame, who is responsible for the sinking? How does individual innocence add up to collective disaster?
• The grandfather paradox: travel back in time and stop your own grandfather from ever meeting your grandmother, and you are never born; but if you are never born, you cannot go back to stop him. Does this logical loop make time travel impossible from the start?
• The fool pursues the pleasures of life and finds himself their dupe; the wise man avoids its evils.
• Heraclitus says you cannot step into the same river twice, because the water has flowed on. But think again: is it only the river that changes, or is the person stepping in also someone new? Can anyone step into any river even once?
• The odds of you existing were practically zero; you happened only through countless accidents stacking up just right. Given such an impossible stroke of luck, is living an ordinary life a waste of the universe's gift, or is even thinking that way an empty vanity?
• Hilbert's infinite hotel: a hotel with infinitely many rooms is completely full, yet a new guest can still be given a room. Why does our common sense collapse the moment 'full' and 'infinite' appear in the same sentence?
• Newcomb's paradox: a being that predicts the future almost perfectly sets out two boxes. Take only the closed box and it is full; take both and it is empty. Logic says take both boxes, so why does intuition keep telling us to take just one?
• Every night when you fall asleep your consciousness switches off completely, and every morning it comes back. Is the person who wakes up really the one who fell asleep, or a brand new consciousness that inherited their memories? What exactly separates sleep from death?
• The body is the tomb of the soul.
• The surprise execution paradox: a prisoner is told he will be hanged one day next week, but he will never know which day in advance. By pure logic he proves that no day is possible, and is then hanged, completely surprised, on Wednesday. Where did the reasoning go wrong?
• Thomson's violinist: you wake up with a famous violinist plugged into your body, and only nine months of your life can keep him alive. Does someone's survival give them a right to use your body?
• The ethics of care: should morality be grounded in abstract rules, or in concrete relationships and compassion? Could the bonds we feel for one another explain morality better than the scales of justice?
• Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
• Would life still have value if suffering were engineered away?
• Why do some of the kindest, most honest people struggle in life while people who lie and cheat seem to thrive?
• What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands.
• How many things I can do without!
• Is morality objective, or something humans invented?
• God is dead; God died of his pity for man.
• A happy life is impossible; the best that a man can attain is a heroic life.
• Societies will spend millions rescuing a few stranded adventurers, yet do nothing for individuals quietly ruined by bad luck. What does that say about how we value lives?
• How much did this people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful!
• If the world were clear, art would not exist.
• We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
• Compatibilism: can determinism and freedom both be true? If I act on my own desires without coercion, am I free even inside a chain of causes?
• Has philosophy ever definitively settled a question?
• Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
• Nagel's bat: can we ever know what it is like to be a bat? If another creature's inner world is closed to us forever, why can't science unlock subjectivity?
• What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?
• A hundred years after a person dies, nobody is left who remembers them. It is as if they never lived. If a life's meaning depends on the people who remember it, and we know that eventually no one will be left in the universe, was everything meaningless from the start?
• Diffusion of responsibility: why does nobody in a crowd step in to help, with everyone assuming someone else will? Why does individual conscience weaken as responsibility gets spread across more people?
• What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!
• Diogenes living in a barrel and telling Alexander the Great to stop blocking his sunlight: what Cynic philosophy asks of us.
• The Zen idea of beginner's mind points at a paradox: the more you know about a subject, the more your mind closes to new learning. How can experts stay open?
• One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
• The Stoic divide between what is up to us and what is not, and where inner peace really comes from.
• The plank of Carneades: two shipwrecked sailors cling to a plank that can hold only one. If one pushes the other off to save himself, is it murder or self-defense? Does the instinct to survive suspend morality?
• Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.
• We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
• Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.
• Moral luck: can we be blamed for outcomes beyond our control? Is it fair to judge the drunk driver who crashes differently from the one who makes it home safely, when their intentions were exactly the same?
• When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state always change with them.
• The future you will have completely different desires and values from the you of today. So the promises you make and the things you save up are really for a stranger you have never met. Why do you owe them anything?
