Our universe as virtual reality
The notion that our reality is a simulation or "control system" of some kind has always intrigued me. Long before The Matrix, folks like Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec played with this idea in very smart ways. And recently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom developed a mathematical argument to support the mind-bending theory. His work was even the subject of a New York Times column last year. My Fortean friend Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Journal pointed me to another new paper, "The Physical World as a Virtual Reality," written by Brian Whitworth and published by Massey University's Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science in Auckland, New Zealand. From the abstract:
Previously on BB:
• Hans Moravec on living inside a simulation Link
• NYT on the "simulation argument" Link
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.Link to PDF of paper
Previously on BB:
• Hans Moravec on living inside a simulation Link
• NYT on the "simulation argument" Link
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Oblig movie reference that isn't the Matrix. "The 13th Floor" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
To push on the origin question a little: "The notion that our reality is a simulation or "control system" of some kind" was certainly at the center of the later work of Phil Dick.
Interestingly, since our experience of "the world" is created inside our individual heads from (relatively objective we believe) sense data, our experience tends to be colored by whatever paradigms have seized our imagination. "The Big Bang" originated at a time when nuclear weapons were what our nightmares were about. Now they're about games, and about "the machines are in control", so the universe looks like a game machine.
Oblig fiction reference: Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, 1938, in which our universe turns out to be the Nth in an (almost) infinite series of steadily more perfect works of art.
Lila, the divine game.
@JPHILBY, Of course you're right. I'm a big PKD fan. The folks I listed were in reference to their non-fiction, but then again, it's a blurry line. : )
And thanks to all for those movies, which I've never seen!
When we were intrigued by machines with gears and pistons and such, we imagined the universe as a big deterministic machine with "perfect" movements. Now, that we're in the midst of the "information economy", we see the universe as a computer.
Information theory is a good perspective for the universe but, as they say, the map is not the territory.
This is why every time I go camping I yell the Konami Code to the heavens.
Well, just skimming through the PDF I don't see how you verify this theory. Another question immediately leaps to my mind "If we are a simulated reality then is the world in which we are a simulation also simulated?" Or is it an "objective reality" If it is then why can't we be objectively real? If it isn't then doesn't that invoke an rather nasty infinite regress?
Lord Occam walks in the room "Enough!" snip! "There ya go, kids. You're objectively real as far as you'll ever know. Now get back to work on something important."
So how does one perform an SQL injection attack on the universe? I wonder what the table names are?
Perhaps a buffer overflow would work better. If we reproduce enough we might get someone written outside the population memory.
All I know is that I want the head of the programmer who messed up my life. Get it right, will you!
Jack L. Chalker postulated a very similar hypotheses back in 1977 in his Well World books.
Edited from WP:
"The Well World is a computer roughly the size of Earth with a crust of normal rock, water and air over the surface making it resemble a normal planet. The computer is responsible for "simulating" an entire new universe superimposed over the old Markovian one. The Well World was constructed by an ancient alien species known as the Markovians who predated the existence of the current Universe. They were the first and only intelligent species to arise in the original universe and developed immense levels of technology that allowed them to manipulate reality on a basic level. They constructed layers of machinery miles beneath the surfaces of their colony worlds that responded to telepathic commands...but eventually the Markovians developed a sense of ennui and incompleteness that they were unable to fully understand, let alone develop a solution for. The Well World was eventually constructed as a means of trying to overcome whatever flaw in themselves was stopping them. The surface is divided up into 1560 large hexagonal regions (780 per hemisphere) each with an independent and often dramatically different climate, native to a new species of intelligent life that the Markovians designed, and a maximum tech level enforced by the Well computer (called the Well of Souls); devices above the allowed tech level simply fail to function in low-tech hexes."
Two Favorites from Iain M. Banks:
Feersum Endjinn, 1994 - virtual reality
Excession, 1996 - one of many universes (Culture)
When I read the Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia years back, I'd expected it to focus on some sort of alternate reality where evolution had taken a different course. But the title belied the content in that regard, as it's actually more of a virtual reality story. Maybe not the most gripping read, but I thought they put an interesting spin on the premise.
The Escape Pod s/f podcast has readings of a couple neat short stories along these lines as well:
The House Beyond Your Sky:
http://escapepod.org/2007/05/17/ep106-the-house-beyond-your-sky/
Save Me Plz:
http://escapepod.org/2007/09/20/ep124-save-me-plz/
forty two, my good man, forty two
I grok ya, 14, I grok ya.
forty two
Would be wonderful to have embroidered on a big, fluffy towel for the end game.
@Spikeles
I'm glad you got to interject "13th Floor" at slot #1.
When TheMatrix came out it was the most popular of the VR movies that all of the studios made that season:
The Matrix- 31 March 1999
Existenz - 13 April 1999
13th Floor - 28 May 1999
Studios like to compete with each other on the same theme.
The year before, Dark City was released ( Feb 1998 ).
There was another movie released in that timeframe too. 13th floor and Existenz were both sadly overshadowed by the matrix.
Whenever you see someone talking about what is "logically possible", you know their argument is lame. Real arguments turn on what is actually possible. "Logically possible" is a technical-sounding euphemism for "imaginable" or "made up."
