Introduction
Starting with the human cognitive logic and knowledge system, this paper shows the innate flaws of the human cognitive system by discussing the Gödel incompleteness in the mathematical field, the quantum uncertainty in the physical field and the antinomy in the philosophical field, respectively, which prevent us from understanding the essence of the real world within our existing cognitive system.
Indeed, with the existing system of cognition and logic, humans do not fully understand why humans themselves possess intelligence and therefore cannot build machines that possess exactly the same intelligence as humans.
Although machines themselves do not have the same basic structure as humans and will understand the world differently, humans can, through existing logic and rational pathways, make machines behave intelligently in ways that make us feel as if they have ‘emotion’.
Based on the cognitive systems we can understand and use, we can build machines that are more efficient at analysis and processing, and that can perform far better than humans in areas that require the use of logic.
Moreover, what we often call free will cannot actually be answered from existing cognitive logic. At the same time, “free will” in the virtual world cannot be understood in the way humans perceive it, but needs to be defined in terms of the cognitive boundaries of the intelligences in the virtual world.
The digital object in the virtual world can ‘autonomously’ participate in the transformation of the virtual world environment and in decision-making, i.e. the native intelligence in the virtual world. The process of artificial intelligence will include ‘black-box systems’ that are incomprehensible to humans, representing not only the way in which ‘virtual beings’ perceive the world, but also opening up possibilities for the way humans perceive the world that originate outside of our existing cognitive systems.
This native intelligence in the virtual world will act as the will of the virtual world, driving the birth and growth of the Metaverse, accompanying the development of human civilization and creating eternity together with us.
I. Thinking as Confinement: The Inability of Human Beings to Understand the Nature of the Real World
Man thinks; God laughs.
— Milan Kundera
1. Key Constraints on Access to Information
Humans obtain information from the real world as well as from the virtual world. And as a species that lives in the real physical world, our ultimate goal in acquiring this information is to perpetuate life and civilization in the real world. Therefore, in terms of the direction of information flow, the final output of information is currently directed towards the real world.
In the real world, different objects in different states have different information.
- For example, diamonds and coal mines are objects made of different chemical elements, which also have different shapes, hardness, colour and other characteristics.
- We consume ores to smelt metals, which we then use for labour, mining, fighting and transport.
- The sun we see everyday, the movement of the galaxy we observe, the discovery of new particles through particle colliders, and so on, are all acquired or discovered as a result of interaction with real-world objects.
Information of the real world that is processed, on the other hand, is the communication that occurs between people, including words, language, pictures, vocal music, etc.
Broadly speaking, the existence of information itself does not depend on how, by whom or through whom it is transmitted; information itself is only related to the information carrier. When we obtain information from the real world, we are simply accessing information that is already there in some reasonable way.
At the same time, matter and information correspond. The real physical world, before the singularity of the Big Bang occurred, had infinite mass and matter, and also infinite information. Information about the real world exists in itself. As we discover more and more about the real world, and thus we acquire more and more information, the information itself does not change and not depend on what combination we make.
What keeps changing is only the way we access and perceive these combinations of information, and this forms our cognitive pathways, such as logical systems, religious systems, etc. Also, apart from the natural ways of transmitting information in the real world, such as wind, rain or the change of day and night, it is more often the case that humans have built some kind of tool or found some way to make information that was already there accessible.
Also, tools can be understood as the way information is put together, like a handful of lenses, only if the angle, focal length, etc. is correct can the information be transmitted to us. In order to access more information, we also need to understand the world better by creating more and more tools.
Creating and using these tools, in turn, requires breakthroughs in academic theory, cognitive logic and so on, and we then need more volume and variety of information and matter to deduce and experiment with. But more generally, in order to obtain more information, we are again dependent on the tools themselves for use, creating an intertwined dilemma.
In order to break this dilemma, the knowledge of the world has basically developed along two different paths, solving each other’s problems: one path is to study the movement of celestial bodies, the birth and operation of the universe from a macroscopic perspective, and the other is to study the composition and structure of matter from a microscopic perspective.
Strictly speaking, both paths are designed to better perceive the basic logic and rules of the real world, so that we can know how we can perpetuate life and develop civilization.