• One writer argued that the point of art is the process of struggling, not the final product. If a machine produces something indistinguishable from art, does how it was made still matter?
• The child in the basement: if the happiness of thousands depended on the constant suffering of a single child, would you accept that happiness? Can the misery of one innocent ever legitimize the wellbeing of a whole society?
• Moral luck: you can do everything right and things can still go wrong. How should you judge people, and yourself, in a world like that?
• The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
• Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
• Most disagreements are two people arguing from different frames without noticing it.
• Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
• Moral relativism: do right and wrong change from culture to culture, or is there a universal standard? When what is normal in one society is horrifying in another, who is right?
• Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
• The best way to disagree is to take on your opponent's strongest argument, not their weakest. Why has public discourse gone in exactly the opposite direction?
• The sorites paradox: take grains away from a heap of sand one at a time, and at which grain does it stop being a heap? If no single grain makes the difference, does the fuzziness of that boundary mean our concepts themselves are broken?
• Children who are taught philosophy improve at math, reading, and empathy. Why is philosophy still missing from most schools?
• Health is not everything, but without health everything is nothing.
• What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
• A single idea can change the course of a life. Which ideas have that power?
• True, profound peace of heart and complete tranquillity of soul are to be found only in solitude.
• Nobody expects atoms or molecules to have a purpose, so why do we expect life to have one? Maybe living things are not for anything, they just are.
• A death row inmate with dementia cannot remember his crime. Is he still the same person who committed it, and is he still responsible?
• We may never be able to tell whether an AI has become conscious. What should we do with that uncertainty?
• Everything is content, once you start filming your life, the act of filming changes what your life is.
• To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
• The zombie argument: could there be a being that behaves exactly like you from the outside but has no feelings, no inner experience at all? And if such a being is possible, does that mean consciousness is something over and above the physical body?
• When a community says 'we', who exactly does it mean? Its members change, its rules change, its home changes, yet we still call it the same community. What is the invisible thing that keeps a nation, a team, or a family the same over time, or is it just a name?
• Deontology: can an action be wrong in itself, regardless of its consequences? Even if a lie saves a life, why is the lie itself still counted as wrong?
• Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
• Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: swift Achilles can never catch the tortoise that started ahead, because by the time he reaches where it was, it has moved a little further. Do infinite steps make motion logically impossible, or is it logic that fails to capture reality?
• A baby has no memories of its earliest days, yet we say that baby was you. If an illness erased all your memories, would you still be the same person? Is it your memories that make you you, your body, or something else entirely?
• Why should one tell the truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?
• The ring of Gyges: if you were invisible and certain of never being punished, would you still be honest? Is morality just fear of getting caught, or something deeper?
• Machiavelli warned 500 years ago that publics grow complacent in the face of charismatic, self-interested leaders. Are we proving him right?
• You think you understand something, until you try to explain it to someone else and realize you never did. Maybe knowing is not something in your head but something that only exists once it is put into words. So do you really know anything you cannot explain?
• Most equations in physics make no distinction between past and future; both directions work equally well. So what makes time flow only forward, why can we never go back, or is the 'flow' just something our brains invented?
• All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
• You did not choose where you were born, your family, your language, or your first beliefs, and every choice you have made since was built on top of them. If you never chose your starting point, are your decisions truly free, or just a line of falling dominoes?
• How should you decide which problems are worth your lifetime?
• Buridan's ass: a donkey standing exactly halfway between two identical bales of hay cannot decide which one to choose and starves to death. Does perfect equality really paralyze free will and make decision impossible?
• Some thinkers call industrial farming one of the worst crimes in history, with billions of sentient animals living and dying on production lines. Why is this so easy for most of us to ignore?
• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
• Mary's room: a scientist who knows everything about color but has never seen it finally sees red. Does she learn something new? Is experience a separate thing added on top of factual knowledge?
• If a hot dog is a sandwich then cereal is soup. Are categories about structure or about use, and does it matter which one we pick?
• No one does wrong willingly.
• The beginning is the most important part of the work.
• Hume's guillotine: can you build a bridge from 'is' to 'ought'? Can we derive how things should be from how they are in nature?
