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

Brian,

If one assumes that the 'processor' is 'otherworldly', as you do, I don't know why one wouldn't assume the existence of 'perfect' components used to build the processor, and, in that case, there is no reason that is obvious to me that the processing could not be analog, and not digital.

It's not even certain that so-called 'quantum processing' is not essentially analog in nature. If each 'node' on your 'grid' is an analog processor, suitably connected to other nodes, there is no evident reason, other than current technology and economics biases, to assume digital. Many of the 'oscillations' you concern yourself with come quite naturally to analog elements. And one need not assume 2-D processors that favor the logic 'layouts' and construction techniques used for today's semi-conductor processing. An 'otherworldly' processor should be implementable as a 3-D structure, in which case analog processing may be the preferred implementation.

Problems with analog processing were based on connectivity and on imperfect building blocks and on cost factors (among other things). I am not aware of any analysis that limits what can be achieved in principle with analog processing.

So your conclusion, "The argument was just that this if the physical world we see is created by processing, then physical world must be digital, by definition" seems unwarranted.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

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

Brian,

Your essay is impressive in its comprehensive arguments, professional presentation and a seeming objectivity.

One can never dispute a well-argued thesis, when reality can't be known. My view is simpler but still wedded to modeling assumption and characteristics.

Thanks for the read.

Jim Hoover

Brian,

I was not thinking of parallel universes, but I am glad you responded as you did. I was thinking of this reality (one observer) being a stew of multiple virtual realities running that bump into each other.....but this is probably would be just one reality.

Some Nitpicking: I do not agree with all your evidence, in particular 4. Non-locality and 8. Superposition. I believe that they are misinterpretations. Also your list of philosophical options is wimpy: a) Physicalism b) Solipsism c) Dualism and of course Virtualism.

There are many good essays in this contest. This is the only one that I will read again.

What is, is. What is not, is not.

Thanks,

Don L.

Dear Dr. Brian Whitworth,

I have a few questions while I continue to read your essay:

"Nor is this solipsism, that the physical world is just a dream, which Dr Johnson is said to have refuted by stubbing his toe on a stone, saying "I disprove it thus"."

Is it your position that George Berkeley believed the world to be a dream?

"Randomness. If every physical event is predicted by others, a random quantum event is an impossible "uncaused cause", but a processor creating a virtual world can be its cause."

I assume you are using 'random' to have a technical meaning. In other words, not meaninglessness.

James

    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

    Dear Brian,

    I asked about Berkeley because I thought your response would actually help me to understand your perspective. If I were to assign Berkeley to one of your Universal models it would be physicalism and not Solipsism. I would go even further based upon my own view and suggest that you might find that your work, as I understand it at this point, might be somewhat of an extension of George Berkeley's view. In any case, I am certain that Dr. Johnson did not refute Berkeley's view by kicking a stone. His act makes me wonder if he had perhaps not read Berkeley's writings for himself.

    You: "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."

    I found this paragraph to be very clear and very helpful. The explanation of randomness is something I am still thinking about while I continue to study your essay. Thank you for your helpful resonses.

    James

    6 days later

    Hi all,

    This thread is super, a very beautiful discussion.Dear TH you know it's essential to have a deterministic road.It's essential to respect our newtonian fractalization.You are skilling but you forget some foundamentals about our realism.The most impressing is that you insist on the realism and on the other side you work with irrationalities when you want explain the pure physicality. The relativity is not that. Now of course all rationalist can understand that it's difficult for you to change your line of reasoning after several years of work in the road of irrationalities and irrealities.

    How can you say that Bell's theorem is correct, that has no sense,I don't see the relativity special or general there? But perhaps you can convince me with strong arguments?

    Reagrds

    Steve

    8 days later

    Dear Brian

    You have written an excellent essay, your arguments are very conclusive and interesting. On my essay I have arrived to similar conclusions from a different perspective, I try to explain how we should understand emergence of classical reality just like how a world ruled by a non-classical logic (quantum reality) determines what is seeing by a world ruled by classical logic (the realm of general relativity). About discreteness I think there is nothing fundamental about it, we see discrete features on quantum reality just because we use tools based on classical logic to get a partial understanding of the quantum world. We can construct emergent universes based on a discrete ground basis as in a continuous one. I would like to hear your opinions about it.

    Regards,

    J. Benavides

      Dear Brian Withworth

      You wrote amusing 10 points, why universe is simulation. But we can ask ourselves, what is objective universe. This is (probably) only classical Newtonian mechanics. When we pass to special relativity theory (SR), objectivity begins to disappear. I did one derivation of SR, which use more little steps in transition to SR.

      http://vixra.org/pdf/1012.0006v3.pdf

      Time is dilated. Longitudinal length is shortened as consequence of equivalent inertial frames. Only standstill matter becomes important as stuff, where time running. And this stuff is built up from elementary particles. Therefore, without general relativity and quantum mechanics, we almost obtain some 'subjective' conclusions.

      You mentioned also ur-stuff. This is from Weizskacker and it is also used by Zeilinger and Brukner. Those three physicists are important as reference for this contest.

      Otherwise, virtual reality can be a useful thought experiment for our physical world. It needs to be developed. But, it is not enough only digital nature of physical world. Unlocality is also important.

      p.s.

