"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.