• Science can describe what happens in your brain when you see red, but nobody can measure the redness you actually experience. Maybe my red is your green, and we have used the same word all our lives without ever seeing the same thing. How would you prove otherwise?
• If there are infinitely many universes, countless copies of you are out there making every decision differently. Does that make your wrong choice in this universe trivial, since another you got it right somewhere else, or is this the only you that counts?
• The zombie argument: is a being physically identical to us but with no inner experience possible? If consciousness is just brain function, why can't we explain what it feels like from the inside?
• The Gettier problem: is a justified true belief really enough to count as knowledge? If a belief turns out to be true by sheer luck, should we call it knowledge at all?
• Can you be grateful for your own life while fighting injustice in the world?
• When everyone in a society believes the same falsehood, it becomes normal, and the one telling the truth is called mad. Which of the things you are most certain of today will people look back on in a hundred years and ask, how could they ever believe that?
• The ship of Theseus: if every part of the ship is replaced over time, is it still the same ship? Our cells are replaced too, so what keeps us the same person?
• The trolley problem: a runaway trolley is about to hit five people; pull the lever and it switches tracks, killing one person instead. Is deliberately killing one person morally different from letting five people die?
• Molyneux's problem: a person born blind learns to tell a sphere from a cube by touch alone. If they suddenly gained sight, could they tell which is which just by looking, without touching? Does knowledge transfer between the senses on its own?
• Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.
• If you felt no pain, and no hunger even while starving, survival would become impossible. Maybe pain is not a flaw but the very thing that ties you to yourself. Would a being that never suffers really count as alive?
• A single ant is stupid, but the colony acts intelligently: it builds bridges, farms, wages war. If the 'mind' lives not in the ants but in the connections between them, does your mind live not in your neurons but in the connections between them?
• At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.
• Sartre's bad faith: is escaping our own freedom by saying 'my role requires it' a lie we tell ourselves? If a person can choose at every moment, is 'I had no choice' ever true?
• Billionaire wealth could end extreme poverty many times over while half the world lives in it. Anger feels justified, but what would an actually effective response look like?
• I would like my books to be a sort of Molotov cocktail, or a minefield; I would like them to self-destruct after use, like fireworks.
• Inside a dream you never notice that the dream world is not real; everything feels perfectly solid. So how are you so sure you are awake right now? Can you point to any definitive proof that separates waking life from a dream?
• Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world, and defines himself afterwards.
• Would you sacrifice one person to save five, and does it change if that one person is your sibling?
• The lady or the tiger: a princess's lover must choose between two doors, one hiding death, the other a beautiful woman he would be made to marry. The princess knows which is which, and she signals him. Does jealousy win, or love? Is this a dilemma with no answer at all?
• The Münchhausen trilemma: if every claim is proven by another claim, how do we stop the infinite regress? Knowledge is either circular, endless, or resting on an unprovable assumption. Which can we accept?
• The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
• Kant's formula of humanity: where is the line between using someone as a means to an end and respecting them as a person? Why does human dignity demand that we never treat anyone merely as a tool?
• There is a big difference between believing others are wrong and believing you are right.
• A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to inquire; and if not, he cannot, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire.
• Can one be a saint without God? That's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.
• If enough people believe a fiction for long enough, it starts to work like reality: money, countries, corporations all run this way. Are these things, with nothing behind them but shared belief, actually the most powerful realities governing our world?
• The golden mean: is courage the balance point between cowardice and recklessness? If every virtue sits between two extremes, who decides where the middle is?
• I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
• Is it possible to be completely honest, and what would it cost you?
• Mary's room: a brilliant scientist learns everything there is to know about the science of color while locked in a black and white room. When she steps out and sees red for the first time, does she learn something new? Is what red looks like a fact that physics can never contain?
• I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time.
• Plato's theory of forms: how can an abstract shape like the perfect triangle be more real than the world we can touch?
• We are told hard work is the gateway to a better life. Maybe internalizing the work ethic is actually a trap.
• Naming is something like attaching a label to a thing.
• To be happy, you have to stop thinking about happiness; chase it directly and it runs away. Maybe the things we want most only arrive once we stop wanting them. Is desire, then, something that sabotages itself?
