Exploring the Virtual Reality Conjecture by Brian Whitworth

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

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

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your comments. Well everything depends on where you sit. So I can indeed create a flower using my computer, but it will be a digital one (2D or 3D). To me it is not a "real" flower, but an avatar who sees only digital "things" might consider it as real as the rest of his virtual world. Who then is to say that the "real" flower I see outside my window is not also created thus? What proves that my world is objective?

Its all a matter of perspective, as a virtual world can be unreal from the outside but real from the inside. The movie 'The Matrix" made this point brilliantly, but cunningly kept its ultimate reality physical - Neo exits the matrix into a physical world, which is still objectively real. Hence the VR conjecture is the opposite idea. It "thinks the unthinkable", that all physicality is virtual, even though, as you say, it is real to us who are in it.

PS. the paper doesnt talk of computing but of processing, whose definition doesnt assume a physical base. Our computing is processing with a physical base, i.e. classical computing, but quantum computing is non-classical so could have a non-physical source.

A final point. Any theory that we are fundamentally deluded about the nature of the world is hard to take. The tolerance of this forum to oddball papers is a credit to its openness. Even readers who explicitly disagreed with this essays conclusions engaged its content honestly. For me, even to air this idea openly is a privilege, for which I thank FQxI members.

all the best

Brian