THE FABRIC OF REALITY

[Zarathustra]

Fist, he quickly leaves behind vanilla etc. and considers directly affecting nerves, like the Matrix, so I'd caution against getting hung up on this distinction. A universal image generator is nothing at all like a universal VR generator, which is what he's building up to. An image is static, while VR must be interactive, and that's where it truly becomes an existential question, because the interaction must happen according to computable functions that include all the possibilities. Therefore, we must take into account what a physical device can calculate, not merely what a device can replicate.

As for being able to tell the difference between VR and reality . . . our "reality" that we're comparing it too is another VR! It's our subjective experience. So how does the question make sense? It's not the differences that count, it's the similarity. Like the camera example in the post above, the construction of VR within the VR of our consciousness is paradoxically proof that we're getting beyond the VR! The requirement that these must be physical machines, and that computation is a physical process, is the point. Building a working VR is basically testing the theory that we can build physical machines (as opposed to subjective bundles of perceptions) that gives us precisely the same kinds of experiences that we have when perceiving what we assume is the physical world. Therefore, our "VR" of normal everyday perception is functioning exactly the same way as a universal VR generator, which--again--must be a physical object.

[Fist and Faith]

No, I'm not hung up on it. I just thought it was an interesting thing. We don't call every moment of our lives VR, even though we only experience things in the world as representations/images in our heads that we receive through our senses. We call it VR if what we receive through our senses is, itself, an artificial representation of something in the world. But, pre-Matrix, what we smell in a VR seeing is not artificial. Or, rather, the artificial ones won't fool us.

I like what he says about simulating free-fall. What an excellent point.


Hoffman speaker do too much for me. He's got a point. Up to a point. But I think he takes it too far.

[Zarathustra]

"Hung up" was a poor choice of words. I just meant it's a throwaway point for him.

We're used to thinking of VR as fake, in the same class as a hallucination. But the entire point of VR is to create a system that can simulate reality. And that's the point of our senses, too. So our experience of the world is literally a VR. Artificiality has nothing to do with the definition, no more than our senses are artificial. The point is that to make a universal VR--something that can simulate reality--you'd have to make something very much like our brain + sense organs + reality, i.e. the laws of physics. It would have to include every computable fact about the physical world, or it wouldn't simulate reality. We're not talking about fooling people. It's not like a Turing Test. It's like simulating a hurricane. You want to get as close as possible. And that requires a machine that does exactly what we do when we view the world: create a 3-d "hologram" that not only looks impressively real, but also allows for the possibility of discovering the laws of physics.

That last point is key. You can't discover any laws of physics inside a dream. You can only discover how mental representations flow. But for an accurate simulation of reality, you'd have to be able to do exactly the same kind of science we do in our waking consciousness. And that requires a connection to the truth of reality. And since such a machine can be built in principle, and it's identical to our experience of the world, it follows that building universal VR generators is exactly the same as building perceptual systems that convey the truth of the world.

[Fist and Faith]

Hoffman speaker do too much for me.

Really?? Really, autocorrect?? I am positive it sometimes changes things when I hit Submit. It's like it wasn't really paying attention. Then when it's posting my message, it says, "Oh! I didn't see that one. I'm sure he meant this instead."

Anyway, Hoffman DOESN'T do too much for me.

But yes, of course we have to fool people. Although 'convince' is a better word. If I'm trying to have a VR experience, I can't be thinking, "That doesn't smell right" any more than I can be thinking, "What? My wife isn't a redhead!" It takes you out of the experience.

[Fist and Faith]

I really like these couple pages.

It is not customary to think of mathematics as being a form of virtual reality. We usually think of mathematics as being about abstract entities, such as numbers and sets, which do not affect the senses; and it might therefore seem that there can be no question of artificially rendering their effect on us. However, although mathematical entities do not affect the senses, the experience of doing mathematics is an external experience, no less than the experience of doing physics is. We make marks on pieces of paper and look at them, or we imagine looking at such marks — indeed, we cannot do mathematics without imagining abstract mathematical entities. But this means imagining an environment whose ‘physics’ embodies the complex and autonomous properties of those entities. For example, when we imagine the abstract concept of a line segment which has no thickness, we may imagine a line that is visible but imperceptibly wide. That much may, just about, be arranged in physical reality. But mathematically the line must continue to have no thickness when we view it under arbitrarily powerful magnification. That is not a property of any physical line, but it can easily be achieved in the virtual reality of our imagination.

Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our ‘direct’ experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly — we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them.

We realists take the view that reality is out there: objective, physical and independent of what we believe about it. But we never experience that reality directly. Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge — including our knowledge of the non-physical worlds of logic, mathematics and philosophy, and of imagination, fiction, art and fantasy — is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain’s own virtual-reality generator.

[Avatar]

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

Ever notice that your own nose is translucent to your vision when both eyes are open? Your brain simply superimposes what the other eye sees over your nose, because it knows that your nose is irrelevant to your survival.

What we "see" is a model of reality generated by our brains, after the raw input of our senses is filtered by our needs, our beliefs, assumptions, experiences, etc.

That's why eye-witness testimony is unreliable, why things like the "invisible gorilla" experiment happens, etc. etc.

--A

[Zarathustra]

What we believe is based upon our perceptions.

I don't think this part is true. We believe plenty of things that aren't based on our perceptions. No one has ever seen god, for instance. But this goes for physical things, too, like the entire world behind me that I can't see until I turn my head. Even if I turned around and there was nothing there, this perception wouldn't cause me to believe the world disappeared. I'd believe I was hallucinating.

But I agree with the rest of the quote and your points. We do trust our senses too easily and most of the time our experience of the world is naive realism.

Good to see you around, Av!

Fist, yes his points about VR seem way ahead of their time, and much deeper than any discussion of VR I've ever seen. I just read an article today that VR had finally come of age. I agree. I demoed an Apple Vision Pro recently and I was astonished. I'd never seen something so realistic in my life. I found myself thinking I could reach out and touch a woman in front of me, and even though I knew she was illusion, I hesitated because it seemed a violation of her personal space. It was indistinguishable from reality.

[SoulBiter]

Fist, yes his points about VR seem way ahead of their time, and much deeper than any discussion of VR I've ever seen. I just read an article today that VR had finally come of age. I agree. I demoed an Apple Vision Pro recently and I was astonished. I'd never seen something so realistic in my life. I found myself thinking I could reach out and touch a woman in front of me, and even though I knew she was illusion, I hesitated because it seemed a violation of her personal space. It was indistinguishable from reality.

Frankly that is scary because if it is as real to you as you say, people will become addicted to this very easily. I say that because as a former gamer who used to stay up until 3AM on a work night (for years), slaying dragons in Skyshrine in EQ with a guild, or busting a plane to set up a long night of clearing it and leveling. Even that level for me was addictive and after moving on from EQ to EQ2, to WoW, I decided I had to get stop. I no longer play video games because its too addictive for me. It was fun but I gave up years of RT to play in an artificial world.

[Zarathustra]

Fist, yes his points about VR seem way ahead of their time, and much deeper than any discussion of VR I've ever seen. I just read an article today that VR had finally come of age. I agree. I demoed an Apple Vision Pro recently and I was astonished. I'd never seen something so realistic in my life. I found myself thinking I could reach out and touch a woman in front of me, and even though I knew she was illusion, I hesitated because it seemed a violation of her personal space. It was indistinguishable from reality.

Frankly that is scary because if it is as real to you as you say, people will become addicted to this very easily. I say that because as a former gamer who used to stay up until 3AM on a work night (for years), slaying dragons in Skyshrine in EQ with a guild, or busting a plane to set up a long night of clearing it and leveling. Even that level for me was addictive and after moving on from EQ to EQ2, to WoW, I decided I had to get stop. I no longer play video games because its too addictive for me. It was fun but I gave up years of RT to play in an artificial world.

