"Consider the source": The idea of the Universe as a virtual reality

From Boing Boing (via Clusterflock) comes this speculative paper (pdf file) on the idea of the universe as comprised of information.

From the abstract:

This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us from online worlds, but our world as a virtual reality is usually a subject for science fiction rather than science. Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation. If the universe were a virtual reality, its creation at the big bang would no longer be paradoxical, as every virtual system must be booted up. It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve. Modern information science can suggest how core physical properties like space, time, light, matter and movement could derive from information processing. Such an approach could reconcile relativity and quantum theories, with the former being how information processing creates space-time, and the latter how it creates energy and matter.

Just off the cuff, it seems that this intersects in various, interesting ways with this post of mine. But, as I am a bear of very little brain, it'll take a while for me to work it out. One thing I will say, just off the cuff (and based solely on my having so far read only the excerpt above), is that the pondering of this idea has the potential to reframe BOTH evolutionary and Intelligent Design arguments, in that (again, off the cuff) such a theory seems to emphasize that thing which we're all required to do with Information: interpret it.

Or maybe, as with (it seems to this non-scientist) so many proposed scientific models and theories of the cosmos, this is another instance of theory reflecting not "natural" systems but anthropogenic (thanks, Pam) ones.

In any case, some fodder for late-night coffee-shop talk.

EDIT: In rereading this, I find myself wondering a) just how unaware of one's prose style one has to be to use the phrase "off the cuff" three times in the same paragraph yet only be aware that one has done it twice; and b) what an on-the-cuff take on this will look like.

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"All rights and privileges appertaining thereto": Commencement and the decline of Grand Narratives

Steve Jobs, who gave the 2005 commencement address at Stanford. For better or for worse, he is his own Grand Narrative.

My fellow blogger Belle Lettre of Law and Letters fame graduated from "Liberal Law School" yesterday. Sort of. She decided for various reasons to witness this commencement as a spectator. Reading her post this morning led me to think about this past Saturday's commencement at my college that, as a faculty member, I was both spectator of and participant in.

What prompts this post, though, was this little off-hand remark by Ms. Lettre:

It also struck me how many people's families will travel to go to these ceremonies. They must mean something, these rituals and rites of passage.

Coming as it did after her comparing/contrasting differences in ceremonies she has been part of before and that she approves/disapproves of, I must admit that this caught me by surprise.

I happen to like commencement, but I'm not attaching any particular virtue to that. It does give me a chance, though, to gas on for a bit about Grand Narratives generally.

Full disclosure: Ms. Lettre's post is by no means the first time I've encountered detachment in others regarding commencement. The first time, I remember being dumbfounded when a colleague at my previous school told me that he had never attended his commencements, not even for the awarding of his PhD; I am married to a woman who herself didn't attend her college commencement; most of my colleagues--at least the ones who say anything--would prefer not to be bothered and would not be present if commencement were not considered a work day in our contracts. Me, though, I'd be there anyway, even if I still had papers to read and grades to average waiting for me at home (which I did).

We have no secular rites of passage anymore, apart from commencement. Birthdays and New Year's Day are foisted upon us; they are literally as inevitable as the physics that govern the motion of the planets and so, even if we don't celebrate them, we have no choice but to acknowledge them. Commencement, though, is different: it has the edge to it of celebrating a choice freely made, one's submission to a contract whose terms one doesn't set, the acknowledgment of the completion of that contract, and the giddy anxiety of the look ahead to a future that that contract's completion prepares one for.

I know the realities, though. I graduated from high school in 1980, a time, amazing to think back on nowadays, when a high school diploma still had some real-world heft to it. As we know, those days are long gone . . . and in many disciplines, the BA and BS are losing their value except as means to the ends of a) the sort of career advancement that requires just any old college degree; or b) gaining permission to apply for grad school or professional school.

It's in facing these facts and simultaneously saying without fear of contradiction that I find meaning and value in commencement that we see how Grand Narratives function. Yes: Commencement has meaning and value only to the extent that I and others assign it that value. But I say it has those qualities because I know and believe that that value exists apart from my mere say-so. I have seen too many people's lives transformed (including my own) by this thing called Education to deny its value, even though I know also of too many people, many far more deserving than I, for whom all that Education hasn't panned out in real-world terms.

Like all Grand Narratives, Commencement codifies and celebrates promise, in the sense of opportunity and hope. No matter how we think of Grand Narratives, I don't think I know of anyone who truly lives without their supposed illusions. All the more reason, I figure, to be part of affirming the hope that this one remaining secular rite of passage codifies.

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