Reality is presented to us both in a digital and analog manner, the first as evidenced by the findings about the nature of space and sub-atomic entities, and the latter by the uncertainties at the quantum level. It is not sufficient to regard reality, our universe, simply as both but dialectically, one in terms of the other. The most fundamental law of understanding is that we apprehend something in terms of what it is not. We need contradiction to discern anything. Our understanding is process based and has deep historical roots extending back more than 4500 years. In modern times, scientists have relied upon Cartesian reductionism to discern the nature of our world, but deduction also is inherently dialectic, relying upon induction for its integrity. Logic, itself, is the language of innate order in the universe, but its digital aspect is bi-valency that describes what digital physicists have found to be the case in our reality. Evidence is in the form of how the syntax of the binary system and relationships within it reflect what happens here. Such has major implications for us in the form of inherent computations, phenomena as illusions, and complexity arising from simplicity.
Reality is presented to us both in a digital and analog manner, the first as evidenced by the findings about the nature of space and sub-atomic entities, and the latter by the uncertainties at the quantum level. It is not sufficient to regard reality, our universe, simply as both but dialectically, one in terms of the other. The most fundamental law of understanding is that we apprehend something in terms of what it is not. We need contradiction to discern anything. Our understanding is process based and has deep historical roots extending back more than 4500 years. In modern times, scientists have relied upon Cartesian reductionism to discern the nature of our world, but deduction also is inherently dialectic, relying upon induction for its integrity. Logic, itself, is the language of innate order in the universe, but its digital aspect is bi-valency that describes what digital physicists have found to be the case in our reality. Evidence is in the form of how the syntax of the binary system and relationships within it reflect what happens here. Such has major implications for us in the form of inherent computations, phenomena as illusions, and complexity arising from simplicity.
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time would just be, but in relativity, space contracts and time dilates. Likewise objective things should just inherently exist, but the entities of quantum theory are probability of existence smears, that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle in physically impossible ways. Cosmology even tells us that our entire physical universe just popped up, from nowhere, about 14 billion years ago. This is not how an objectively real world should behave! Yet traditional alternatives don't work much better. That the world is just an illusion of the mind doesn't explain its consistent realism and Descartes dualism, that another reality beyond the physical exists, just doubles the existential problem. It is time to consider an option we might normally dismiss out of hand. This essay explores the virtual reality conjecture, that the physical world is the digital output of non-physical quantum processing. It finds it neither illogical, nor unscientific, nor incompatible with current physics.
Despite scholarly consensus on the empirical facts, ever since its inception in the 1920s there has been deep disagreement about how to interpret quantum theory. “To interpret a physical theory is to say what the world would be like, if the theory were true.” All scientific theories require interpretation, since strictly speaking what they describe are our experiences of the world rather than the world itself. Thus, whether we are trying to explain or merely describe the world, we are always engaged in inference. To make inferences we need a context for interpretation. For any given claim this context is provided locally by related theories, more broadly by disciplinary paradigms, and ultimately by worldview claims about the nature of reality. The challenge in interpreting scientific theories is to integrate them into this hierarchy of knowledge. Usually this is not too difficult. New theories often require adjustments to nearby theories, but in doing so we can rely on paradigms to make them cohere. More rarely paradigmatic assumptions are themselves challenged, but in that case scientists can fall back on their worldview to make sense of the needed changes. By implication, the most difficult interpretive problems arise when our worldview is called into question, which leaves us without any frame of reference on which to fall back. Quantum theory poses a worldview problem. Prior to the quantum revolution the classical worldview could not be tested scientifically and so it was essentially metaphysical. Even though it corresponded to our experience of material objects, we lacked proof that it adequately represented the deep structure of reality. By giving us access to that deep structure for the first time, quantum mechanics made it possible to do such a test, or “experimental metaphysics.” Unfortunately, the results seemed to contradict classical assumptions, at least on the sub-atomic level.
