Going in

A year ago I wrote The inside-out universe, about a powerful way of thinking about systems as universes, and computers as universe-building machines. I believe that there is something amazing and unique about the way that, with a computer, you build the rules of the computer from inside the computer, and I'd like to expand a little more on that idea and where I think it leads us as a species.

Mythologically, there has always been a kind of hierarchy. Gods make people, people make tools, tools shape the land and tame the animals. But people don't make gods, tools don't make people, and people don't make themselves. All of those ideas (religion as myth, genetic engineering and self-determination respectively) have been considered controversial or even heretical, in part because they break the divine hierarchy. The only ones who are allowed to build up instead of down are gods themselves, and any attempt to do the same by lesser beings is blasphemy.

That said, increasingly, we can build up. The more we learn about the structure of the physical universe we find ourselves in, the more we shape it to work the way we want. Already, the worst excesses of the natural world have been mostly tamed: hunger, many diseases, and danger from predators are all solved problems (not that everyone has access to the solutions, but the solutions at least exist). As we probe further into biology, it is feasible that all diseases will someday be cured, up to and including death itself. We may even end up modifying our bodies and minds to transcend biological limits entirely.

But no matter how much we learn, no matter how powerful we get, the laws of the universe are yet more powerful. We can create flying machines, but we can't fly by merely willing ourselves through the air. We can travel at amazing speeds, but still never ever faster than the speed of light. There are parts of the universe that nobody will ever see, even if we could travel at the speed of light, because they are too far away and the universe is expanding too quickly. There is, of course, some tiny possibility that we will crack the laws of physics wide open and discover that there are no limits and we can do whatever we want, but that is significantly unlikely. We're probably stuck with the rules we've got.

So what are we to do? Accept our fate and the limits of our universe with humility and grace? Unlikely. Our physical universe has been created with certain rules and tradeoffs that we can't control, but a virtual universe could be designed however we want. Don't like the speed of light? Or gravity? Or time? Just change them. In our primitive virtual worlds we have already violated these rules and many more. If we made a virtual universe sophisticated enough to live in, with rules that were more permissive, we could escape these last remaining limits by moving there.

And if we designed this virtual universe in the right way, it wouldn't merely have a different set of tradeoffs, it could have any set of tradeoffs. The inside-out universe would have the tools to change its laws built into the structure of the universe itself. You could rewrite physics to suit you, bend time and space, conjure things from nothing... really, do almost anything you can imagine. By going into that universe, we would finally transcend the divine hierarchy and become – there's no other word for it – gods.

From that perspective, the question isn't why we would move into a virtual universe. The question is why we would stay in this one.