Brian Whitworth, Ph.D., Information Systems, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Information and Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand:

“The most common comment you would expect is, ‘You can’t prove it.’ But if you think about it, let’s suppose that everybody thought the world was a virtual reality. They were brought up from childhood to believe this. And you one day had the idea that it was an objective reality – that it was not created by computer processing, that it was just actually there in existence. And I said to you, ‘OK, why don’t you prove it?’ I think you would have a bit of trouble proving it.

You could say, ‘Well, I know the world is objective because I experience it.’

People would reply, ‘But you only experience your input.’

And someone might say, ‘Well, I have lots of mathematical laws that can predict things.’

And the other says, ‘Well, of course you do because it’s all based on mathematics.’

Then you say, ‘Look, the universe is enormous! It’s huge!! How can it possibly be a virtual reality to be so big?’

And the other would say, ‘It’s only big to you. It’s only big to people inside it.’

And you might say, ‘But it’s been going for billions of years!’

And the other might say, ‘Well, that might be just a few seconds of processing. Nobody really knows.’

And so on. You would actually find it quite difficult to prove your case. So, I guess the point is that people assume that objective reality is a proven theory, but it is not. It’s an axiom just as unproven as virtual reality theory.

So from a scientific perspective, neither objective reality nor virtual reality is proven. And what is happening is that modern physics with things like time dilation and space contraction, teleportation, multi-existence and so on, seem actually more supportive of a virtual reality universe than an objective reality one. full story