Transumanar

The Physical World as a Virtual Reality

An interesting speculation: 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.

Posted by on 01/05 at 10:09 AM

‘If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical’.

You are talking about the Big Bang as if it were beyond doubt. Big mistake. The Big Bang has been falsified many times over and persists today only because A) each falsification leads not to a re-examination of basic assumptions, but a growing pile of ad-hoc hypotheses designed to paper over the yawing gulf between theory and reality, and B) the peer review system for cosmology is dominated by Big Bang supporters who reject out-of-hand any paper that questions its validity.

A slightly more in-depth look at the Big Bang’s failings as a viable theory can be found in my essay ‘transhumanist thinking and the necessary rejection of the Big Bang’.

Posted by on 01/05 at 11:32 AM
Hi Extro!

Not I - this is just a quote from the abstract of the paper. I am not religious about the BB or something else, and share some of the considerations in your essay. Let theory and experiment decide.

Most considerations in “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality” are quite independent of the actual mechanism that brought reality into existence (if such a formulation makes sense). I am quite interested in the possibility that our reality might be “controlled” (sort of) by another level of reality, but of course this is just speculation at this stage. Again, let theory and experiment decide.

Posted by on 01/05 at 03:48 PM