• The panopticon: does a person who knows they might be watched start policing themselves, even when nobody is looking? If the mere possibility of an invisible authority is enough to change our behavior, where does freedom begin?
• Before acting, you tell yourself 'I could have done otherwise'. But rewind time and replay the exact same brain, the same memories, the same moment: would you really do anything different? If not, you are not free; and if you would, what caused the difference, pure chance?
• Optimistic nihilism, the idea that if nothing ultimately matters, we are free to decide what matters, and why millions find that comforting.
• Some fish live near the surface, others on the ocean floor, yet they never fight over 'this is my land'. Could property, borders, and deeds be entirely human inventions, or does nature run on some invisible form of ownership too?
• Neither in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death.
• Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
• In order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit; we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought. The limit can only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.
• Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.
• The categorical imperative: could you will that everyone act the way you are acting? Should a behavior count as moral only if it could become a universal law?
• Searle's Chinese room: someone follows the rules of Chinese and gives correct answers without understanding a word. If a system produces the right outputs, where is the line between understanding and imitation?
• Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
• Nozick's experience machine: would you plug into a machine that guarantees lifelong happiness inside a fake life? If happiness is not enough, why does reality itself matter so much?
• Frankfurt cases: can we be morally responsible even when we could not have done otherwise? If we make a choice 'our own' despite being unable to change it, is freedom still required for responsibility?
• Religions correlate strongly with geography. Is where you were born the real reason you believe what you believe?
• If your smartphone is effectively an extension of your mind, should it have the same legal protections as your brain?
• Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
• In a relationship, is it more important to be loved or to be understood?
• Locke's sleeping man: a man is locked in a room while he sleeps, but on waking he believes he is staying by his own choice. Is a 'free choice' made without knowing you had no alternative really free?
• If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
• The first and best victory is to conquer self.
• What is the real difference between justice and revenge?
• Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
• I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.
• Repeat a word enough times and it loses its meaning, collapsing into pure sound. Maybe meaning is not inside the word at all, but something we pour into it fresh every time. Could it be that no word, by itself, ever says anything?
• Rawls's difference principle: is inequality legitimate only when it benefits the worst off? If the rich getting richer also lifts the poorest, is that fair?
• The first time you learn something, the world changes; you can never return to the person who did not know it. Some knowledge remakes you irreversibly. If you could have chosen never to learn, would you have wanted to stay your ignorant former self?
• Schopenhauer's hedgehog dilemma: hedgehogs huddle together for warmth in the cold, but their spines force them apart, and then the cold pushes them back together. Since human closeness brings both warmth and pain, are we all endlessly searching for that ideal distance?
• If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
• For an action to count as yours, you have to want it. But you never chose your wants; they simply came to you. Nobody can want what they want to want. So are even your deepest desires things that were loaded into you from outside?
• It may be shameful to be happy by oneself.
• Peter Singer's drowning child: you would ruin your expensive shoes to save a child drowning in front of you, so why do you hesitate to spend the same money saving a child far away? Does distance shrink moral responsibility?
• He who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.
• To call something 'evil' you first need a measure of 'good'. But who set that measure? If morality is not a law of the universe but a human agreement, is genocide 'wrong' only because most people say so?
• The social contract: do we obey the state because of an implicit promise we made to escape the chaos of nature? We never signed any contract, so why are we bound to follow the law?
• The great novelists are philosophical novelists, that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
• A main cause of philosophical disease: a one-sided diet; one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example.
• Should you treat your life as an optimization problem, or does that ruin the point of living?
• Utilitarianism: should the greatest happiness of the greatest number be our measure? If one person's suffering can be traded for the majority's happiness, what happens to justice?
• Rawls's veil of ignorance: if you had to design society without knowing your own wealth, gender, or talents, what kind of order would you build? Why does defining justice require forgetting who we are?
• Hell is other people.
• Effective altruism: is doing good about good intentions, or about producing the most measurable benefit? Should we prefer the emotional donation or the cold calculation that saves more lives?
• What measuring stick do you use to judge your own life?
