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Is the world real? Or are we all just hallucinating?

Hopes&Fears asked a group of scientists and researchers if reality is actually real or if it’s all an illusion or hallucination.

How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don’t. We can never prove that we’re not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn’t mean that we believe that we are.

There are two aspects to the question. The first is, “How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?” That’s the worry about the holographic principle, for example โ€” maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.