Simulated Reality - Arguments - CantGoTu Environments

CantGoTu Environments

Further information: The Fabric of Reality and Computational universality

In his book The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch discusses how the limits to computability imposed by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem affects the Virtual Reality rendering process. In order to do this, Deutsch invents the notion of a CantGoTu environment (named after Cantor, Gödel, and Turing), using Cantor's diagonal argument to construct an 'impossible' Virtual Reality which a physical VR generator would not be able to generate. The way that this works is to imagine that all VR environments renderable by such a generator can be enumerated, and that we label them VR1, VR2, etc. Slicing time up into discrete chunks we can create an environment which is unlike VR1 in the first timeslice, unlike VR2 in the second timeslice and so on. This environment is not in the list, and so it cannot be generated by the VR generator. Deutsch then goes on to discuss a universal VR generator, which as a physical device would not be able to render all possible environments, but would be able to render those environments which can be rendered by all other physical VR generators. He argues that 'an environment which can be rendered' corresponds to a set of mathematical questions whose answers can be calculated, and discusses various forms of the Turing Principle, which in its initial form refers to the fact that it is possible to build a universal computer which can be programmed to execute any computation that any other machine can do. Attempts to capture the process of virtual reality rendering provides us with a version which states: "It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator, whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment". In other words, a single, buildable physical object can mimic all the behaviours and responses of any other physically possible process or object. This, it is claimed, is what makes reality comprehensible.

Later on in the book, Deutsch goes on to argue for a very strong version of the Turing principle, namely: "It is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment." However, in order to include every physically possible environment, the computer would have to be able to include a full simulation of the environment containing itself. Even so, a computer running a simulation need not have to run every possible physical moment to be plausible to its inhabitants.