I wonder how the inhabitants of a virtual reality, knowing that their environment is not real, would treat the theory of a true reality?
Would it seem to them as interesting and original as to us - the idea of a virtual one? Would they start wondering if it was possible - to break free from the captivity of their virtuality into a hypothetical reality? One might argue that they would believe from birth that there is a "true" reality somewhere higher up the hierarchy or immediately right behind their reality. But suppose they have some sort of proof that the higher reality is virtual too, and they themselves are capable of creating a lower one. In that case, they could assume that the hierarchy of realities is infinite - there is nothing strange about such an idea in their position. I wonder, would they shoot "The Anti-Matrix"? And what would be the main idea in it? That their reality is actually the real one, and the virtuality accepted by everyone a priori is shaped by millennia of cultural tradition, religion, and scientific falsifications. Or that for happiness and joy, one precisely needs to escape into a new, artificially created reality?
In general, the concept of virtual reality corresponds to the programmer's concept of a virtual machine. What does it mean?
That a program, seemingly executing on your computer, actually in many cases resides in some abstract computer, which has only a few common traits with yours. And this abstract computer itself is also a program (for simplicity you can equate it to an operating system), which truly runs directly on your "hardware". Of course, not everything is that simple - the abstract computer where the program is executed can be tightly coupled with yours, and in parts, the program can even reach the real one. At least the one that it and most people consider real :-)
From here to the green letters comes a piece for geeks, nerds, and other maniacs who don't mind wasting their time.
Here I'll stop spouting abstract nonsense, and write a couple of truths generally known to good programmers. I hope I won't bore anyone (It's generally unclear why - programmers know this anyway, and the rest will have a hard time)
What do I mean by the fact that a program in on a modern computer is always executed on a semblance of a virtual machine? Let's take the Linux operating system as an example, or more broadly - Unix-like systems. Theoretically, you can use only machine-independent functions and libraries that exist for different platforms (in principle, many programs do exactly this). By a simple recompilation, the program will work on a completely different platform. Thus, it "exists" on a "virtual machine" of the C++ language and standard OS libraries.
And now I'll write why a program can "reach" the "real" level, and why it isn't real at all. To reach - means to use the machine code of the computer on which it is executed, that is, direct instructions to the computer, bypassing the intermediation of the operating system.
But the tricky gimmick is that modern computers have long since stopped executing x86 architecture code directly, but translate it into the so-called microcode of their native architecture. I.e. even the operating system itself is executed in a virtual machine of the x86 architecture.
But at the same time
1)It doesn't know this
2)It has no way to reach the real architecture, unlike programs that exist in the OS itself and use its functions (see above)
And if we recall that modern programs are very often written on "true" virtual machines in the full sense of the word(Java, .NET, languages with an interpreter like Python, PHP, Perl) it turns out they are already running at a 3rd-4th level of virtual machine nesting. Plus there are scripting languages running in the Java environment, that's level 5. Plus there are tons of "emulators" like Microsoft VirtualPC, allowing you to run one operating system on top of another "in a window". The Japanese recently ran Windows XP on a Sony PS3 game console, by the way. On the QEMU emulator, running under Linux.
And here it is safe to read again.
And all this is done not for beauty or entertainment, but for real work. I.e. imagine if we lived in a virtual reality of the 6th level of nesting, having the ability if desired to reach somewhere up to 2-3 at most. Now that would be fun.
Even though you can't compare a virtual machine with a real virtual reality (what a damn oxymoron), it's still impressive. When running a program, you don't even suspect how run down everything is (after an oxymoron, the rules dictate a pun follows)
After such a hodgepodge, it's no surprise that the movie "The Matrix" is easily grasped by computer geeks of all stripes (even if subconsciously by those who aren't in the know). But for the same reason, the most hardcore ones are sometimes surprised by why The Matrix makes such an impression on everyone, and what's so mind-blowing about it? And sci-fi fans or well-read people also remember that Stanislaw Lem wrote about the concept of VR back in '63, if my memory doesn't fail me, in the essay "Summa Technologiae".
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