If our world is virtual, can it be saved and restored like a game world? To save the physical world as information would need a decoding context based on that world, so it is impossible, as McCabe explains:
“All our digital simulations need an interpretive context to define what represents what. All these contexts derive from the physical world. Hence the physical world cannot also be the output of such a simulation.” (McCabe, 2005).
A physical world can’t both cause information and be information but for argument’s sake, imagine our universe frozen at a point in time as many physical states. What could restart it? Each static state has in itself no information so who could decode it? Not us, as we would be frozen too! A movie stored in a file needs a dynamic system like a laptop with power to run it, but what could run a universe of matter states? If matter is all there is, nothing could but what if minds could be saved as information?
Some suggest not that matter is information, but that mind is. If minds are information encoded by brains, emulating a brain could clone it (Sandburg & Bostrom, 2008), so could we copy our mind to a younger body, or live forever as a hologram? Currently, there is no evidence at all that a computer can create a mind that experiences events as we do. It can create a hologram that acts and talk like a dead person, but there is no-one behind it experiencing those events. Emulating a dead relative doesn’t resurrect him or her, any more than a video or photo does, so using information to represent a past reality doesn’t recreate it.
But what if we copied a person’s brain exactly, atom for atom? Wouldn’t that also copy their consciousness? Nature provides the answer because it has already done it. Identical twins are essentially physical clones that came from the same egg, but they are different people with different experiences. A physical clone of me doesn’t make another me, but another person entirely, as I can’t experience their life, nor they mine. Chapter 6 critiques the silicon chip speculation in more detail (6.3.11).
Something is wrong with the idea of reloading reality, and it is the belief that only matter is real. If that was true, a perfect physical copy of me would be another me, but it isn’t. Instead, it is like reloading a game on another computer with another player. Even if one day we managed to teleport atoms, cloning a person to another location would create their twin, not them, because if the source atoms weren’t deleted, there would be two people in two bodies, not one. To really reload a physical event, we must copy what generates it, so can quantum processing be saved and reloaded?