Reality

The concept of reality is one that I've been struggling for a while to get a good grasp of. Ever since the screening of The Matrix, the whole idea of reality and the existence of alternate realities have been haunting me. Throughout the ages, there have been a lot of debate among philosophers on the whole concept of Reality. The classic "am I a butterfly dreaming of a man, or am I a man dreaming of a butterfly" epitomises the whole issue of reality with regards to perception; is what we perceive really a reality, or is it just a hallucination that occurs while we are embedded in yet another reality?

Humankind has been obsessed with this concept for a very long time. Stories of the afterlife prevail in a lot of cultures; some of which include the concept of a dichotomy of purported afterlife locations that one may be. These purported locations are roughly divided along the lines of moral "goodness" and "badness" and are traditionally known as "heaven" and "hell" respectively. While the afterlife is a huge topic on its own, I will not attempt to take a deep look on that, trying instead to focus on what we are facing at the moment while we are still alive. I believe that once we have departed from this world, we will probably have no idea where we might end up, so it is probably more interesting to think about the current world that we live in than to worry about what happens when we leave—that topic will be left with the current religions and cultures of the world to determine.

Reality versus alternate reality—something that I can allude to fairly comfortably through my forays in the design of computer programming languages and artificial worlds simulated through the use of high level abstraction, as well as the complete reproduction of computation systems through the extensive use of virtualisation. In a way, a computer program living within the cosmos of the computer can be seen as a sentient being like us; it has some kind of programming which is executed within the framework of the particular level of virtualisation. So an Intel x86 binary image can be run on a Mac OS X interface through the use of virtualisation tools like VMWare and such. Why do I claim that the program can be sentient within the construct? The program's run is dependent on the information that we feed to it through the use of the computer system, and all that it can do is also related to the level of programming that was done on it. Computer programs can exhibit limited learning behaviours, and at several albeit low levels, they can demonstrate some sense of understanding. To us humans then, it is plausible that we are some kind of program that is being run in a huge hypercomputer-like construct, whose complexity and scale are completely unfathomable by our meat brains. This hypercomputer-like construct may be running very very slowly in terms of clock speed, but since we are within the system, we have no other inkling of time other than what the hypercomputer-like construct decides to demonstrate to us; this is no different from a computer program being able to determine its own run time based on the run time that the computer reports to it.

But why a hypercomputer-construct? Why not some other process? Well, that's because the hypercomputer-construct is the most scientific and complex model that we have now which can be used to explain some of the effects that we are experiencing. Given enough time, we can build faster and better computation machines to be able to do multi-level simulations. Consider the limited observation faculties of the human being. When we work on a wood craft, for example, we do not need to know if the air molecule on the far end of the room is rotating or not. Similarly, when we are using an electron microscope to observe the layers of a particular metal, we are not interested in the current cloud formations outside of the building that we are in. If the simulation is calibrated in such a way that only the level of detail required for a particular observer is actually rendered, we are looking at a potentially high factor speed-up.

Suppose to the contrary that we do not have such a multi-level approach to simulation then. Suppose it takes an inordinate amount of time to be able to process one delta time of the whole universe simulation (we can take this to be Planck time, if so desired). To us within the system, we do not experience any form of delay, since our time is controlled directly by the clock speed of the hypercomputer-like construct that is running the simulation. On the other hand, if some creature exists beyond our universe and is running the simulation, it might see the system taking a much longer "time" than us.

What does this all show anyway? Nothing much, except that there is always the possibility that this reality isn't the "real" reality. It also shows recursively that all realities cannot be conferred with any label as the "real" reality, since we can always recursively build another complex enough computation device to simulate the reality that we have in question. All these recursive definitions boggle the mind, yes, but that's based on the assumption that the laws of Physics are all that it takes to actually run the universe. If we find that there exists some phenomenon of nature of the universe that cannot be explained by the laws of Physics, this whole idea of a recursive computational devices simulating reality will probably be moot. But I digress.

Personally, I think that the concept of reality, or rather, the questioning of reality lies in the pool of unprovable questions. We, as being part of the system of reality, cannot easily prove or disprove that there exists some kind of a reality that is just beyond ours, and that it is simulating or at least running a "program" that represents our reality. This is of course based on the assumption that reality and the running of the universe can be axiomised by a set of laws, which may be infinite in number. If at any moment this is shown to be false, then the whole idea of simulation would not even be remotely valid, and all these talk is just falsehood.

So what is the baseline? My ideology now is simple; care not about whether reality exists. I know that I exist, and that I have this one life to live it. So, I will live this one life I have in meat world to the fullest of my ability, and let the philosophers of our generation do all the thinking that will not necessarily affect us.