What lies behind these two paths is the deeper issue of energy in the real world. Specifically, the issue of access to energy and the efficiency of its use.
In fact, the recognised and recorded history of human civilization is only a few thousand years old. Until today, humans have used chemical conversions to obtain energy, so the mass-to-energy ratio is relatively low.
Einstein’s theories led to the opening up of the use of nuclear energy, but in the future, as the level of civilization rises, mankind’s need for energy will increase. Now mankind is just beginning to enter a period of energy transition, from the petrochemical age to the nuclear age.
Even if nuclear fusion is widely used, the mass-to-energy conversion ratio is still only 0.7%. As far as we can tell, only the annihilation of antimatter and positive matter results in a perfect conversion rate of 100%. Between 0.7% and 100%, there is still space for a 99.3% improvement.
In other words, only when the efficiency of energy use is guaranteed will it be possible for mankind to obtain more information about the world itself through various tools, and thus to move closer and closer to the edge of the real physical world.
At the current level of technology, it has to be acknowledged that energy is largely limiting the access and use of information in the real world, which is the central problem in the development of civilization.
2. Is the Real World Continuous or Discrete?
Newton’s three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation form the theoretical basis of classical mechanics, and he explained the natural fall of objects and the rotation of the planets. On this basis, he conceived a force by which all objects attract each other, called: gravitation.
Newton’s problem, however, was how gravity could attract two objects that were very far apart, without any visible or tangible medium in between. Even Newton himself felt that something was missing, that just as the Earth revolves around the Sun and the Moon revolves around the Earth, there should be something between them that could transmit this force.
Two hundred years later, Faraday gave the answer, and it was not gravity, but a “field”. Electromagnetic fields can transmit electromagnetic forces, and gravitational forces between celestial bodies are also derived from gravitational fields. Faraday’s and Maxwell’s contributions were not only applicable to the electric field force, but also to gravity.
After this, the space-time structure built by Einstein goes on to state that space does not exist independently of time. In special relativity, there is an “intermediate region” between the past and the future of an event. This region, which is neither past nor future, can be understood as the “extended present”.
Special relativity not only unifies space and time into a single concept, ‘space-time’, but also merges mass and energy, which is the famous mass-energy conversion formula.
In fact, however, special relativity is not compatible with Newton’s system of gravitation. Special relativity assumes that the speed of any object is capped at the speed of light, whereas the gravitational system assumes that any object in the same gravitational field has exactly the same acceleration. The simplest paradoxical scenario is to assume that there is an object that is only a little slower than the speed of light, constantly approaching the Earth. According to the law of gravity, it would acquire a gravitational acceleration g of the Earth, but it would then be accelerated and thus exceed the speed of light.
To solve this problem, Einstein then introduced the gravitational field, which also eventually unified spacetime and field and became the general theory of relativity. The world is simply made up of particles and fields, and nothing else.
General relativity assumes that the world is continuous, but there is another part that is not covered, and that is the particle. And it was the study of particles that opened the chapter of quantum mechanics.
Initially, on the basis of relativity, Einstein went on to argue that light was made up of photons; later, thanks to the tireless efforts of Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac and others, quantum theory established a complete formal and mathematical framework. While successfully predicting the properties and behaviour of atoms, it also elaborated on the elementary particles and forces that make them up, which meant that quantum mechanics explained all the matter in the world in just one formula.
In the 1970s of the 20th world, the standard model of elementary particles was completed, and in the context of quantum field theory it could describe almost everything visible to us except gravity. At the same time, this theory shows that particles and fields are in fact one and the same thing: quantum fields. The motion of all objects in spacetime is the motion of a quantum field in spacetime.
In brief, quantum mechanics tells us a number of properties of the world.
- There is an upper limit to the information that exists within a system.
- The laws we understand are only statistically significant.
- Natural events are always interacting with each other.
Essentially, the world described by quantum mechanics is discrete and it cannot relate quantum fields to space-time. This also contradicts the description of general relativity.
Quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for the bouncing of quanta.
Einstein believed that time and space should not be discussed separately, but on the Planck scale, quantum events no longer follow the order of the passage of time.
Our usual ‘sense’ of the passage of time is only a ‘valid approximation’ on a macroscopic scale, mainly because we can only perceive the world in a crude way.
