VIRTUAL WORLDS
Often he seemed to embrace the entire ethic of our trade without demur. After all, he declared to Walter, was not seeming the only kind of being? Oh my God, yes! Walter cried, delighted – and not only in our trade! And was not the whole of man’s identity a cover? Barley insisted; and was not the only world worth living in the secret one? The Russia House [138]
The distinction between simulation and imitation is a difficult and not altogether clear one. Nevertheless, it is vitally important. It lies at the heart of virtual reality. [45]
What then is the status of […] simulated objects? Are they the product of fiction, of imagination? Not in the usual sense. Are they, then, natural, physical actual? Again, not in the usual sense. They exist in what Sutherland called a ‘mathematical wonderland’ […] [55]
There can be no ‘author’ of such objects in the same sense that there is an author of a book (although, as we shall see, even the literary author, according to some French theorists, no longer exists). They partake in a new mode of existence, a mode that is not actual nor yet imaginary – the mode that has been called virtual.
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‘Virtual’ has a respectable pedigree as a technical term, going back to the origins of modern science. It was used in optics at the beginning of the eighteenth century to describe the refracted or reflected image of an object. […] The word is still used in physics to describe the exotic behaviour of subatomic particles that appear so fleetingly they cannot be detected. It has come a long way from its original use as the adjective form of ‘virtue’, in the days when virtue itself meant to have the power of God. Echoes of that early meaning, however, survive in the excitable claims of virtual realists to have the power to create their own worlds.
And it is appropriate that the word should resonate with a certain amount of divine significance, because the computing concept of ‘virtual’ is much more than a matter of mere technology. It means something that goes to the scientific heart of reality.
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a computer is a ‘virtual’ machine – a virtual Turing machine, to be precise. It is an abstract entity or process that has found physical expression, that has been ‘realised’. It is a simulation, only not necessarily a simulation of anything actual. [69]
Maybe the universe is not a boo so much as a computer, everything that exists within it the product of some algorithm. If so, this would mean that Turing’s universal machine would truly be universal: given the right table of behaviour, and sufficient time, it could reproduce an entire virtual universe. Never mind flight simulators; how about world simulators?
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‘It [quantum physics] introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event’ wrote Werner Heisenberg, ‘a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality’. [219]