The World as a Virtual Reality

Jan 08

The World as a Virtual Reality

I’ve just finished reading a paper I picked up over at BoingBoing titled “The physical world as a virtual reality", by Brian Whitworth. It’s a very interesting read so I’m recommending it on here. It’s not a long read, but it does help stop that grey matter seizing up. As a result I see the word “computer” in a whole different light.

The paper doesn’t try to say that the world we live in is a virtual reality simulation, as we see in the movie “The Matrix". Instead it examines several theories, including one that I find very pleasing for some reason; which is that the World is not necessarily a virtual reality, but it *is* calculating, and the mathematics we continue develop year upon year simply unfolds these calculations piece by piece.

Having said that, there is something rather intriguing about the fully virtual reality argument, the “Calculated Universe Argument” (in which we *are* actually in a computer simulation). It handles some of the biggest mysteries very neatly indeed. These include things that we have the math for (and make use of in phones, CD’s, transistors), but not the reason, not the “why?". This includes higher dimensions, the big bang, and quantum theory (wave function collapse). For example how do quantum particles seem to “know” what to do, even when they are totally separated from each other. Of course it opens up even grander questions about what is running the simulation, and how complex is the “real” world if the world we are in is not self calculating.

That’s just a little of what the paper covers, it’s not taxing at all so great for the morning commute.

Link to the original BoingBoing article here.

4 comments

§ Luca Ribichini said on : 25/01/08 @ 16:59
hello! I was looking for flash and speech recognition/text to speech and I knew about Rash.
I have read about its wonderful capabilities, but I also saw that latest version is 1.1, released in summer 2005.
I guess it has been definitely discontinued, as the site powerofq.com is an empty page now.
Would you mind giving me some further information? I am not very much into Flash development, and I thought that maybe newer technologies such as Flex are the cause of Rash decline..
but reading about Rash features in old forums, my impression was that it seems much easier and it doesn't require very high knowledges about scripting and so on.. that's why I am still wondering why it has been discontinued and still curious to give it a try.
Sorry if I contact you in this way, even with a comment on a completely-different-subject post, but I could not find an e-mail address of yours.
Feel free to answer me, no matter if here or by e-mail.

Best regards,

Luca
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 25/01/08 @ 22:09
Hi Luca,

Unfortunately I haven't looked in in Rash's (or was it Q?) development since I posted about it. I'd be happy to hear about any developments you find.

Richard
§ Dmitry said on : 19/06/08 @ 06:50
Use your recommendation and read this article. Thank you, really interesting. But there are many contentious points ... I would recommend the article to friends.

Dmitry.
§ Dores said on : 30/06/08 @ 02:03
Thanks for this. Good reading (should be obvious for most) nice that its been addressed.