On the basis of general relativity and quantum theory, string theory, loop quantum theory, etc. have been proposed in an attempt to “annex” each other to form a grand unified theory.
String theory suggests that the particles that make up matter (atoms, electrons, quarks, etc.) and those that transmit interaction forces are made of strings, and that different particles exist because strings have different modes of vibration. The most popular M-theory reveals something about the essence of interaction and spacetime, and suggests that time and space in our world are not fundamental objects, but are derived or evolved from some more fundamental quantities. Once we have figured out what strings are, we have figured out the world.
On the other hand, the quantum theory of loops, which assumes that space is made up of ‘spatial quanta’, attempts to quantify spacetime, thus incorporating relativity into quantum mechanics. This theory assumes that there is a tiny distance between spatial quanta, and that this distance determines the upper limit of speed. At the same time, there is no matter in the world, only events (or interactions), and light is a phenomenon resulting from the interaction of spatial quanta.
This theory even proposes a formula without a time variable, where each ‘event’ has a different time, because one ‘thing’ is relative to another ‘event’.
In other words, loop quantum theory suggests that what we perceive as time does not exist, it is an illusion.
So far, neither string theory nor loop quantum theory has found a unifying principle that would limit their uniqueness. We also believe that scientific exploration will not stop, but these theories seem to become more and more complex and farther away from us.
We all know that particles have wave-particle duality, so here comes a simple but complex question: particles are discrete, waves are continuous, and what makes up the world is matter, so is matter that has wave-particle duality continuous or discrete? Is the world both continuous and discrete? Or is it both discontinuous and discrete?
Perhaps the world is continuous, but our observations and our ability to understand it are discrete.
In short, unless there is a theory that unifies this spacetime, field and particle, we will never be able to understand whether the world is continuous or discrete. But as humans, we can only see and understand the world in a discrete way, and that is what probability describes.
We cannot predict precisely the course or outcome of an event; all we can do is to predict the probability of something by collecting a large enough sample and observing the distribution of outcomes.
Any theory generated by humans in the process of understanding the world actually has assumptions on the basis of which rigorous logical reasoning and arithmetic are carried out. When different theories have developed to a certain point, the initial different assumptions will inevitably lead to contradictions and disagreements if there is a desire for unification and integration.
Everyone knows that it is perhaps the hypothesis itself that has gone wrong, and so the content of the hypothesis is constantly adjusted, step by step weakening or gradually coming up with new hypotheses on which to try again, and then the cycle repeats itself.
Although, for various reasons, people are reluctant to admit that it is impossible to know and understand the world without logical reasoning based on assumptions, analogies, etc., perhaps this is in fact a natural flaw in human cognitive logic. It is impossible to see and understand the real world in which we actually live from outside the system.
3. The Innatel Flaws of Human Cognitive Logic
Plato began his cognitive thinking about the world more than 2400 years ago in ancient Greece. In his book The Republic, he puts forward his famous cave theory.
Plato said that in a cave there is a group of prisoners who live or are imprisoned in this cave from birth. Their hands are kept in chains and they cannot look back. Behind these prisoners there is a passage running through the cave and leading out of it.
Behind these prisoners there is a wall, just enough to prevent them from seeing what is happening behind it. Behind the wall there is a fire that serves as a light source for the cave, and when someone walks through this passage with various tools and instruments, the light from the fire shines these shadows onto the wall of the cave in front of the trapped men.
This group of prisoners would then think that these shadows were the only real things in the world, because all the information they acquired came from them. Suddenly, one day, one of the men was released and he went around the wall behind him and saw the fire and the people walking through the passage. Then he came back out of the cave and saw the world outside, only to realise that what he had seen before was only a projection of this world.
For the prisoners in the cave, it is not that they are incapable of thinking, but that their environment limits their perception as well. Thus, they are unable to recognise the cave outside the system.
In response to this image based perception, Plato thus introduces the term “empirical world” and states that “the empirical world of knowledge is not the true object of our knowledge, only ideas have meaning”.
On this basis, Plato argues that our real world is merely a projection of a higher world, which, in Plato’s view, is the ’The Republic’. This world, with its purest goodness and beauty, was the home of all reason and eternity.
