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Perhaps if you had sat on the rendered umpire’s chair and shouted ‘fault!’, a nuclear submarine would have surfaced through the grass and torpedoed the scoreboard.
This discussion of accuracy in virtual reality mirrors the relationship between theory and experiment in science. There too, it is possible to confirm experimentally that a general theory is false, but never that it is true.
All reasoning, all thinking and all external experience are forms of virtual reality.
The Cantgotu environments are environments that we can’t go to using this virtual-reality generator.
The characteristic of a Cantgotu environment is simply this: no matter how often you guess, no matter how complex a program you contemplate as being the one that might be rendering the environment, you will always be proved wrong because no program will render it, on your virtual-reality generator or on any other.
That is just the general feature of virtual reality that I have already discussed, namely that experience cannot prove that one is in a given environment, be it the Centre Court at Wimbledon or an environment of the Cantgotu type.
The Turing principle (for abstract computers simulating physical objects) There exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform.
the parts of mathematics that we tend to consider the least esoteric are those we see reflected in the behaviour of physical objects in familiar situations.
The Turing principle It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment.
multiverse. Similarly, since the laws of physics are capable of being rendered, they are rendered somewhere.
all our external experiences are of virtual reality, generated by our own brains.
You would know that, even though the universe seemed to have a certain layout and obey certain laws, there must be a wider universe outside it, obeying different laws of physics. And you could even guess some of the ways in which these wider laws would have to differ from the chessboard laws.
Reasoning from the premise of one’s own existence is called ‘anthropic’ reasoning.
