Exploring the Virtual Reality Conjecture by Brian Whitworth
Exploring the virtual reality conjecture
Brian Whitworth
Introduction Computers today simulate entire worlds, with their own time, space and objects, but that our world could be so is normally a topic of science fiction, not physics. Yet that the world is illusory has a long history. In Buddhism, the world expresses the Universal Mind, in Hinduism it is Maya, the illusion of "God’s play”, and to Plato it was just shadows flickering on a wall1. That the world is digital is also not new, as to Pythagoras numbers were the non-material essence of the world, Plato felt that “God geometrizes” and Gauss that “God computes”, as in Blake's "Ancient of Days" (Figure 1). The tradition continues today, as Zuse argues that "space calculates" [1] and others ask if reality computes?2 This essay explores the virtual reality (VR) conjecture, that the physical world is the digital output of quantum processing. One can contrast Platonic idealism, that the seen world reflects a greater unseen one, with Aristotelian physicalism, that what we see is Figure 1. God computes? all there is. Logically, one of these world views must be wrong, but after centuries of dispute, science and religion formed the truce of dualism, that mind and body realms both exist, dividing scientists into atheists who saw only the physical world, theists who also believed in a non-physical reality and agnostics who didn't know. Today, dualism seems increasingly a union of opposites, a marriage of convenience not truth. If different mind and body realms exist but don't interact, what relevance are they to each other? Or if they do interact, which came first? If a conscious mind "emerges" from a physical brain, isn't it superfluous? Or if the mind creates the body as in a dream, why can't I dream the body I want? Dualism is currently in retreat before the simpler, non-dual view that there is only one real world. Scientists observing this ideological war generally feel that if there is only one world, let it be
Brian Whitworth
Introduction Computers today simulate entire worlds, with their own time, space and objects, but that our world could be so is normally a topic of science fiction, not physics. Yet that the world is illusory has a long history. In Buddhism, the world expresses the Universal Mind, in Hinduism it is Maya, the illusion of "God’s play”, and to Plato it was just shadows flickering on a wall1. That the world is digital is also not new, as to Pythagoras numbers were the non-material essence of the world, Plato felt that “God geometrizes” and Gauss that “God computes”, as in Blake's "Ancient of Days" (Figure 1). The tradition continues today, as Zuse argues that "space calculates" [1] and others ask if reality computes?2 This essay explores the virtual reality (VR) conjecture, that the physical world is the digital output of quantum processing. One can contrast Platonic idealism, that the seen world reflects a greater unseen one, with Aristotelian physicalism, that what we see is Figure 1. God computes? all there is. Logically, one of these world views must be wrong, but after centuries of dispute, science and religion formed the truce of dualism, that mind and body realms both exist, dividing scientists into atheists who saw only the physical world, theists who also believed in a non-physical reality and agnostics who didn't know. Today, dualism seems increasingly a union of opposites, a marriage of convenience not truth. If different mind and body realms exist but don't interact, what relevance are they to each other? Or if they do interact, which came first? If a conscious mind "emerges" from a physical brain, isn't it superfluous? Or if the mind creates the body as in a dream, why can't I dream the body I want? Dualism is currently in retreat before the simpler, non-dual view that there is only one real world. Scientists observing this ideological war generally feel that if there is only one world, let it be