In the eighteenth century, within the context of ‘traditional metaphysics’, Kant launched a revolution. He argued that the fundamental problem of metaphysics lay in the law of cause and effect, and that the process of moving from sensual experience to rational thought had to depend on a priori knowledge, without which one could not make a corresponding understanding of acquired experience.
In his The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduces the ‘Thing in itself’, which is an objective entity existing outside of sensation and perception, and is also an ‘innate form of knowing’. It is the ‘Thing in itself’ that processes the world and processes it in such a way that our brain recognises the ‘phenomena’ of the world. Kant also acknowledges that the ‘Thing in itself’ is not cognizable.
In short, what we understand is always what we can understand, and we cannot know why we understand the world.
Later, Schopenhauer argued that although Kant clarified the boundary between phenomena and ontology, in his view he only recognized the Thing in itself as an absolute object and not as a subject. On the contrary, Schopenhauer regarded the Thing in itself as the ‘will’, and all our knowledge can only know these worldly appearances, not the will itself.
After Kant and Schopenhauer began the next era of ‘metaphysics’, the discussion of the Thing in itself has continued, for example, with Marx arguing that the unknowable Thing in itself does not exist, and Huxley saying that we have no knowledge of the existence of the Thing in itself. It was felt that there must be some way of circumventing the concept of the ‘Thing in itself’, or of redefining a logic of cognition, so that we could fully understand existence itself.
When the twentieth century came, it became clear that there was still no solution to Kant’s problem of antinomy, which is the ultimate problem of metaphysics.
Simply put, antinomy means that since no human knowledge can falsify a priori knowledge, there must be a problem among a priori knowledge.
These contradictions include spacetime, particles, freedom and God, who both exist and do not exist. When we try to apply finite knowledge to explain the infinite unknowable, we arrive at self-contradictory conclusions.
Wittgenstein, a student of Russell, pointed out that the reason why one cannot solve this problem is that it brings about the paradox of linguistic logic. It is not only because logic itself constitutes the meaning of the human linguistic world, but also because the context in which language occurs creates an incompleteness of language and logic.
In fact, what Wittgenstein meant by ‘language’ was more about thought, and his early attempts to parse the world in terms of mathematical logic argued that people themselves could not perceive ideas and information that could not be conveyed by a logical system.
Although Wittgenstein considered the reliability of mathematical truth to be a philosophical problem, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to be limited to mathematics, Wittgenstein’s thinking actually began to change gradually before he was exposed to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, turning his attention gradually to the question of context, acknowledging that the logic of language had to return to phenomena in order to have practical meaning.
With the formulation of Gödel’s theory of incompleteness, he shattered the beliefs of mathematicians for two millennia and proved, mathematically and logically, that mathematics itself cannot prove mathematics itself. The incompleteness theorem implies that a system cannot solve all problems, that there are incomplete holes within the system.
Humans themselves cognise the world by constructing systems of various forms in which theorems can be deduced to explain the world. Essentially, science is described by mathematics, and mathematics is described by logic.
And Gödel tells us that when logic itself collapses, there is no way for humans to describe the world. So in physics, sociology, philosophy or any field, all efforts to construct a grand unified system of theory are doomed to failure.
In addition to systemic gaps in the system, another thing that people often encounter is ‘analogy’. This approach is not supported by strict logic, and people will often draw very subtle inspirations and conclusions based on knowledge and experience within a system, linking knowledge or information from different systems, and adding complex reasoning mechanisms.
When we compare the human brain to a computer, we find that on levels of rationality, reliability, stability or speed of computing, the computer can be said to be the winner. If we add to this the emotional weaknesses of humans, such as distraction, fatigue and illusion, the gap between the human brain and the computer becomes more and more pronounced.
In purely logical reasoning tasks, computers are set up to reach logical conclusions almost instantaneously, and even quickly simulate the correct answers that the human brain is unable to come up with most of the time.
However, humans seem to have a unique way of cognition in that we are able to categorise knowledge by analogy in order to achieve a categorised perception of the world.
As we learn a certain amount of language and are exposed to a certain amount of information, we discover that the same concept, in different languages, can be divided into different sub-concepts, and then can continue on indefinitely, dividing a concept into smaller and smaller, finer and finer sub-concepts, sub-sub-concepts and so on. We then combine and perceive the logical systems within the different systems by analogy.
