Exploring the Virtual Reality Conjecture by Brian Whitworth

Hi Ted

Thanks for your comment. The term Mind/Consciousness is not currently well defined, so people take it to mean whatever they want it to, without due consideration. In contrast the Buddha explicitly denied any reference to what he called the discriminating mind, which processes the senses. Equally, Hui Neng who founded Chan/Zen Buddhism spoke of Essence of Mind, not our ordinary minds. Yet current thought on consciousness is typically founded on qualia that derive from the senses, e.g. I see "redness", or I feel happy. So it is not in the same tradition. The topic must be addressed properly. Simplistic and inconsistent overviews, like Amit Goswami's book, just raise dust on the road.

all the best

Brian

Dear Don

Well if we already have one that has run successfully for fifteen billion years, why bother?

Brian

Dear Georgina,

You probably well describe how many feel when they read this - even me had I not written it! Yet unsettling as it is, the question deserves consideration because people are asking it.

Re what is reality, your example is telling. A computer game can be "real" to one so involved in it they see nothing else. It is a local reality, a world real within itself, even though from outside, it is not real. So what is real can arise from the unreal, e.g. in a Japan, an assault court case arose because in an online game, a player lent his special sword to another avatar in the game, who then sold it on e-bay! So was the sword that was stolen real? Or take the classic case of Mr. Bungle (actually a group of NYU undergraduates) in LamdaMOO, a text based virtual reality, who hacked a voodoo power, to control other players, and used it to violently "rape" several female characters, making them respond as if they enjoyed it (Dibbell, 1993). There was no "real" rape, as there was no physical contact, and no laws were broken, but there was outrage. Or if a wife's husband commits virtual adultery in a game room, should she leave him? Was it real?

Lets define reality as whatever is the "end of the causal line", i.e. uncaused. In The Matrix, the construct world was created by machines in another world, where Neo is a body in a vat, so is unreal. In contrast, the physical world of Zion is real because it is not caused by anything else. The VR conjecture is NOT The Matrix because it asks if that physical world is self-sufficient, given the big bang, quantum randomness etc. Whether the physical world is an objective reality, that exists entirely in and of itself, is a question science can address, because it is about the physical world.

You ask if virtual reality is compatible with science? Suppose one day the processing behind the virtual online world The Sims allowed some Sims avatars to "think". To practice science, they would only need information to test theories against, which the virtual reality could provide. If they found a world like ours, e.g. with malleable space and time, they could conclude their world was virtual from how it behaved. So not only does science allow the virtual reality conjecture, but a virtual reality could also allow science.

Finally, to conjecture the world is virtual (p1) then say it is digital (p9) would sidestep the contest question, but in between are seven pages on why this is possible and how it could be so. What then about the many other things not covered? Well it is currently just about the physics, not psychological or philosophical implications. If you are wondering if it supports new age ideas of telepathy, psychokinesis, aliens, crop circles, etc, I dont think so, as why should a simulation let its avatars change their programs? Yet equally, it does not deny that possibility. It is just Tegmark's "physics from scratch" approach where processing is the only initial assumption.

all the best and thanks for your comment

Brian Whitworth

Hi Jace,

Thanks for Hoffman's paper. As originally a psychologist, I accept that the brain constructs reality, rather than veridically reflecting reality. Yet as you rightly say, this doesnt mean that we create reality, as some assume. Yet quantum mechanics implies just that, as Wheeler observes:

"To the extent that it {a photon} forms part of what we call reality ... we have to say that we ourselves have an undeniable part in shaping what we have always called the past." (Davies & Brown, 1999) p67

So physics and psychology are two different levels of looking at things. I am not sure that they are easily connected - see this paper LINK.

all the best

Brian

Hi Russel,

You are right, running programs is the way forward. Physicists seek simple static formulae, but Nature doesnt work that way. It is dynamic and efficient. We should use simple recursive programs, like Mandelbrot's, and a language like Lisp, to reflect it.

This model uses a rotating discrete circle. Moving it gives a sine wave formula, Schroedingers equation is an expanding spherical wave, and after that the formulas get too hard. But simulations can still run such "unsolvable" problems, e.g. traffic simulations, given valid simplifying assumptions. But we are like the man looking for his keys under a lamp post, who when asked where he lost them said "In the bushes, but the light is better here", e.g. we assume a flat 3D Euclidian space when we know space curves; we assume triangular spin networks when even war gamers use hexagons not squares, to get more movement directions; we assume static links when even New York cell phone networks dynamically reorganize links under load. Yet it is possible, e.g. Bruce Maiers simulations using "boxel" cubes, see LINK .

Can we do on classical computers what nature does with quantum computing? Prime numbers that supercomputers take hundreds of years to find take only seconds on a quantum computer. Yet the model does suggest simplifying assumptions, e.g. that there are only four dimensions, that all node transfers use planar channels, with a finite capacity exactly equal to the total processing of any photon. The theory also explains why it is so hard to simulate even what a single photon does - because it distributes its processing to literally travel every possible path, even though it restarts at a node point when detected (See LINK Ch3, p19, The law of least action). I am jumping ahead a bit, but consider why the mass of an electron or neutrino etc is always a value range, but their charge is an exact value. In this model, the charge processing remainder after a channel overload is exact, while the mass is the processing the node does before it overloads varies with channel processing order effects.

