The program in a virtual-reality generator embodies a general, predictive theory of the behaviour of the rendered environment. The other components deal with keeping track of what the user is doing and with the encoding and decoding of sensory data; these, as I have said, are relatively trivial functions. Thus if the environment is physically possible, rendering it is essentially equivalent to finding rules for predicting the outcome of every experiment that could be performed in that environment. Because of the way in which scientific knowledge is created, ever more accurate predictive rules
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