It's not just for games. It will be where people work, workout, meet others, watch movies, share memories. The 3-d home movies were like being in the same room. My iPhone 16 Pro takes video for the Vision Pro, so I'm already stockpiling 3-d home movies until the price comes down on the goggles. But this will replace your "desktop." It merges seamlessly with your computer, so that you are typing on a real keyboard but your screen is floating wherever you want, in orbit around the earth or in a forest. But it can also be transparent to the real world, so that you see your workspace overlaid on the actual room you're sitting in. You could walk around with these things. That's why I say you can even workout this way. Imagine a stair-step machine combined with a beautiful hiking trail. Or just lifting weights on the beach.

Seriously, get to an Apple Store and experience the demo.

[Fist and Faith]

Fist, yes his points about VR seem way ahead of their time, and much deeper than any discussion of VR I've ever seen.

I haven't read anything else about VR, but I don't know how anyone would top this. It's not about the technology, and his back then would probably be laughable today. But how he covers the concepts, in VR and Universality and the Limits of Computation, is just amazing.

[Fist and Faith]

Frankly that is scary because if it is as real to you as you say, people will become addicted to this very easily. I say that because as a former gamer who used to stay up until 3AM on a work night (for years), slaying dragons in Skyshrine in EQ with a guild, or busting a plane to set up a long night of clearing it and leveling. Even that level for me was addictive and after moving on from EQ to EQ2, to WoW, I decided I had to get stop. I no longer play video games because its too addictive for me. It was fun but I gave up years of RT to play in an artificial world.

I sometimes think about this. Is it objectively better to take the route you took? Can someone have as good a life in that artificial world as they can in the real world? Can an 80-year-old on their deathbed think back on a life of happiness that was spent largely online? Luci has a post somewhere talking about her days on WoW, and how much it meant to her. Is it wrong if a significant percentage of your life was spent that way? If you neglect your children because of it, I'm gonna say that's objectively wrong. But what about people who don't have children? Even people who don't have children because they prefer things like WoW?

[SoulBiter]

Just think about Star Trek TNG, they had holodecks and had to deal with "holo-addiction". Is this so far from that fictional future? Like all technology, its a two edged sword.

Edit to add. I made some friends that I communicate with to this day when I played EQ and EQ2. And like most addictions, it took time away from my family and frankly they needed my time more than my guild friends did. The good thing is that I realized what was happening and cut it out. That is the danger though because so many won't be able to. The more real it seems the more addictive it will get.

[Fist and Faith]

You're right about all that. But a person might never get married or have kids. It happens. It always has. We've all known people who had social difficulties. I've always been one, but there are many who are much more extreme than me, and there are more people on the spectrum now than ever before. If such a personand spends their lifetime playing games, can we say their life was objectively less than someone else's? Is a life in the real world objectively better?

[SoulBiter]

As the Talosians in the Menagerie said: "Captain Pike has an illusion, and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant."

Now this is interesting. Imagine people that are bound to a wheelchair and/or quadriplegia with very little to no movement. All of a sudden an entire world/universe/or fantasy universe, can be opened to them.

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah. But what about people who aren't bound to a wheelchair and/or quadriplegiac? Is there anything wrong with them living the same life as those who are? Ultimately, the question is, is a life in the Matrix just as good as a life outside of it?

[SoulBiter]

Frankly, as long as they pay their own way there is nothing wrong with it. I would be very much against people getting lost in it. Eventually you lose your job, your health, your relationships. Just like any drug or addiction.

[Fist and Faith]

Yeah, it can definitely be a problem. But if you didn't have family, you could've gone on for years more than you did. You could've started going to bed at 1 AM instead of three, and been able to last years longer. Would that have been a wasted life? I wonder. Is what someone in that position gets out of these games as good what they could've gotten in the real world?

[Zarathustra]

The chapter with the imaginary dialogue is a bit of a chore to get through. But he makes good points. I'm already on board with his argument against inductivism, so I don't need all this convincing.

I've been watching interviews with Stephen Wolfram. He has a computational model of reality that I think has relevance to this topic, especially my focus on the transition from Possible to Actual being like a computer program that is moving forward one step at a time. The possibilities are inherent in the code, but they don't become actualized until the program is run in some fashion. Wolfram expands on such an idea with mathematic rigor and deep knowledge of physics.

