I am getting increasingly astonished at hearing so many well-qualified scholars repeating – as official scientific doctrine - a claim which they clearly don’t believe. The claim is that they (and indeed their readers) don’t exist. But existing isn’t something extra that you do on top of just being present. It is simply being present in the first place.

We can, of course, ask these people, `Who, then, are the beings that are now making this claim? What are the mysterious entities which (in your view) actually write their books - work out their subtle doctrines - make their life-changing decisions for them and deal, for instance, with their children and their bank-managers? How do these bogus entities manage to go on deceiving all the people round them into taking them for genuine human beings? And who, indeed, are all those surrounding people? If they are all just flickering illusions, how do they manage to provide us with a world which is certainly not just fantasy but is solidly and painfully real?’ The answer – that, apart from the brain-cells they are all indeed imaginary – doesn’t make any sense. To repeat, imaginary people can’t constitute a real world.