“I refute it thus!” Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Bishop George Berkeley's argument for the unreality of matter by kicking a large stone (Boswell, 1823). In the light of modern physics, however, Johnson's simple reasoning evaporates. Apparently solid matter is revealed, on closer inspection, to be almost all empty space, and the particles of which matter is composed are themselves ghostly patterns of quantum energy, mere excitations of invisible quantum fields, or possibly vibrating loops of string living in a ten-dimensional space–time (Greene, 1999). The history of physics is one of successive abstractions from daily experience and common sense, into a counterintuitive realm of mathematical forms and relationships, with a link to the stark sense data of human observation that is long and often tortuous. Yet at the end of the day, science is empirical, and our finest theories must be grounded, somehow, “in reality.” But where is reality? Is it in acts of observation of the world made by human and possibly non-human observers? In records stored in computer or laboratory notebooks? In some objective world “out there”? Or in a more abstract location? The ground of reality When a physicist performs an experiment, he or she interrogates nature and receives a response that, ultimately, is in the form of discrete bits of information (think of “yes” or “no” binary answers to specific questions), the discreteness implied by the underlying quantum nature of the universe (Zeilinger, 2004). Does reality then lie in the string of bits that come back from the set of all observations and experiments – a dry sequence of ones and zeros? Do these observations merely transfer really-existing bits of information from an external world reality to the minds of observers, or are the bits of information created by the very act of observation/experiment? And – the question to which this entire discussion is directed – are bits of “classical” information the only sort of information that count in the reality game, or does an altogether different form of information underpin reality? In short, where is the ontological ground on which our impression of a really-existing universe rests?
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time would just "be", but in relativity, space contracts and time dilates. Likewise objective "things" should just inherently exist, but the entities of quantum theory are probability of existence smears, that spread, tunnel, superpose and entangle in physically impossible ways. Cosmology even tells us that our entire physical universe just "popped up", from nowhere, about 14 billion years ago. This is not how an objectively real world should behave! Yet traditional alternatives don't work much better. That the world is just an illusion of the mind doesn't explain its consistent realism and Descartes dualism, that another reality beyond the physical exists, just doubles the existential problem. It is time to consider an option we might normally dismiss out of hand. This essay explores the virtual reality conjecture, that the physical world is the digital output of non-physical quantum processing. It finds it neither illogical, nor unscientific, nor incompatible with current physics. In this model, quantum entities are programs, movement is the transfer of processing, interactions are processing overloads and the fields of physics are network properties. It has no empty space, no singularities and all the conservations of physics just conserve processing. Its prediction, that the collision of high frequency light in a vacuum can create permanent matter, will test it. If the physical world has the properties of a processing output, physics must rewrite the story behind its equations.
In this essay, I review the importance of languages in the study of reality, following the well-known aphorisms by Galilei, Bohr and many others. The emphasis on these aspects helps us to understand that it is not meaningful to ask if the reality if "digital" or "analog", but we have to search what is the best language to study some specific aspects of the reality. This problem is particularly felt in the case of frontier science, like quantum gravity, where, in front of several theories (syntaxes) available, there are presently neither observations nor experiments leading to the building of a convincing semantics. You will not find here recipes for a definitive theory. Just thoughts and questions.
Can Reality be simulated by a huge Quantum Computer? Do we believe that Reality is made of something more than interacting quantum systems? The idea that the whole Physics is ultimately a quantum computation—a strong quantum version of the Church-Turing hypothesis well synthesized by the Wheeler’s coinage It from bit—is very appealing. It is theoretically very parsimonious: an Occam razor’s quality-guaranteed description of the world. But, if this is the case, then we need to understand the entire Physics as emergent from the quantum computation. Here I will make a short exploration on how this may come about. Ask a physicist what does he thinks the world is made of. Very likely the first impetuous answer will be: it is made of particles! But, at a second thought the answer will be: it is a Quantum Field. Particles are just states or the Field: they can be created and annihilated. We have indeed a beautiful Grand Unified Field Theory, and we are looking forward to see the Higg’s boson at the LHC. But what is the Quantum Field made of? Ultimately, it is made of quantum systems that are interacting, each system located at a different position in space. Things may be indeed more complicated than that, because the field is a continuum. But is Reality actually continuous? We don ’ t know: but it looks easier to think to Reality as a continuum. Now, suppose that this is not the case, namely Reality is ultimately discrete, and the continuum is only a mathematical fiction. Then, what else is out there more than interacting quantum