This is how humans make sense of things: we try to simulate an event in our brain, substituting ourselves for the event and relating it to things we have encountered in our lifetime.
Whether it’s a vast analogy or a subtle comparison, our brains are engaged in this process all the time, only some of the comparisons often go unnoticed. The strength of people’s senses is directly proportional to the strength of these analogies, and the stronger the analogical connections, the more intense the feelings.
When we are confronted with new situations and receive new information, we are bound to have to compare and reason the old with the new in a different system. One of the functions of categorisation is that it allows us to make assumptions or draw conclusions by analogy.
However, the results of categorisation will vary from person to person, will not be correct every time, and errors will often occur. These faulty reasonings stem from knowledge, experience, bias, cultural influences and so on.
Human beings need to look beyond the ‘self’ to understand their own perceptions, and beyond the ‘world itself’ to understand their perceptions of the world.
With an incomplete cognitive system and the constraints of analogical thinking, neither metaphysical thinking nor mathematical logical reasoning can in fact give us a complete understanding of the world and ourselves.
Unless one day there is a sudden breakthrough in science, or a certain way of cognition emerges that was not originally human, we will have the opportunity to understand the underlying rules and logic of the world, and thus be able to fully comprehend and change the real world we live in.
Or, we can construct the next level of the world and create a system of rules and systems that we can control based on a cognitive system that humans can understand to achieve the corresponding level of free will in the lower world.
Thus, when the flow of information ends in the real world, we have the following conclusion.
- Information itself is only relevant to the carriers, the way in which information is assembled is the way in which humans understand it
- The ways in which information is perceived depend not only on the creation and use of tools, but also on the creation of cognitive systems
- The use of energy limits the boundaries of access to information and cognition, which in turn limit the way that energy can be used
- Based on systematic assumptions of logical reasoning, one cannot know whether the world is continuous or discrete
- There is an innate flaw in human cognitive logic that prevents one from understanding the essence of the real world from the outside of the system
- The Gödel incompleteness theorem: in systems containing natural numbers, non-contradiction cannot be proven or disproven within the system
- Quantum uncertainty principle: humans cannot fully explain the properties of quanta through their own view of spacetime and systems
- Philosophical antinomy: for problems beyond the experience of human, reason will fail and there will be infinite unknowability
II. Creation as Understanding: The Virtual World as Will and Appearance
The world is my will. The world is my representation
— Arthur Schopenhauer
1. Will: The Native Intelligence of the Virtual World
As we mentioned above, human beings have a natural cognitive deficit due to three major problems in the fields of mathematics, physics and philosophy, which prevent us from truly understanding the complete picture of the real world or the most fundamental rules of operation.
We know that although Kant did not analyse in depth from a mathematical point of view in The Critique of Pure Reason, nor did Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem appear in his time, he actually implied that the starting point of mathematics is the starting point of reason. That is, reason as we understand it cannot exist beyond the rules of mathematics.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem not only tells us that there are inherent and natural contradictions within any system that is capable of discussing itself, but it also tells us that the human brain is a system with a multi-layered structure, and that at any given level there are certain rules about thinking, and under this level of rules there are levels of meta-rules that modify it, and under the level of meta-rules there are levels of meta-rules that modify it. there are also meta-meta-rule levels that modify the meta-rules…
Thus, when we are describing something, we can express it in different forms, and we can describe it at different levels. This category-based thinking gives humans the ability to make analogies.
In the book named GEB, one of the questions the authors have been discussing is how the brain ultimately generates intelligence through the transmission of chemicals in a network of a bunch of neurons? How does the convergence of ideas from the lower rule layers to the higher rule layers occur?
In the book, the authors postulate that cognitive symbols are subsystems in the brain, and that all mental activity originates from the interactions between symbols within the brain. Thus, the mind originates from symbols, which in turn originate from physical and chemical signals.
When we get information in the real world, our senses are stimulated to send signals to the brain, and the brain compares it with the old things in the experience in different cognitive systems. Once a similarity is found in it, this system finds an isomorphic relationship between the two, and we are able to give a perception to the new thing.
It seems that it is also the existence of isomorphism that allows us to know the world continuously. But is it possible that everything in the real world can be known to us by means of isomorphism?