He thinks the quantization of matter found in quantum mechanics is due to a deeper quantization that includes space and all of reality. And this quantization has an explanation: the computational nature of the universe. Reality is constantly updating its state(s) as it moves from present to future, an update that has discrete steps precisely because it’s a computation. Like any algorithm, it can only advance stepwise.
In my opinion, that’s brilliant! It finally gives a logical reason for quantization.

This not only explains quantum mechanics, but also relativity, because the universe doesn’t advance stepwise all at once everywhere; instead, it is a vast series of computational threads that move forward in parallel—the paths of each particle. They are constantly branching and sometimes recombining, but in their bottom-up causation, they are causally separate. This is explains why general relativity necessitates that every observer measures time and space differently depending on their reference frame, because they are looking at that branching structure from different perspectives.

So if we think of reality like a branching tree where each particle’s path is a branch, the bottom-up growth of the tree as it gets taller is the computation advancing step-by-step, determining the shape and size of the branches—indeed, what kind of tree this is. But there are also "sideways" interactions that happen between the branches (analogous to them “bouncing around in the wind”) that are independent computationally. Neither branch took the other into account as it formed; the code pushing each of them “up” is causally separate. So when they combine or collide, this forms new patterns tangential to the direction of growth. While the underlying computations of each branch determines what happens at such an interaction, it wasn’t part of the original computation that was producing each branch. In other words, they are emergent patterns not included in the original code of the universe. Granted, they don’t violate the code, but neither can they be derived from it.

It is these tangential patterns that we call the laws of physics. We are looking at the tree from above, from present-to-past. All we can really see is the current state as it "tosses about in the wind." The way the branches can collide is in some way a product of what branches are, their shape and flexibility. As such, the patterns of interactions aren’t completely random, but nor are they absolute or fundamental. They are relative to our perspective and the complexity of inter-branch interactions.

But this also means they aren’t deterministic. Determinism happens bottom-up, not sideways. This where where consciousness comes in. We exist within those tangential patterns; we are also emergent. And yet through our knowledge, we become the wind, the causal force pushing the upwards growth here and there within our dimensions.

I haven't watched this yet, but it's one of the shortest videos I could find. I've listened to hours of his interviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLMZAHyrpyo

[Fist and Faith]

Neither branch took the other into account as it formed; the code pushing each of them “up” is causally separate. So when they combine or collide, this forms new patterns tangential to the direction of growth. While the underlying computations of each branch determines what happens at such an interaction, it wasn’t part of the original computation that was producing each branch. In other words, they are emergent patterns not included in the original code of the universe. Granted, they don’t violate the code, but neither can they be derived from it.

This sounds exactly like the brain. In the beginning, certain things are going to happen, because DNA programs them to happen. Neurons grow in specified ways. But the brain also gets a lot of input from there outside. DNA can't anticipate what input the brain will receive. But what DNA has caused is flexible. It is shaped by - pathways are formed in response to - the input. A brain may never develop certain ways of working, because it never received input of the needed type. While another brain received a lot of that type of input, and excels in that area. Each brain's DNA gave it a certain degree of ability in a given area. But if Mozart had become deaf through some accident as an infant, he would never have formed certain connections. How any brain turned out could not have been predicted by any analysis of the DNA.

[Fist and Faith]

Thus the prevailing view today is that life, far from being central, either geometrically, theoretically or practically, is of almost inconceivable insignificance. Biology, in this picture, is a subject with the same status as geography. Knowing the layout of the city of Oxford is important to those of us who live there, but unimportant to those who never visit Oxford. Similarly, it seems that life is a property of some parochial area, or perhaps areas, of the universe, fundamental to us because we are alive, but not at all fundamental either theoretically or practically in the larger scheme of things.

I knows this isn't his opinion. He immediately explains why this is wrong. But I am always stunned by people who think life, or thought, or consciousness, isn't anything interesting. Such people are everywhere.

Any property or thing that is found only once in the entire universe, or so infrequently that there is no sign that it existed anywhere else is, by definition, extraordinary. The properties and laws of the universe allow for something, but that something only happens once in a trillion trillion trillion times? How is that not a big deal?!?