2026. Some questions about quantum realism and their answers. Email any further questions to brianxw@gmail.com.
1. A universe as big as ours must be real.
Answer. It is only big relative to us, just as we are big relative to bacteria. Our universe may be tiny compared to what contains it. We don’t know the scale of what is going on.
2. A universe that has been going for billions of years must be real.
Answer. Again, only relative to us. Our lifetime is just a flash compared to that of a planet, star, or galaxy. In Hindu scriptures, a day of the god Brahma is about 4 billion years, and in Buddhism a small Kalpa is about 16 billion years, so it all depends on scale.
3. It would take a computer bigger than the universe to simulate it.
Answer. True. A physical computer the size of our universe can only compute a few molecules, but a quantum computer has exponentially more power than a classical one of the same size (2.1.4), so a quantum computer as big as our space could cause it.
4. So who is the programmer?
Answer. Whatever made our universe also made us but it needn’t be a person like us, or even singular. Reverse engineering physics suggests a quantum network that acts like an open-access platform with many programmers not one. If observations trigger physical events from quantum events, our universe is like a three-dimensional painting that appears one brushstroke at a time but doesn’t persist, so it must be constantly refreshed by a vast army of painters, that include atoms and molecules (2.5.4). Any unified entity can then contribute, even you!
5. Computers need physical hardware so the argument is circular. Processing based on the physical world can’t create the physical world. That’s recursive.
Answer. That a physical world created itself is recursive but that a non-physical source created it isn’t. Physical processing needs physical hardware, but quantum processing only needs a quantum network that needn’t be physical, so this theory isn’t recursive.
6. Can we hack into the system?
Answer. Maybe we already do. Quantum computers tap into it, but the no-cloning theorem doesn’t let us modify it (3.4). Consciousness however could be the back-door to understanding quantum reality, as explored in Chapter 7.
7. Is this like The Matrix, with Keanu Reeves as Neo?
Answer. Definitely not. Neo dropped out of the matrix into another physical world (5.7.1) but the network implied by quantum theory can’t be physical at all. What generates physical events can’t be based on anything physical (Annex 1).
8. This just defers the problem of fully explaining everything to another level, so it can’t be a theory of everything (TOE).
Answer. True. If every physical event is to some degree uncertain, as quantum theory states, no physical history can ever predict it. An objective reality that exists by itself allows a theory of everything, but a subjective reality that only exists when observed doesn’t. If our world is an observer-observed reality, as Wheeler’s participative universe implies, the only option available is a query of everything (1.6.4).
9. If virtual reality calculations are performed by “something”, it would be a system like our universe that would need its own explanation, and we are back to square one, so to speak.
Answer. The something you refer to is described by quantum theory, which didn’t take us back to square one but a square further on. Explaining quantum theory is a new step not an old one, and if that unites quantum theory and relativity theory, it is yet another step (5.1.1). Science is about progress not perfection.
10. A theory that some other world creates this world is not testable.
Answer. Actually, it is. A theory about heaven isn’t testable because heaven isn’t observable, but that physical events are generated is a theory about our observed world, so it is testable. Quantum theory’s claim that quantum events create physical events has been tested many times, but physics still chooses to deny it (4.5.9).
11. This is all just meta-physics, like the number of angels on a pinhead.
Answer. Meta-physics speculates on unknowable things, but this statement is about the world we know, so it isn’t just meta-physics. Quantum events don’t need angels to produce physical events, just the laws of quantum mechanics.
12. This theory is unproven.
Answer. So is physical realism. Why fail one theory by a criterion that its competitor also fails? Evolution is also unproven, but science still prefers it as the better theory.
13. This theory is based on assumptions.
Answer. So is every scientific theory. The scientific method is to assume a hypothesis then see if it works, so reverse engineering physical events is scientific (1.5.2).
14. Denying the axiom that there is nothing outside the physical universe opens the floodgates to let anything convenient through, no matter how unlikely or even absurd.
