I am a philosophy graduate, not a physics graduate. This affects which parts of Poul Anderson's texts I can comment on. Poul Anderson appreciation requires a multi-disciplinary approach.
Flandry's suggested analogy between the Wayland computer and a cosmic creator sounds plausible but cannot be literal. The computer divides its attention at least three ways so that it can play both sides in a game of chess and also monitor war games beyond the chess board. The difference is that the cosmos as a whole was not conscious before parts of itself became conscious. However, having become conscious, the single reality does divide its attention between many organisms and experiences its own internal processes from multiple perspectives.
My friend, Andrea, knows some physics and accepts that idea the universe as experienced by us is a hologram/simulation/virtual reality. Either we are parts of a conscious AI, like the "emulations" in Anderson's Genesis, or we are alien beings lying in a coma and immersed in a virtual reality. I find this proposition implausible unless a lot more evidence emerges for it. Nevertheless, each of us is the single reality experiencing itself at particular places and times. We are like the Wayland computer dividing its attention and thus gaining unpredictable experiences. Everything that we experience is under the proscenium arch.
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It's currently a non-falsifiable hypothesis -- how would you discover that a perfect simulation was a simulation, if you were inside it?
You wouldn't. There would have to be some detectable discrepancies which some say there are.
Paul: that doesn't make sense, unless the makers of the simulation deliberately wanted the 'inmates' to detect it. Otherwise they'd just make us unable to discern it.
Kaor, to Both!
We see Anderson examining similar ideas in GENESIS, in those "emulations" of Gaia. The persons we see in those emulations did not know they were not truly real, only fictions.
Ad astra! Sean
And, in GENESIS, the emulation of an entire universe will be a long way in the future, if ever.
In GENESIS, there is one emulation where rockets launched into space always crash because the universe has not been fully emulated. The stars really are just lights in the sky. The inhabitants of the emulation are plagued by a contradiction between their scientific predictions and what happens.
Paul: yes, I thought that was a very good bit of business by Poul. Emulating an entire universe would be much harder.
I recall a 40's-50's SF novel where an emulation of an entire galaxy is made, and used to study how history works and societies evolve, and eventually to use scientific advances the simulation-people make.
Except that at the very end -- the simulated galaxy runs 'faster' than ours -- the simulacria figure things out and 'crash out' of the simulation in spaceships.
The discrepancies in our "emulation," if they exist, are on the subatomic level (and may be unavoidable) so it would take us a long time to detect and interpret them and maybe even longer to reach any consensus about them.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I remember that pathetic emulation! And of how puzzled the characters in that emulation were: their rockets were not behaving as all the science they had worked out said they should have. They might have been getting close to discovering what they really were.
And that would have been crushing!
Mr. Stirling: Sounds a bit like those stories I've seen about fictional persons discovering they were only fictions!
Ad astra! Sean
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