Your Brain is a Virtual Reality Machine

What is the difference between reality and virtual reality? At first, the answer seems obvious: reality is real and virtual reality is made up. It’s right there in the definitions of the words. But when we get down to the nuances of the meanings of these terms, we will find out that there may not be nearly as much of a difference as we first think.

Teasing Apart Reality and Perception

Being human, we have an instinctive intuition about what reality is. We look around, and we see it. We hear it, touch it, smell it, orient ourselves within it. Our senses tell us what reality around us is like, and in our consciousness, we perceive it. This instinct is called naive realism.

To make naive realism concrete, we look at an ancient theory of vision: eye beams. Back before the days of modern science, people believed we saw things by emitting invisible beams from our eyes. Anything these beams touched, we perceived in our vision. Perception was thought to take place out at the location of the things we perceive, and thus, our perceptions showed us reality.

Modern science has shown us that, to the contrary, perception happens in the brain. Our eyes do not emit beams. Instead, light bounces off the objects and brings information about their colors and textures into our eyes. Our eyes receive that information and translate it into electrical signals, which travel up our optic nerves into our brains, where our brains take the information and construct a representation that makes sense to us. The same is true for the rest of our senses.

Thus, what we think of as reality is not actually reality; it is a representation of reality created in our brains out of the information brought to them by our senses. When you see an apple, you see something red, round, and delicious over there. But “redness,” “roundness,” “deliciousness,” and “over there-ness” are just concepts created in your mind; they are not real qualities! Sure, there is something out there corresponding with each of these qualities, but it is different from the qulia that represent it. This theory of perception and reality is called representational realism.

Brains, Reality, and Virtual Reality

What is virtual reality? Those of us who have tried it have the experience of putting on a headset with screens in the eyepieces so close to our eyes we can’t tell they are there. These screens produce images that give the illusion that we are in a different place. The things we see in virtual reality are not material objects, they are illusions fed to us by a computer.

There’s an old thought experiment that asks, how do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat of nutrients, and that everything you perceive isn’t just being fed to you through your sensory nerves? Well, according to science, you are! The vat is your skull. Your brain is being fed electrical signals through your sensory nerves, which are translations of information received by your sensory organs.

Reality, like virtual reality, is made of information. The ultimate information in reality is a set of relationships between mathematical constructs, which we think of as matter and energy. The ultimate information in virtual reality is a set of relationships between mathematical constructs, which we call electrical signals in the computer. The concept and image of an apple in your brain is not like the electrical signals in the computer. But neither is it like the information making up the material apple. It is an equally false, and equally true, representation of both.

Thus, the only difference between reality and virtual reality is the type of information that exists “out there.” In terms of what we naively think of as reality, the images and sounds and colors and spaces and all that stuff, there is no difference! This “reality” created in our brains is a virtual reality, generated to help us process the information coming from our senses so that we can survive and thrive. There is one major difference between a material apple and a virtual apple: you can eat a material apple. But as to the question of which is more real, they are both mental constructs made from real information out there.