On Realism Considered

Not sure what to fully make of this, but recently have listened to some podcast conversations about how we were all in a Matrix-like simulation of sorts, and this seems to be in a similar vein.    Posting it not because I think this is true, but because I think the whole concept can open your eyes to how complex  things can be simulated,  and thus enhanced and delivered. 

I recall talking this to (non engineering) management about this at times, and they seemed perplexed.  But then I pointed out there was a long tradition in engineering and their enterprise in doing exactly that.  Even today's Machine Learning can be seen as a means of simulating the world to understand it.   So here in the spirit of all that:

From the Edge

Realism Is False
A Conversation with Donald D. Hoffman [1.27.20]

. . . I want to propose that realism is false, and what we're seeing is more like a user interface or a virtual reality headset. Think about a virtual reality game of tennis. You're playing VR tennis with a friend, you both have your headset and body suits on, you see your friend's avatar on a tennis court and you start playing. Your friend hits the tennis ball to you, and you hit the same tennis ball back to your friend, but is your friend seeing exactly the same tennis ball that you're seeing? Well, of course not. There's no public tennis ball. You have some photons being sprayed to your eye by your headset, and those photons are causing your visual system to create your own perception of what you would call a green tennis ball. Your friend has a headset on, which is spraying photons to his eye, and his visual system is creating his own green tennis ball perception.

It turns out that both of those perceptions are coordinated by something else, namely a supercomputer that's sending the photons to both headsets, causing both headsets to work in coordination. . . .

All the things that we would do to say that objects really exist even when they're not perceived hold here in virtual reality. . . . That doesn't mean that the tennis ball exists and has any physical properties when it's not perceived; it just means that there is some objective reality.   ....   " 

DONALD D. HOFFMAN is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Donald D. Hoffman's Edge Bio Page