reading these two books:

“Simulacron-3” by Daniel F. Galouye is from 1964 and is often mentioned as the first ever description of virtual reality. The story centers around a very sophisticated simulation machine and around the idea that life in such a simulation is as real as ours. It is the basis of the film “The Thirteenth Floor” (which I haven’t seen), and also Fassbinder made a two-part television-film based on it, called “Die Welt am Draht” (which I’d love to see, but it is not available on dvd). Also it has a lot of elements in common with Greg Egan’s “Permutation City”. Interesting to note is that the cover, including the text “The world of the future – its destiny was controlled by a huge, inhuman machine.” bears no relation whatsoever with the content of the book; the machine in the book is very much man-made, and the only inhumane behaviour in the book comes from, well, humans.

“Endophysics” by Otto Rössler is a collection of abstracts and papers around his concepts of “Exophysics” and “Endophysics”; the idea that physical laws look radically different when you’re inside a system (such as we are in the universe) or completely outside of it (when you are studying a world simulated in the computer). He suggests that much of the strangeness of quantumphysics might make a lot more sense when seen from a hypothetical exophysical perspective. He describes a very simple simulated world in which an embedded observer would experience quantum-like effects. His broader point is that we can learn something about our own “exophysics” (the even bigger picture, so to say) of our universe by thinking about our relationship to worlds we simulate.