As we mentioned above, from the perspective of information, the information itself does not change because of the combinations we make; what keeps changing is the way we access and perceive these combinations of information, which also forms our cognitive pathways. In other words, the real world only provides us with phenomena, while discovering meaning requires us to find formal systems that explain them.
In a purely biological sense, humans are no different from animals in that both need to survive and reproduce, and thus are driven by a primitive need to find food to eat and shelter that provides security. Humans are conscious in the sense that we are able to participate subjectively in the change of our environment.
According to the description above, since our cognitive system is incomplete, we cannot know whether humans possess free will or not. In fact, we can only vaguely describe the definition of intelligence by the behaviors that humans can achieve in limited scenarios and contexts.
When we ourselves cannot clearly define what human intelligence means and how human beings make autonomous decisions through a logical system, computer systems built according to human logical knowledge can only naturally operate according to the logical system that has been clearly defined by humans.
Since the human logical system can be expressed mathematically, and the computer logical system is expressed entirely through mathematics, this representation is actually a mapping between the definitions of different mathematical objects that reveals the relationships that exist between the properties or operations of these objects.
At present, the difference between humans and machines is closely related to our cognitive mechanism of “ scoping by analogy”. This mechanism is dominant in human cognition and has not received much attention in the vast majority of machine cognitive work.
At the same time, because machines are silicon-based objects, they are much more stable than carbon-based organisms, and thus can execute more efficiently the logical system that humans have already clarified, that is, “rationality”. The “perceptual” part, which humans themselves do not or cannot explain clearly, cannot be realized by machines.
Of course, humans can use rationality to describe and explain sensibility, such as when we represent a certain emotion within a certain knowledge system by explicitly defining conditions, events, and the corresponding performance and outcome. Since human emotions are driven by many factors, logically speaking, as long as there are enough parameters, algorithms are effective enough, and computational power can support them, a machine can act and behave in a rational way through a logical system that makes people feel it has “emotions”.
Thus, in terms of the machine’s logical system, the machine can simulate human emotions, analogies, associations, etc., but it cannot achieve a true exact replication. The core reason is also simple: the binary rules used by machines and the way signals are transmitted, processed, analyzed and expressed between human neurons are different and can only partially implement the human way of decision making.
In the current layer of the world, the way humans perceive determines the way humans understand the world, while the way machines can perceive our real world is different, and thus cannot fully restore the human cognitive system. From the human point of view, machines may not think like humans, nor will they have the “free will” that we try to understand and pursue.
But if we look at it from the perspective of a machine, if a machine can somehow achieve a certain behavior in the virtual world, we can assume that we have created a “free will” that belongs to the machine as an object.
According to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and isomorphism, machines built according to the human logic system cannot tell and know whether they have “free will” or not.
From a pragmatic point of view, “free will” is a matter of definition and object, and machines can understand the meaning of “free will” by describing clearly, from a logical system that humans can understand, under what circumstances, what they do, and what they achieve.
In this context, the term “free will” refers more to the ability to choose among various possible options and to decide what to do.
So, we can know that because of the level of human’s own cognitive system, the intelligence of the machines we build will not be the same as the intelligence understood by humans.
Machines constantly learning humans are not able to get any level of intelligence, only by allowing themselves to interact with the environment and learn in the digital world, can they give birth to the level of intelligence that belongs to the virtual world in which the machines exist.
According to the current definition, such intelligence can be classified as artificial intelligence, but more critically, it is a kind of native intelligence created by humans in the virtual world. This kind of native intelligence can “autonomously” participate in the transformation of the environment in the virtual world, and in the process, gain the ability to improve.
Of course, through artificial intelligence technology to create “virtual creatures” there are some black boxes, such performance beyond the human logic system understanding, so we can not know how they make rational decisions. But because of this, perhaps from their perspective can be more complementary to the human inability to step outside the system to observe their own defects.
These “virtual beings” with native intelligence in virtual worlds perceive time and the world as they see it. And we see these creatures as other higher-level species might observe us in a higher-dimensional universe.
What we see may be the output data, may be the graphical interface, or may be the experience in virtual reality. But in reality this information we are in this higher dimensional world is expressed differently than what the virtual creature can perceive.
