The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

by David Deutsch

The first thing to stress is that we do have only virtual reality based on the wrong laws to learn from! As I have said, all our external experiences are of virtual reality, generated by our own brains. And since our concepts and theories (whether inborn or learned) are never perfect, all our renderings are indeed inaccurate. That is to say, they give us the experience of an environment that is significantly different from the environment that we are really in. Mirages and other optical illusions are examples of this. Another is that we experience the Earth to be at rest beneath our feet, despite its rapid and complex motion in reality. Another is that we experience a single universe, and a single instance of our own conscious selves at a time, while in reality there are many. But these inaccurate and misleading experiences provide no argument against scientific reasoning. On the contrary, such deficiencies are its very starting-point.