      I was late for this contest, so my essay is:

      http://vixra.org/pdf/1103.0025v1.pdf

      The essay from 2009 is

      http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/571

      I see how you save the space. Abstract is not in pdf. :)

      Regards Janko Kokosar

      Dear Brian,

      Congratulations on your dedication to the competition and your much deserved top 35 placing. I have a bugging question for you, which I've also posed to all the potential prize winners btw:

      Q: Coulomb's Law of electrostatics was modelled by Maxwell by mechanical means after his mathematical deductions as an added verification (thanks for that bit of info Edwin), which I highly admire. To me, this gives his equation some substance. I have a problem with the laws of gravity though, especially the mathematical representation that "every object attracts every other object equally in all directions." The 'fabric' of spacetime model of gravity doesn't lend itself to explain the law of electrostatics. Coulomb's law denotes two types of matter, one 'charged' positive and the opposite type 'charged' negative. An Archimedes screw model for the graviton can explain -both- the gravity law and the electrostatic law, whilst the 'fabric' of spacetime can't. Doesn't this by definition make the helical screw model better than than anything else that has been suggested for the mechanism of the gravity force?? Otherwise the unification of all the forces is an impossiblity imo. Do you have an opinion on my analysis at all?

      Best wishes,

      Alan

        Hello dear Bryan,

        Your essay is well written, well explained, well presented.

        The problem is that you confound the computing and the universal dynamic. Thus of course it exists one universe(sphere) and these mwi are just a play of computing. The realism never will be other than this pure objectivity of uniqueness and its entropy.

        Now you can compute emergent universes on the 2D picture after all, but frankly for the convergences in 3D and the universal axiomatization...??? Let's be serious a little.If you can create a flower with your computer, tell me it ....

        But beautiful essay as Tommasi ,interesting.Good luck thus.

        Steve

          4 days later

          Brian,

          You may recall that my essay analyzes Anton Zeilinger's logic and concludes that his logic fails if the state of one or more of the entangled particles changes en route from the source to the detector. You seemed to believe that there is no physical reason for the photon to change:

          In a comment above you state: "Your Bell experiment logic is interesting. If the properties of a photon can change en route, without physical interaction, or just before it is observed, isn't the objective reality hypothesis conceded? That a physical photon "thing" can change its properties for no physical reason, is indeed a floodgate. So I think I support Zeilinger."

          I de-emphasized this argument after becoming aware of Joy Christian's work implying Bell's calculations are in error, but, assuming Joy is wrong (which I do not) my argument still applies.

          Yesterday I received Phys Rev Lett 106, 080404 (25 Feb 2011) Antonelli, Shtaif, and Brodsky's paper titled "Sudden Death of Entanglement Induced by Polarization Mode Dispersion" in which they note that the relation between the violation of non-locality and the sudden disappearance of entanglement are due to CHANGES OCCURRING EN ROUTE! The changes are due to the optical birefringence associated with the optical fibers over which the photons travel. They claim that understanding this relation to non-locality is of utmost importance and say "the arbitrary birefringence characterizing fiber-optic transmission produces a PREVIOUSLY UNOBSERVED combination of physical effects" [my emphasis].

          They conclude that "The ultimate limits imposed by fiber birefringence to applications based on non-local properties of polarization entanglement were shown to be intriguingly related with the phenomenon of entanglement sudden death."

          Without vouching for their calculations, I would point out that the concept of "change en route" as an argument against Zeilinger's (and others') logic is exactly what I proposed in my essay.

          You may wish to look at their paper.

          Edwin Eugene Klingman

            Dear John.

            To do as you do, turn around the common assumption that the physical world defines everything, and instead say the quantum world defines the physical, is a major shift that will need more than mere logic to be accepted, and rightly so. My paper doesnt try to "prove" this point, but to start people thinking about it as an alternative view, arguing that it is neither unscientific, nor untestable nor a God theory.

            Discreteness is fundamental to information processing, as information is defined as a choice from a set of options. If that set were infinite it could not be enumerated to make the choice, i.e. every processing output must be discrete. That the physical world is discrete is built into the VR model. Whether the world we see is discrete or not remains an open question, but some support that it is includes:

            1. Planck limits on length, time, energy etc suggest that everything we measure is discrete.

            2. Heisenburg's uncertainty principle defines h as the discrete value.

            3. Photon wave energy quantization suggests that wavelength changes are discrete

            4. Non-discrete continuity creates infinities and paradoxes, e.g. Zeno.

            5. A discrete world with no infinitely small has no infinitely large, e.g. black holes suggest a finite capacity to space, c is the maximum speed, etc.

            6. In calculus infinitesimals "tend to zero" to approximate reality, i.e. it sets small discrete values to "zero". If this works because it really is so, then the world is discrete.

            7. Spin networks, loop quantum gravity and all quantum simulations assume discreteness.

            8. Cosmological models suggest fundamental upper bounds on the world's information processing rate, which as argued, implies lower bounds.

            Others may have other points. Note that if the physical world is not discrete, of if any measure of it can be infinitely large, this model is immediately falsified.

            all the best

            Brian Whitworth

            Hi Alan

            Sorry, I havent really got to that yet - give me another year or two! Currently analyzing mass and charge in processing terms before going on to gravity and how matter moves (as distinct from how light moves which Ch3 covered). Maxwell got his equations by visualizing emanating electric vortices which interacted when the source moved to give magnetism. But to get published, he was convinced to just submit the mathematical results of his structural vision. I dont know where his original logic is written down. Today, the legions of mathematical physics are lost in the semantic desert of string theory. So a structural model like the one he used to get his equations might have a chance, but probably not. Certainly it cannot be a mechanical structure, but it could be a processing one.

            all the best

            Brian