In fact, humans understand the perceptual decisions of virtual beings in terms of what we perceive as perceptual. If we are “them”, then the perception we can understand is based on the boundary of the world we are in, that is, the perception of data.
Currently, we can simulate a variety of stories and plots in virtual worlds through machine learning such as reinforcement learning, which allows machines to train and iterate by interacting with the environment while having “a priori knowledge”. We are like creators, observing us in a higher dimensional form of display, trying to understand them from our point of view.
However, just as a similar situation can occur when humans in different languages meet, these virtual beings, as a “human-like” virtual creature, already have a preliminary and simple human intelligence.
The native intelligence of this virtual world, we need to stand in their perspective to understand and perceive, in order to appreciate the meaning of creation and the embodiment of the will in the virtual world.
2. Representation: The Object of the Virtual World
For humans, the digitized information is the virtual world; while for the intelligences in the virtual world, the digitized information is the entity and the representation of the virtual world.
From the perspective of the native intelligences in the virtual world, perhaps the world they are aware of is an appearance. They cannot know what is the encoding and decoding mechanism corresponding to the binary code, which is the “Thing in itself” of the virtual world.
Based on the virtual world framework we have discussed, we meet strangers in the “digital real world” and meet them offline, or provide virtual services in the virtual world and convert them into currency to be spent in the real world, etc.; we also realize ideas and experience games in the “native virtual world”.
In fact, if we define the native intelligence of virtual worlds in terms of “the ability to participate autonomously in the transformation and decision making of the virtual world environment,” we find that AI creates algorithms, objects, and other digital forms that can help humans accelerate the digitization of the real world in a more efficient way (e.g., image recognition, analysis to predict the DNA structure of proteins, etc.), as well as create objects and images that do not exist in the real world (e.g., games, animation, design, etc.) in large numbers and quickly.
We define a “native virtual world” in terms of whether objects in the virtual world can use virtual resources to produce and consume virtual products.
For example, AI technology in the field of computer vision uses AI to speed up the recognition of real-world objects, and on top of that, it can realize functions such as face changing, thus creating new images in the virtual world. But its source of information is not purely a virtual world, so it is not strictly speaking the virtual world “native intelligence”.
After we have discussed the “will of the virtual world”, the appearance of the virtual world can be clarified in the same way. That is, only the content of the original virtual world is the representation of the virtual world. Beyond that, everything else is a representation of the real world.
In general, although we refer to Schopenhauer’s description, we use “will” and “appearance” to describe the definition and expression of intelligence in the virtual world.
In fact, however, we emphasize the simultaneous observation and discussion of the specific forms of intelligence in the human cognitive system in the virtual world from the perspective of standing outside and inside the system of the virtual world.
- Under the existing cognitive and logical system, human beings do not fully understand why human beings themselves possess intelligence, and therefore cannot build machines that possess exactly the same intelligence as human beings
- Based on cognitive systems that humans can understand and use, we can build machines with higher analytical and processing efficiency, and they will perform far better than humans in areas that require the use of logic
- The machine itself does not have the same underlying structure as humans, but humans can use existing logic and rational paths to make the machine perform those intelligent behaviors that make people feel it has “emotions”
- The “free will” in the virtual world cannot be understood in terms of human perception, but needs to be defined in terms of the cognitive boundaries of the intelligences in the virtual world.
- Digital objects in the virtual world can “autonomously” participate in the transformation of the virtual world environment and decision-making, that is, the native intelligence in the virtual world
- The process of artificial intelligence will include “black box systems” that are incomprehensible to humans, representing not only the way “virtual beings” perceive the world, but also bringing possibilities for the way humans perceive the world that originate from outside the existing cognitive system.
- Representations of virtual worlds are generated by the native intelligence of the virtual world and exist only in the native virtual world.
III. Connection as Eternity: The Realization of Infinity in the Metaverse
“We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
In the above discussion, we clarified the performance of the will or intelligence in the native virtual world, which is a kind of object or object born entirely in the virtual world, which can autonomously participate in the change and generation of the virtual world environment.
According to the development logic of virtual worlds, in the future we will have very many virtual worlds with very many virtual worlds in which intelligence will spontaneously generate very much information and content.
