X-Message-Number: 5310
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 1995 22:42:06 -0500
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <>
Subject: Virtual reality

In #5300,  (Thomas Donaldson) writes:
> First, the little essay on "what is reality" misses the point
> entirely. ...

I would reply to this, except that I haven't heard anything from
Thomas Donaldson.  All I've seen is glowing phosphors on a glass
screen.  They completely real, of course.  But who is to say that
they represent something else?  Silicon chips are just silicon chips.
Glass is just glass.  I've never had a *real* conversation with
Thomas Donaldson.

Even if we had met in person, what would that accomplish?  Any words
he spoke would be mere air vibrations.  What difference does it make
to anyone whether the air is vibrating, so long as it isn't doing so
sufficiently to do harm?

I've also never had a *real* job.  Work consists of force times
distance.  I do some work on a keyboard, but it's a negligible amount.
My employer could save money by replacing me with a steam engine which
would press all the keys with greater force, through a greater distance,
more often, thus doing far more work than I ever did.  Actually, this
wouldn't save them any money at all, as they never pay me money.  They
only give me pieces of paper that have pictures of dead presidents on
them.  Come to think of it, they don't even do that.  They give me
pieces of paper which tell me that numbers in a bank computer somewhere
have been incremented.  Which is silly, because numbers can't be in a
computer, as numbers are just an abstraction.  Actually, they merely
change the state of magnetization of various very tiny areas on a disk
belonging to a bank.  Why should I do real work for that?

What good is a disk, magnetized or otherwise?  I can't eat it or mate
with it.  I suppose I could bash someone in the head with it.  That
might be useful.

Face it, we already live in a highly abstract environment, and it's
becoming more so all the time.  A chess game is "virtual reality".  So
is a TV program, a telephone conversation, a video game, music (other
than a live, in-person, performance), books, Cryonet, and almost
everything else we do.  I see no reason to panic that this trend is
slowly continuing.

> ... we know that we are in Reality when something happens that all
> our expectations and theories could not have predicted ...

I agree.  Note that this includes the results of computer programs,
including simulation programs.  If we knew what the result of a computer
program would be, there would be little point in writing or running
it.  In fact, it's a fundamental theorem of computer theory that in
the general case, there's no way to tell what a program will do, other
than to run it and see what happens.
--
Keith Lynch, 
http://www.access.digex.net/~kfl/


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