Answer. The axiom that there is nothing outside the physical universe is just that, an axiom, and no floodgates open when science questions an axiom. Asking a question about the physical world is science, even if it happens to be is it all there is? If the scientific method is maintained, convenient fantasies won’t get through, but if we abandon science for the tradition of materialism, it is already lost.
15. This theory would end science, as you can’t study what you can’t by definition see.
Answer. Yes, you can, as quantum theory shows (1.2.6). Science studies quarks no-one can see and still survives. Science will only end if we stop asking questions (1.5.1).
16. A theory that postulates the unseen is not scientific.
Answer. This is logical positivism, a simplistic nineteenth century fallacy now discredited in many disciplines (3.9.2). Quantum theory postulates the unseen, but it is still a science because it predicts observable effects.
17. This theory can never be decided.
Answer. Of course it can. Science compares theories based on observable evidence. If it can decide that our universe had a beginning, it can decide if it is generated or not.
18. This theory contradicts Occam’s razor.
Answer. Occam’s razor is to prefer the simplest theory that fits the facts (1.6.1). Last century it favored physical realism but today, when space bends, time dilates, and electrons teleport, it cuts the other way. Compare one quantum network that runs one core process with the standard model‘s five fields, thirty-eight particles, sixteen charges, fourteen bosons, and twenty-four ad hoc parameters. Which is now simpler?
19. This is not mainstream physics.
Answer. Of course it isn’t. Nothing new is ever mainstream.
20. This is a crazy idea.
Answer. That doesn’t make it untrue. That the earth goes around the sun was once a crazy idea. Science advances by testing crazy ideas.
21. This is just another God theory.
Answer. Not so. God theories don’t constrain God but reverse engineering physics to deduce quantum events is constrained by quantum theory (1.5.2). Quantum mechanics limits what quantum events can do, so this isn’t just another God theory.
22. Is the programmer God?
Answer. Depends what you mean by God. If you mean an ultimate reality like the Brahman of Hinduism, the Suchness of Buddhism, or the Tao of Taoism, then there is no person to be the programmer. A godlike person like Krishna or Jesus could write a program, but if we still have choice then it doesn’t control us, and if we don’t, why bother? A God that transcends the physical world as described in the Bible and Koran could direct it in some way, but not as a programmer.
23. This model implies a phantom spirit world reality, alongside the physical world.
Answer. No, dualistic religions do that. In this model, the world we see is the phantom world that exists alongside quantum reality, which is the great smoky dragon that breathed our physical world into existence (3.9.6).
24. Does this mean that everything we see is just information in various forms?
Answer. Everything we see is based on our senses, which our brain turns into nerve information, so in that sense you are correct. But information doesn’t exist alone, as it depends on physical states, so is everything we see also just matter in various forms? In this model, information is a convenient way to observe physical events, and physical events are a convenient way to observe quantum events, so what is out there isn’t information or matter but quantum processing, based on qubits not bits (2.1.4).
25. Where are the equations?
Answer. We have them already. For example, Schrödinger’s equation describes a processing wave expanding in three-dimensions, but where is the meaning?
26. Equations that work are enough. Physics doesn’t need meaning.
Answer. This is the Copenhagen doctrine that it is enough to carry on calculating (3.1.4). If you are happy with this, then fine, but why can’t others ask what the equations mean?
27. I don’t think the world is a fake.
Answer. Neither do I (1.4.5). A virtual reality is fake if it has no effect outside itself, so Monopoly money works in the game but is fake outside it. Likewise, if our physical world is a virtual reality, what occurs within it has no value outside it. However if our universe is evolving consciousness (6.3.13), it has a value outside itself so it isn’t fake.
28. If the physical world is virtual, then we don’t really exist!
Answer. Sort of. If the physical world is virtual, then you don’t exist in it, just as you don’t exist inside a game you are playing. Your avatar represents you in the game, but pixels interacting with pixels can’t experience anything, so the observer has to be outside the game because nothing inside can do the job. If your body is an avatar in a virtual world, the player observing it does exist, but not in the world observed (6.3.1).
29. Whoever is playing my character is pretty boring.
Answer. Sorry about that. Have you tried all the options? Try pressing different buttons.
