[ExI] VP was Re: VR

[The Avantguardian]

--- scerir <scerir at libero.it> wrote:

> The Physical World as a Virtual Reality
> http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0337
> Computational Universes
> http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0305048
> The VR hypothesis
> http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/01/vr-hypothesis.html

Thanks for the links, Serafino. Very thought provoking articles. However, my
understanding of general relativity doesn't quite jibe with the model's whole
"processor overload" theory of gravitational time dilation. The whole point of
time-dilation is that it is a local effect. Observers *outside* of the gravity
well will notice the slow down of time within the well without themselves being
affected.

>From a virtual reality standpoint, this is difficult to reconcile. To
illustrate this simply imagine you are playing the Sims and you have so many
Sims on your screen that your processor becomes overloaded. Why would some Sims
slow down and others continue onward at normal speed?

Of course the VR model is also somewhat dualist, but that doesn't bother me as
much as some. I mean if an unknowable "Processor" outside of the universe
supervenes on the universe, it would be indistinguishable from God. Of course
it would also suffer from many of the same criticisms that God does as well.
Who created the Processor? Or what is "processing" the Processor? (Poor God,
but that's art for you. Everybody's a critic.)

In order for it to be taken seriously as a cosmological model, I would switch
things around a bit. I would embrace objective reality as being really real and
call the new and improved theory the "Virtual Processor Model" in the spirit of
the virtual particles like gluons that bind atoms together despite being
undetectable. This makes sense, since the model emphasizes the *effect* of an
unseen and unseeable processor on the measurable universe of physics.

My virtual processor correction to Whitworth's model further has the benefit of
restoring locality to general relativity since one can have any number of
virtual processors in various locations slowing down or speeding up as physics
dictates.

Who knows, perhaps black hole quasars are the IO busses of the "Cosmic
Computer"? One could imagine that they shuttle information back and forth
between the virtual processors and our universe by swallowing old matter and
energy from their equatorial plane and expelling new matter and energy into the
universe from their polar axis.

It seems that Newton and his deist buddies may have been right after all; the
universe IS like a giant watch. God simply upgraded from clockwork to digital.
;-)       


Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"Life is the sum of all your choices."  
Albert Camus


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