‘Sorry about the noises off,” says Michael Frayn, the author of Noises Off. A man is fixing the electronic entry system to his house and beeps, warbles and buzzes are coming from the hallway. Later the man comes in to explain problems with software and sub-menus. Frayn looks agonised.

“But can you fix it? I’m going away tomorrow.”

“Oh, it’s fixed.”

Frayn and I exchange a look that means, “So why all this sub-menu stuff?” But, being middle-class, we know it’s best to say nothing.

The world does not make sense: buzzers break bafflingly and are fixed incomprehensibly. Thoughts are exchanged but unspoken. Or are they? What are thoughts? Where are they? Tomorrow Frayn has chosen to go and stay with his daughter in Ibiza. But did he? How? And where is this choice? Was it, in fact, just an inevitable event in a causal chain that stretches back 14 billion years to the Big Bang?

And, while we’re on the subject of the Big Bang, what was that all about? Nobody saw it or heard it or measured it. Did we, in fact, invent the Big Bang just to round off our equations which are, as we know, no more than models of the world out there? If, of course, there is a world out there.

“It’s a paradox,” Frayn muses. “I accept it is plainly true that the universe is independent of us and we are an extremely small and insignificant part of a very large universe and there is something out there. On the other hand, it is absolutely impossible to think of anything you can say about the world outside except in terms of our understanding and imagination, and that makes it very difficult.”

Reason tells us that as individuals, even as a species, we are brief cries in the cosmos, beeps in the hallway, noises off. On the other hand, we seem to be at the centre of things. Did dinosaurs exist before there were people? Well, yes, but, then again, no, because there were no people around to point at them and say, “dinosaur”.

Having mulled these ideas over all his life and once — in a book called Constructions — pursued them in print, Frayn, farceur — most memorably Noises Off — novelist, playwright, philosopher of sorts and all-round good egg, has now chosen to expand them into a mighty book entitled The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe.

“I wouldn’t claim it’s philosophy because philosophy has become a very technical subject. It’s just some fairly general thoughts about a question which is so fundamental, so basic, that it often gets overlooked.”

The question is: are we in the world or do we make the world? Frayn’s answer is compendious, scholarly, whimsical and necessarily inconclusive because, of course, there is no answer. That is what we call the human condition. It includes multiple digressions about painful subjects such as seeing yourself in a mirror not as you think you are but as others see you. It also has a page on the great philosopher Yeswell Sortov — I got the joke just in time to stop myself looking him up on Wikipedia.

If anything, as his subtitle suggests, Frayn comes down on the side of humans as makers of the world, mainly because he is dubious about the confidence of scientists.

“A great many scientists do feel there is an absolutely objective, independent universe with its own truths and their job is to discover them and they will eventually get to a final statement about the universe. Other scientists think we won’t get to that end point, but we can go on refining the truths we have. My point is there isn’t a truth about the universe, there are the truths we say about it. You can’t get round the back of it.”