30. This contradicts common sense.
Answer. Common sense also told us that the sun goes around the earth, but it doesn’t.
31. This is not a new idea.
Answer. True. It goes back at least to Plato’s story of prisoners in a cave, taking their shadows on the wall to be reality (3.9.6). Modern virtualism advocates include Conrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin, and Tom Campbell.
32. Why would anyone create a world like this?
Answer. We can only guess. Perhaps reality wanted to know itself and this was the only way? Our universe is a vast enterprise, created at great cost, so it probably isn’t pointless.
33. This theory makes no difference in practice.
Answer. Yes, it does. If light created matter, all the effort spent colliding matter would have been better spent colliding light (4.5.9), and the $30 billion Higgs project just found another dead-end in the evolution of matter (4.4.7). Think of all the research wasted on WIMPs that don’t exist (4.7.6), proton decay that doesn’t happen, and imaginary gluon agents.
34. Are paranormal powers like healing and precognition implied?
Answer. They aren’t ruled out, but why build a virtual world where players flout the rules? We can’t see any obvious glitches in it. That our universe is based on quantum laws rather physical laws doesn’t imply a magical way to evade them.
35. Could the experiments at CERN start a new big bang?
Answer. No. A primal reality created our universe from itself, in a chain–reaction that made all the photons of our universe. Since then, no new photons have been added or destroyed, though some became matter. Over billions of years our universe has experienced extremes beyond anything we do, and it still works. To think that we can harm the quantum world is like online Sims thinking their actions can harm our world.
36. Is this Seth Lloyd’s theory that the Universe is in fact a giant quantum computer?
Answer. No. Lloyd embeds his quantum computer in a fixed space and time, which contradicts relativity. A quantum computer inside our space and time can’t create them, as the big bang is said to have done. The quantum processing proposed here can create our space and time because it doesn’t exist within them.
37. Does this imply the existence of a Creator?
Answer. If by Creator you mean a super-being who created us by a miracle, then no, as we evolved. If you mean that our universe had a first cause outside itself, then yes.
38. How does this relate to Leonard Susskind’s Holographic Principle?
Answer. It implies it. The holographic principle, that everything physically knowable about a spatial volume transmits across the surface around it, is a necessary prediction of quantum realism (3.8.6).
39. Is this panpsychism?
Answer. No. Panpsychism is that all the physical parts of nature (pan) have a psyche, which is a mind or spirit however you interpret the Greek word. It relates to Plato’s anima mundi, that a vital essence or pneuma (breath) animates the physical world. As Nagel concluded, panpsychism accepts materialism, that matter exists in and of itself, which this model denies (6.1.8). Matter that doesn’t exist in itself can’t contain anything, let alone a spirit.
40. Does quantum realism support evolution?
Answer. Yes, but expands it to include the evolution of matter (4.8.3), so matter evolved as well as life, and still does so today in stars by nucleosynthesis. Evolution in this sense began when our universe did.
41. Is there a place for the soul in quantum realism?
Answer. In religious terms, the soul is the immaterial part of you that after death transitions to the heavenly abode of God, is burned in hell, or returns to earth in another body. The dualism implied, that souls exist apart from bodies, seems simple but raises questions, like why can’t a soul just leave the body for heaven right now, unless it isn’t allowed for some reason? In contrast, quantum realism has no duality, so quantum waves on a tiny scale create simple physical events from which complex bio-systems like bodies emerge. They then inevitably dissolve back into the quantum sea, like rivers returning to the ocean, so nothing is lost, but equally nothing personal like a soul remains. The evolution of brains however changes this, as if neural entanglement allows the non-physical observer we call I, could that be a soul? Even then, a soul made by a brain needs something else to maintain it after death, so quantum realism allows the possibility of a soul but not its certainty.
42. What about Einstein’s statement that “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Answer. He didn’t publicly write that, but apparently shortly before he died, he wrote to a friend that “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Did he mean that time travel is possible or that only the present actually exists? We don’t know.
43. So does consciousness cause quantum effects, as suggested by Von Neumann and Henry Stapp, or does quantum activity cause consciousness, as suggested by Penrose?
