# Virtual Reality Indicates Human Capacity to Understand the World is Unlimited The feasibility of [Virtual Reality](Virtual%20Reality.md) may seem an uncomfortable fact for those of us whose world-view is based on science. Just think what a virtual-reality generator is, from the point of view of physics. It is of course a physical object, obeying the same laws of physics as all other objects do. But it can ‘pretend’ otherwise. It can pretend to be a completely different object, obeying false laws of physics. Moreover, it can pretend this in a complex and autonomous way. When the user kicks it to test the reality of what it purports to be, it kicks back as if it really were that other, non-existent object, and as if the false laws were true. If we had only such objects to learn physics from, we would learn the wrong laws[^1]. On the face of it, Bishop Berkeley would seem to have a point, that virtual reality is a token of the coarseness of human faculties — that its feasibility should warn us of inherent limitations on the capacity of human beings to understand the physical world. Virtual-reality rendering might seem to fall into the same philosophical category as illusions, false trails and coincidences, for these too are phenomena which seem to show us something real but actually mislead us. We have seen that the scientific world-view can accommodate — indeed, expects — the existence of highly misleading phenomena. It is par excellence the world-view that can accommodate both human fallibility and external sources of error. Nevertheless, misleading phenomena are basically unwelcome. Except for their curiosity value, or when we learn from them why we are misled, they are things we try to avoid and would rather do without. But virtual reality is not in that category. We shall see that the existence of virtual reality does not indicate that the human capacity to understand the world is inherently limited, but, on the contrary, that *it is inherently unlimited*. It is no anomaly brought about by the accidental properties of human sense organs, but is a fundamental property of the multiverse at large. And the fact that the multiverse has this property, far from being a minor embarrassment for [Realism](Realism.md) and science, is essential for both — it is the very property that makes science possible. It is not something that ‘we would rather do without’; it is something that we literally could not do without. --- Date: 20241211 Links to: Tags: References: * []() [^1]: Things aren't actually quite this straightforward, see more at [6 - Universality and the Limits of Computation](6%20-%20Universality%20and%20the%20Limits%20of%20Computation.md)