April 1, 2008
What if the Physical World Is a Virtual-Reality Simulation?
What if the universe is a giant virtual-reality construct? Brian Whitworth, a researcher at Massey University, in New Zealand, agrees that it’s a crazy idea, but he argues that it’s worth thinking about.
It would help answer some questions about physics, Mr. Whitworth says, including explaining why the universe began with a Big Bang (someone flipped the switch on the virtual reality, naturally). He posted a scholarly paper about his ideas earlier this year to a popular physics pre-print server.
I talked with Mr. Whithworth for our weekly audio-interview series. Check out the interview with Mr. Whitworth, or sign up for The Chronicle’s Interviews podcast and get a new installment in iTunes or other feed reader every Tuesday.
His argument could be seen as giving computer scientists godlike status. Is he onto something? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday April 1, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Google Docs Moves Offline
Next: How to Design Spaces for the Plugged-In Generation
This is a pretty old idea – I wish I still had my intro to philosophy textbook to quote the philosopher. But basically this is just an update to the idea that maybe we’re just brains in a jar being manipulated to “experience” reality.
— Mike Apr 1, 03:28 PM #
Haven’t any of you see the recent movie series “The Matrix?”
— GL Apr 1, 04:07 PM #
Or “The Thirteenth Floor?”
— Steven Mullen Apr 1, 04:47 PM #
Old idea, sure—but moving from the realm of science fantasy to hard sci-fi — I think that’s Whitworth’s argument. Like contrasting Jules Verne’s with Arthur C. Clarke’s versions of spaceflight. Matrix is Baudrillard + hacker jargon (how does the Matrix actually work, for example?) and really more a metaphor of post-structuralism than a vision of an actual simulation.
— Joe Clark Apr 1, 05:08 PM #
Or maybe it’s closer to George Lord Berkeley’s observation that “If God were to wink, then the universe would cease to exist.” It’s the old Great Programmer in the Sky theory, in whose mind we all exist.
— Landrum Kelly Apr 1, 05:20 PM #
..and Johnson kicks a stone and says “I refute it thus!”
— J. Hall Apr 2, 01:02 AM #
Adam Gopnik’s 2003 piece in the New Yorker (“The Unreal Thing”: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/19/030519crat_atlarge) gave some nuance to this idea. He, too, observed that the premise of the Matrix, while compellingly played out in the film, is not new. He said it “ … is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers, too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth-their Neo-had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.” Choose your side! :-)
— MDR Apr 2, 06:30 AM #
The physical universe may or may not be virtual. As stated previously, this concept is not novel. More importantly, the human brain (the primordial information system) has the capacity to create its own reality, voluntarily (dreams and imagination) or involuntarily (psychoses).
Furthermore, as human capacity to interact with the physical world diminishes due to neurological illness, our minds seem liberated to pursue alternate realities.
Devoting time and effort into thinking about whether this universe is virtual or not seems to me to be not as important as the benefits that can be derived in creating new means by which those who are severely neurologically impaired are able to interact with ‘artificial’ information systems that can present to them the benefits of a virtual world.
This can also be an important tool for learning for the rest of us.
— Ernesto Pretto Apr 2, 07:52 AM #
#6, Samuel Johnson refutes nothing.
How else to explain the malleability ofspace-time except by positing something more real than space-time? (Besides, this is the same Samuel Johnson who expected Hume to cry out for God when dying from cancer, but Hume went serenely to his death refusing to affirm what he did not believe.)
“There was a young man who said God must find it exceedingly odd when he finds that the tree continues to be
when no one’s about in the Quad.
Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd.
I’m always about in the Quad and that’s why the tree continues to be,
since observed by, yours faithfully, God.
— Landrum Kelly Apr 2, 08:31 AM #
This seems a curious byproduct of our insistence on the mind/body (or spirit-soul-Geist-free-will etc etc.) split.
Does the appeal of a “virtual” reality not disappear if we were to actually realize (and believe) that mind/body are synonymous, identical, and inseparable?
i.e. “existence” is real at the exact same time that it is virtual. dunno why we just can’t seem (and I include myself here) wrap our minds/brains around that…
— d Apr 2, 09:16 AM #
I’m certain that you all have papers to grade. Cease this mental masturbation and get to work.
— The Dean Apr 2, 09:33 AM #
As a concept, this is very old (at least a couple centuries B.C.E.), found in Hindu religion and philosophy as ‘maya’.
Incorporating it into scientific inquiry is significantly more modern.
— Dan Apr 2, 10:17 AM #
We are still several millenia away from understanding the nature of existence. We are primitives contemplating fire.
— marci Apr 2, 11:50 AM #
I’ve thought a lot about this. I can envision a world in which a solid object is actually solid, not made up of billions of tiny separated particles as in our world. When you think about it, our world resembles a comic book drawing which is made up of dots. It’s almost like the discovery of atoms should have been a major clue that this isn’t really real.
— Rich Apr 2, 11:50 AM #
So much for a metaphysical question for a post, with a corresponding hypothesis that is not falsifiable. Actually, I like this stuff, but it is philosophy, not science nor technology.
— Landrum Kelly Apr 2, 01:04 PM #
Or, Buddhism… it’s all about the Five Skandhas…
— Ashin Rahula Apr 2, 03:17 PM #