1.2.6. The end of science?
If we are in a virtual reality, is that the end of science? Suppose some characters in The Sims started to wonder if their world was virtual? They could test that theory against data from their world, just as we can. If they found that they lived in a world of pixels, where time can dilate and space can contract, where everything began at a past 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. It follows that a virtual reality can support science, even if it isn’t objectively real.
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 must also be contained by another reality, while an objective reality that exists by itself doesn’t need anything to contain it. Pixels are real to pixels, being of the same nature, so the earth is solid to us who are made of it, while to a neutrino from the sun the earth is just a shadow through which it flies. It follows that a local reality is real from within itself but not real from outside itself.