Immersive Worlds: The Metaverse We Design vs. The Computational Multiverse We Inhabit

“Quantum computation is… a distinctively new way of harnessing Nature… It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.” ―David Deutsch

Is a conscious experience computable? Can the qualitative side of the equation be solved? Can we decipher the nature of our own “base” reality, our real physical world, by comparing it with the features of virtual reality? By simulating environments with ever-higher resolution and perfecting avatar cybernetics, i.e., integrating a perceiving subject via an avatar that would interact within such environments, sooner or later we can achieve VR that would be equisensory to the physical world. VR would then become perceptually indistinguishable from the physical world, even superior in many practical ways, and any artificially created “imaginary” world with a logically consistent ruleset of physics would be ultrarealistic.

Advanced immersive technologies incorporating quantum computing, AI, cybernetics, optogenetics, and nanotech would make this a “livable” reality within the next few decades. Computationally, rule-based immersive environments…