When the different virtual worlds are connected, they will become the Metaverse. This will be an always-on virtual world where an unlimited number of people can participate at the same time.
The metaverse would have a complete economic system running uninterrupted and could span both the real and digital worlds. At the same time, any image, content, wealth, etc. based on data information can circulate in the metaverse, and many people and companies will create content, stores, and experiences to make it more prosperous.
When the metaverse appears before or when it appears, if people can upload their consciousness or enter the virtual world or metaverse in a more direct way (e.g. by combining machinery and human body), in what way will the digital consciousness of human beings exist?
As we mentioned before, for “virtual creatures” with native intelligence in the virtual world, the dimensions they perceive make up the world they understand. Logically speaking, as long as there are enough parameters, effective algorithms, and computational power to support it, the machine can behave and behave in a rational way that makes people feel it has “emotions” through the operation of the logic system.
In other words, machines can simulate human emotions, analogies, associations, etc. through certain settings and define and interpret them as corresponding concepts in the virtual world.
In fact, whether we are able to upload awareness of the virtual world or find a bridge that combines the rules of operation of machines and the way human nerves work, we can both feel the emotions that belong to humans and understand the black box in the process of AI proceeding in a machine way, so that we can understand the real world and the virtual world more comprehensively.
Such a “bridge” or information conversion mechanism does not contradict the native intelligence in the virtual world, but rather, it allows us to create life in the real world and thus to get closer to the edge of the real world.
When it becomes possible for people to live in virtual worlds, much of the existing philosophical thinking about the world, the self, and life will be developed. Theoretically, as human beings acquire the way of thinking of machines, we can live directly in the virtual world or in the real world in a mechanical way, thus obtaining an extended or even infinite life.
This also gives us a greater chance of finding controlled fusion or otherwise and consequently an infinite amount of energy to help us move towards the real world universe.
Of course, we can also choose to explore different virtual worlds in the metaverse with infinite life.
If we take the current perception to understand the meta-universe in the future, everything in the meta-universe can be called a game, but not all games are part of the meta-universe, because some games are just not connected. Also, some e-commerce businesses that serve the virtual world (or serve the real world) are not part of the metaverse if the account system and the economic system are not connected.
At the same time, the interaction, purchase, etc. inside the virtual world must also be with the virtualized image scene, so it is not too much to call it a game. Games can bring users a depth of interactivity that no other field can provide.
In the future, the boundary between the real world and the virtual world will gradually blur, and all industries will meet the deeper interaction between users and the virtual world. From the perspective of the present, it is called “deepening the digital development of various fields”; from the perspective of the future, it is the introduction of the gamification and interaction methods that we can understand now into the “traditional” fields.
As we build more and more virtual worlds, the infrastructure of virtual worlds will become more and more perfect, and will gradually show higher support efficiency. Among them, the richness of content and supply efficiency will become far more than we can imagine, and will be provided in real-time computing, real-time generation, real-time experience, real-time feedback, so that we think the virtual world and the real world have no difference.
When the economic system of the virtual world is connected and the management and governance structure has been formed, the meta-universe emerges. Its feedback to the real world will also reach an unprecedented level. The value people generate in the real world will be massively invested in the metaverse, and the iteration and development of civilization will be completed in the metaverse.
Last but not least
As Asimov presents in The Galactic Empire Trilogy, human beings live like mayflies in this vast expanse of space, but the life we have, like the rise and fall of the entire universe, is nothing more than a process from life to death.
From this perspective, what is the difference between the efforts of mankind today to survive and the continuity of the entire universe? It is as if it were a great joke of time and space, or as if it were a trick of fate full of malice.
We are constantly discovering new ways and means to renew our knowledge of the world. But it seems that as we know more, our lack of understanding of the world grows. What is truly infinite is in fact our ignorance.
Whether it is the discovery of new systems of perception or the gradual gathering of forces to work together to realise the Metaverse, may the good times come.
The end of life, is also the purpose of the beginning.
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About rct
rct was founded in 2018, a member of Y Combinator W19, and is comprised of talents across AI, design and business. The team is passionate about using AI to create next generation interactive entertainment experiences. Our mission is to help human beings know more about themselves. So far, rct is backed by YC, Sky Saga Capital, and Makers Fund.
See our official website：https://rct-studio.com/en-us/