Answer. According to quantum theory, quantum waves interact to give a physical event accompanied by observation, but what causes what isn’t clear. Penrose took this to mean that quantum events cause consciousness that lets us experience a physical event, which he attributed to quantum entanglement caused by cell-wall molecules vibrating in synchrony. This theory works on the cell scale, to let billions of cell molecules act in a unified way, but not on the human scale, to let billions of nerves produce our conscious unity. However if consciousness began small then evolved, what Penrose proposed is just one step in the evolution of our consciousness (6.3.13).
44. Magritte painted a picture of a pipe entitled “This is not a pipe”. Is this picture less real than the pipe he painted or are both real if I remember a pipe in my mind? Is the pipe painted by Magritte less real in my memory than the pipe that was a model for Magritte’s picture?
Answer. A painting of a pipe represents it but it isn’t a pipe, as Magritte said, because you can’t smoke it. As he points out, what represents something isn’t that thing, so a memory of a pipe, as a neural representation of it, isn’t a pipe either. Less obvious is that the actual pipe Magritte painted wasn’t real either, but quantum waves generating physical events, so maybe our world needs the label “This is an event not a thing”.
45. Is consciousness, the feeling of “I”, part of the brain? Is it independent of the physical realm? Is it simply the experience of reality? An emergent concept or a world in itself?
Answer. The feeling of being one I can’t come from our brain because it has no center to unite its activities, no part that can bind them together in one experience. Things can interact but no law of physics requires them to experience it, so if consciousness emerged as life did, when did things become beings like us? If we experience events, do babies, or dogs, or ants, or plants? Evolution is stepwise so who can draw that line? However if consciousness is simply the experience of reality as you say, then it can be universal but evolve according to the degree of entanglement achieved, from atoms, to molecules, to cells, to brains. The chair you sit on can experience molecular scale events while you experience human scale events.
46. What is conscious and what isn’t?
Answer. If consciousness is what humans experience, the world contains beings like us and inert things, but mostly the latter, so we are alone in a dead universe. But if we evolved step-by-step from what came before, our consciousness traces back to the first light. The universe is then full of being on different scales, from infinitesimal atoms to us, so everything is conscious on some scale because what can’t be, can’t exist, as Parmenides argued.
47. Are we dreaming?
Answer. Maybe, but if life is a dream, who is the dreamer? If our mind is projecting the universe from itself (1.2.4), why is it beyond what we can imagine? Realism, that there is a universe out there independent of us, is then preferred to solipsism, that we are dreaming it all. Quantum realism adds the possibility that, unlike a dream, our acts affect ourselves, so even if what we do doesn’t matter, what we are does.
48. What about free will? Do we have choice?
Answer. In this model, choice existed from the beginning as observation did because in quantum theory, every physical event includes both. Choice in this sense means that an entity selects from its available options by itself alone, so no physical history can predict where a photon wave hits a screen because it collapses where it wants to. And if where a photon electro-magnetic field collapses into a physical event is a free choice, where a brain electro-magnetic field collapses into a thought, feeling, or action can be the same, so attention is a choice. The free will theorem formalizes this logic to be that if we have free will, elementary particles do too, so you can believe that nothing has choice, or everything does, but not that we do but photons don’t.
49. I don’t understand how everything observes, even a photon. How can a photon observe?
Answer. Every observation has a scale. For example, flies see about 250 frames per second compared to our 60, so they are hard to swat because what seems fast to us is slow to them. They observe more times per second but each observation is a smaller bite of reality, based on fewer quantum events. Cells then observe even faster but again in smaller chunks, so in principle molecules, atoms, and photons can do the same. To us, these observations aren’t worth the name but who are we to say that? If every physical event is an observation as quantum theory implies, our observations evolved from smaller ones, even on the infinitesimal scale (6.1.8).
50. Is time travel possible?
Answer. Quantum theory implies that the past is gone and the future is undefined, so neither exist right now. Time travel creates impossible paradoxes (2.3.2) because one can’t travel to what doesn’t exist. This leaves only the ever-present here and the eternal now.