[PilotVertolet]

dear friends,

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/07...e-as-virt.html

be well, be love.

david

our universe as virtual reality
posted by david pescovitz, january 7, 2008 1:54 pm

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:

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

[AndyPharmc]

dear bill and friends,

you may want to check out these links which are along a similar line;

http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

are you living in a computer simulation?
by nick bostrom
department of philosophy, oxford university
this is a preprint of the final version which appeared in philosophical quarterly (2003), vol. 53, no. 211, pp. 243-255.

abstract

this paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. it follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. a number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/ar...simulation.htm

gary osborn asks
is life a computer simulation?

submitted in response to reading andrew collins's article gods, grails and morphian contact, gary osborn, co-author of the serpent grail with philip gardiner, asks is reality updating itself constantly to accommodate new thoughts and ideas, not just in the here and now but in the past as well? read what he has to say in this debate ...

is life a computer simulation? well ask philosopher nick bostrom. he says our lives:

' . . . could well be programmes developed by a post-human society living in what we think of as the future.'

'at some point, probably in this century computers will become capable of mimicking what we call consciousness. the rest follows logically. once there's enough computing power to simulate consciousness, creating an environment for it to interact with would be easy. simulating an entire universe down to the minutest level would be a waste of resources; you would only need to simulate to a degree where the inhabitants didn't notice any irregularities. there would be no point filling in every microscopic detail, or the minutiae of distant astronomical objects, unless someone decided to look at them. then the creators could fill in the necessary details on an ad-hoc basis. this recalls whether a tree exists when no one is looking at it; and it might explain why "reality" at the quantum level appears so strange.'[1]

really? - you mean 'strange,' as in how energy takes small, quantum steps; fixed at certain values, as if all things are "snapped" to different frequency-energy grids, just as pixels and rendered objects are "snapped to grid" in computer art programmes?

be well, be love.

david