1.2.6. The end of science?
If it turns out that we are in a virtual reality, is that the end of science? Imagine if some characters in The Sims started to wonder if their world was virtual? They could test that theory against the data of their world, just as we can. If they discovered that they lived in a world of pixels, where time could slow down and space could contract, where everything traced back to an original moment, they might conclude that it was true. They couldn’t perceive what was generating their world but they could conceive it, as we do now. Yet science would still work, just as quantum theory still works even if we can’t see what it describes. Science only needs observable evidence to work, and a virtual reality provides that.
A virtual reality that seems real to its inhabitants can be called a local reality. It is local because it is real from within but not from without, just as Monopoly money can buy things in the game but not outside it. It is also locally contained within another reality, while an objective reality exists in and of itself and isn’t contained by anything else. Pixels are real to pixels, being of the same nature, just as the earth is solid to us who are made of it. But to a neutrino from the sun, our whole planet is just a shadow through which it flies. It follows that a local reality can support science, even if it isn’t objectively real.