I can imagine (vaguely) a universe being simulated in a sufficiently large computer (one that is mathematically provable to be much, much larger than the universe we actually live in.) But like so many failed inventions, my ability to imagine something is irrelevant to its actual possibility, in precisely the way that my ability to imagine mammals with six legs is irrelevant to the actual impossibility of any such thing on Earth because Darwin's laws supervene physical laws, and starting from the kind of fishy creatures that ultimately gave rise to mammals there is no way to get six legs.
Boundary conditions are just as much matters of fact as laws, and for all we know it is absolutely impossible to ever have a basically mammalian form that has six legs due to subtle selective effects that our imagination, in our ignorance, fails to consider. But a fan of the science fiction school of logical possibility would insist that because they can imagine such a thing it is "logically possible" even though for all we know it is biologically impossible.
It is also "logically possible" that gravity is sometimes a repulsive force, or can be blocked by cavorite. Pity about the whole spin-2 thing...
Our imaginations are wonderfully blurry, and dressing up that blurriness with the claim that what we are imagining is "logically possible" is simply saying that no one can figure out what we are saying in sufficient detail to prove it wrong. If allowed to proceed unchecked, taking this kind of thing seriously leads to formerly respectable physics departments filling up with string theorists.
So while it can be entertaining to throw these ideas about, as demonstrated by the long list of sf being mentioned in these comments, they are of no value at all in understanding the universe we actually live in, as opposed to the various other, completely different universes the authors imagine we might live in (but don't.)
And before all of those people, Leibniz realized we are brains in jars, and before him Plato wasn't satisfied with just staring at shadows of the real world, and before him Siddhārtha Gautama cut right through all this samsara BS. Just goes to show that the eternal epistemological and metaphysical questions will remain questions no matter the modern context in which they are framed.
Ghost in the Shell? Dreams of butterflies?
Gimme dat oldtime Johnson: "Thus I refute Berkley!"
Can someone explain to me how the universe can be like anything? Not a metaphorical "like", but an actual "like".
And can someone please tell philosophers to stop churning out these idiotic "reality is a computer!" papers? It's logically possible there's a new one written every 30.2 seconds. Yeesh.
God bless reality tunnels...
Did I say that out loud?
no, no.... you are quite alone
I have very little patience for this kind of thing. Saying that because the universe follows rules that we associate with information processing it may *be* nothing but information is exactly like Christopher Hitchens' Sunday School teacher telling him that God made grass green because green is so pleasing to the eye -- it is completely backwards.
The universe "resembles" information processing because information processing itself arises out of our attempts to understand the universe. Of course the same rules govern both!
Now, what I *would* be interested in - rather than trying to squeeze the enormity of the universe into our weensy brains by picturing it as a dusty Dell Latitude with a busted fan limping away in a corner of God's office - is how we can apply advanced quantum theory and relativity to information processing. Now *there* is a book I would read.
This reminds me of that one article that had something to do with Schrodinger's cat and saying we are destroying the universe by observing black matter. If we figure out the computer... will it get mad? All your metaphysics are belong to us...
VR Universe my ASS. If this is VR, then what is R? I know this reality may be an artifact of the Universe (we are information running on a quantum substrate), but it sure as hell feels real to me! Now, if this place really is Virtual, then I guess hacking is not out of the question. Magic anyone?
I agree with the above critics that relate this article's logic to that of other non-scientific systems.
However, where this article has value to me is as a proof of concept that machines can be self-aware, sentient, and sapient (SASS).
If conceptually we are just programs in a computer and we are SASS, then other sub-programs in the system could also be SASS.
In a strict interpretation, computer programs could only be SASS within their own "universe," i.e. their own computer programs. However, given different input (i.e. knowledge of our world/program) the sub programs could become SASS.
In other words, SASS is not a solely human trait, and there is nothing "special" about our condition (i.e. the old standby of "the SOUL!") that prevents other systems from becoming SASS. We are all just information processing units.
Re: JPHILBY's comments, the "Big Bang" model actually predates nuclear weapons and the Cold War significantly. An "egg" was a more common metaphor. However, the derisive term "Big Bang" does date to the Cold War. Your point is intact, though your historiography is not.
It seems to me that this all overlooks the really important question. If our reality is just a computer application of some sort, then we need to figure out what kind of application it is.
My vote: screen saver.
Dr. John Lilly showed up here as the firstses with the mostess. Programing and Meta-programing the Human Bio-computer leads us to the notion that we have the power to personally create any one of an infinite variety of "realities" . The quality filter is how attached you are to the supremacy of your mind bubbles ,and how much damage you might cause by convincing others to take you seriously. One major difference between bio-brains and machine brains is that machine brains cannot unplug themselves.
Farmer's "Riverworld" series, starting in 1971, sure sounds like a sim (probably predating the term, but c'mon punk prove me wrong).
"The story of Riverworld begins when almost the whole of humanity, from the time of the first homo sapiens through to the early 21st century, is simultaneously resurrected along the banks of the river."
Well worth reading just for all the different ways Richard Burton uses trying to "get out".
@Newslet: Thanks for the historiography update. I'm still a little fuzzy on "before WW2". I remember reading about the Hoyle model at some point, but am blanking on the early history of Big Bang (prior to Penzias/Wilson).