• Is beauty objective or subjective?
• The trolley problem: is it right to pull the lever and sacrifice one person to save five? Why does actively killing one feel heavier than standing by while five die?
• What do you think happens after we die?
• I know that I know nothing.
• The ancient Greeks had a word, amathia, for intelligent stupidity, a refusal to understand. It may explain why smart people believe and do terrible things.
• The footbridge variation: pushing a large man off a bridge to stop the trolley saves the same five lives, so why does it feel morally different from pulling the lever? If the outcome is identical, what do intention and physical contact change?
• Many of the choices we agonize over are options that never really existed.
• The infinite monkey theorem: would a monkey hitting random keys for an infinite amount of time eventually type out the complete works of Shakespeare, letter for letter? Does infinity turn the seemingly impossible into a certainty?
• The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways, I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
• Man is the cruelest animal.
• A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
• The face you see in the mirror is not your face; it is flipped left to right. In photos you look wrong to yourself because you are used to the mirror. So which one is your real face? Have you never actually seen yourself correctly, and can only other people see you?
• Responsibility and determinism: if every choice is fixed by prior causes, can we be morally blamed? If free will is an illusion, what happens to punishment and praise?
• I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know.
• Descartes's evil demon: could all your perceptions be a deception, and how do we know we really exist? If everything can be doubted, what remains certain?
• Civilization depends on people accepting valid arguments even when they hate the conclusion.
• The utility monster: if a being existed that got a hundred times more pleasure from everything than you do, would it be right to hand it all our resources in the name of maximizing happiness? Does the greatest happiness principle drive itself into absurdity?
• The liar paradox: someone says 'this sentence is false'. Are they telling the truth or lying? If it is true it is false, and if it is false it is true. Why does logic short-circuit the moment language turns back on itself?
• We consider euthanasia humane for a suffering animal but deeply controversial for a suffering human. What explains the difference?
• At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
• Suppose you learned you would live this exact life, every pain and every joy, over and over for eternity. Would the thought crush you or set you free? Is a life only truly good if it is worth living infinitely many times?
• Is a hot dog a sandwich? Commit to a definition and defend it, then explain why people get so emotionally invested in categories.
• We fear death, yet we feel nothing about the endless void before our birth, even though both are the same state of non-existence. Why do we look at one with horror and shrug at the other? Is death really bad, or just an absence we are not used to?
• A teleporter takes a person apart atom by atom and rebuilds them perfectly somewhere else. Is the person who steps out really 'them', or just a flawless copy? And if the original is never destroyed, which of the two is the real you?
• A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
• The tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
• I was alone, but I marched like a regiment descending on a city.
• There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.
• Morality is herd instinct in the individual.
• The brain in a vat: could you be a brain stimulated in a laboratory, with the world a mere simulation? If our experiences guarantee nothing about reality, what is knowledge?
• Isn't it strange how a smell can suddenly throw you years back, into a moment you thought you had forgotten? You never lost that memory; it was waiting for a door to open. Is forgetting really erasing something, or just losing the path to it?
• Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
• When the two halves of the brain are surgically separated, a patient's hands can start doing opposite things, as if there were two separate selves inside. Could there be more than one 'you' in there all along, all just speaking through the same mouth?
• Philosophy taught through costume, lighting, and drama reaches more people than lectures ever did, whether spectacle helps or corrupts the ideas.
• The moral sorites: if one lie does not make you a bad person, which lie does? Is character like a heap of sand with no clear boundary, or is there a sharp line somewhere after all?
• I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.
• Emotions are not the enemy of reason. They are responses shaped by our values, and we should learn to reason with them rather than suppress them.
• Compassion is the basis of morality.
• Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.
• For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses.
• The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
• Many African philosophies hold that we do not exist first and then form relationships, we become who we are through them. What would taking that seriously change about how you live?
• Man is something that shall be overcome.
• The tormenter and the tormented are one.
• Nozick's experience machine: imagine being plugged into a simulation where you would believe you were living a perfectly happy life, getting everything you ever wanted, except none of it would be real. Would you plug in, or choose reality with all its pain?