Life: Reality or Illusion?

Reading chapter 3 of the book "The Questions of Life" was shocking for me because its ideas and thoughts were ones that I've never stumbled across before. In the previous chapters, as well as in the introduction, I concidered Savater's ideas a little out there but always worth thinking about. However, I must say that to me, his ideas in chapter 3 were way over the line. I think he "over-philosophized" and therefore must disagree with him.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for philosophy, I think is great that people question their lives in order to have a better understanding of it, but to me, discussing ideas like life being just a dream, or life being controlled by evil spirits, or us being just floating brains imagining everything is too much. Why? Because it has no purpose. Nothing good can come from discussing whether our lives are really the way we see them or not.

It is true that there's a possibilty that life as we see it is just an illusion, that maybe some evil god is making me imagine that I live in Torreon, that I go to school at Tec de Monterrey and that I play guitar while what's really happening is that I'm just a brain floating in a jar being controlled by this god who is making me imagine all this stuff.

Ok, so let's say this IS true, for the sake of arguing. So what? How does that change my life, or my "illusion of life"? Even if life as I see it is not what's really happening I'm going to keep living it am I not? Or imagining it if that's the case. Nothing's going to change right? Unless this "god" wants to change it, in which case there's nothing I can do because apparently he controls me.

Plus, I think life is just too big. There are way too many details in it for it to be just an illusion or a dream. I mean, I just can't imagine someone telling me that there's no Paris. That I simply imagined going to this beautiful place with this awesomely big tower, these great gardens and all that nice food. Or that music doesn't exist, that I imagined all these hundreds of artists coming up with these thousand songs which I love.

So why waste our time thinking about whether life as we know it is real or not? And whether or not we can control it? I say, live your life to the fullest, and if at the end it turns out that it was just a dream or an illusion, well, there was nothing you could have done right? Plus, you still have the memories don't you?