So I think yes, it is possible, but realistically we are not too far down that track at present.

all the best

Brian

Hi Don

How can several run simultaneously given only one observer at each moment? If many observers "see" different views, is that not the same as several? By Occam's razor, if one suffices (for us), why postulate more? Everett invented a fantastic multiverse machine around the quantum ghost to exorcize it, but to just accept quantum reality and give up physical reality is the simpler option. Yet you are right, as if our universe is simulation running on the inner surface of a hyper-space bubble expanding into a larger bulk, there could be many other such bubbles we dont know of. A system that creates one simulation could indeed create others. Who knows?

Brian

Thanks Jonathan

Yes you are right, who knows what the "other" is, as we can only know this world that we can see and register, as positivists rightly state. Yet science could still conclude (from what we see) that the physical world is a simulation. The argument was just that this if the physical world we see is created by processing, then physical world must be digital, by definition. All the best with your essay!

kind regards

Brian

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hi Eugene,

I didnt use the word "otherworldy" as your quote marks imply, but the word "other". It is not my word but Fredkin's (the computer scientist who began the VR idea twenty years ago).

To say the VR conjecture assumes processing in another world misrepresents it. It asks a question of the physical world, namely, is it a virtual reality? Science is a way to ask questions of the world, not a set of assumptions about it, so it allows the question. I then assume it is true, as a hypothesis, in order to check its implications against the world we see. One of these is that a virtual reality needs a containing reality, as a system cannot output itself, just as a printer cannot print itself out. So that there is an "other" is a conjecture conclusion, not a conjecture assumption.

Hence the VR conjecture doesn't specify that "other", except to give it the properties of processing. It is you who are specifying it. However speculations of what it is made of or does, including yours, are idle if they dont link to the world we know, e.g. that our universe could be "saved" and "restored" (Schmidhuber, 1997), that one virtual reality could create another (Bostrom, 2002), that every quantum event creates a new universe (Everett), etc. This is science fiction not science. In contrast, that the physical world is created by processing, as we understand it, has definable implications for how it behaves.

Yes processing could be analogue, as Jonathan also says, but the VR conjecture applies to a processing output. The situation is that Processing generates an information Output. Shannon and Weaver define information using a choice between a number of options. If that number is infinite, the options cannot be enumerated to choose between. So information, and its processing changes, must always be finite. Indeed, in no case do our processors output infinite values and in every case their output is digital. In this argument, a qubit is just as digital as a bit, as the choices are equally finite. So the conclusion that if the physical world is a processing output, it must be digital, seems fine to me. It follows from the definition of an information output.

kind regards

Brian Whitworth

Hi James

Thanks for your kind questions. I define solipsism as that human minds create the physical world entirely, as a dream or illusion. Bishop Berkeley's claim that our senses create the world is a basis of perception psychology today - that the brain "manufactures reality", as illusions show. Yet it does not necessarily follow that things have no existence apart from our perception (the "esse is percipi" thesis). This contradicts realism - that the world exists apart from us. I dont know if Berkeley resolved this contradiction, though I gather he was more sophisticated than his critics made out. Maybe you can clarify that.

I argue against human-centric bias, e.g. Wigner's idea that the universe needs us to cause quantum collapse, or that it was in an uncollapsed superposed state for billions of years until beings came along to "observe" it. Physicalism, that the physical world exists in and of itself, is also "existence geocentrism" (my Ch2, p6) as it defines existence in terms of what WE register. Yet if science tells us anything, it is that we are not the centre of things.

In the virtual reality conjecture, like solipsism, the physical world is not objectively real or complete in itself. Yet it also holds that there is a real world out there, apart from us, so it is not solipsism. It concludes there is a real world, but that it is not the world we register. In it, every registration, by us or an electron, is an information transfer, a processing event that just looks like a "particle". It says that quantum mathematics describes what is really there, as processing waves. Science can, eventually, resolve this one way or another, because it is a contrast of two distinct hypotheses about the physical world.

A random event is defined as one that no preceding physical events, or combination, predicts, i.e. no physical world "story" leads up to a random event. Such events should not arise in a causal self-contained physical world, but they do in ours. Of course people read all sorts of human-centric things into this finding that it does not imply. Yet while randomness may be meaningless to us, my next chapter argues that this "free" choice was as necessary for the evolution of matter as it was for biological evolution.

Unfortunately, the conjecture to be consistent must derive all physics from abstract processing, i.e. it cant take space or time, energy, light, matter or fields as fundamental, but must derive all from processing. One cant adopt "half a theory" in this case. So it is not an easy position to maintain.

Hope this clarifies.

all the best

Brian