Real Good Times

Net surfing, virtual reality, hypertext; to their advocates they represent an escape from time; space and Sod's Law - an infinitely expandable virtual kingdom in which you can be lord of all you behold. On the face of it, the coming of virtual reality squares nicely with current quantum mechanical and postmodern notions of reality, i.e. that it either doesn't exist, or is fundamentally unknowable. Relativist philosophers like Hilary Lawson, and quantum sages like Danah Zohar and Fritjof Capra, all agree that old-fashioned Newtonian 3-D space and the arrow of time don't cut it any more. From now on all reality is virtual, whether we like it or not. But virtuality doesn't support this view at all. Despite the expectations of wild otherworlds, in practice, virtuality is still addicted to old-fashioned window-on-the-world reality. The touchstone of virtual reality is that it should resemble video footage as much as possible; it is a spooky mimic, a facsimile: A recent Guardian OnLine review of Apple's QuickTime VR said: 'as the user manoeuvres round the location; correct perspective is maintained': correct perspective? Didn't that go out years ago? The art critic Herbert Read once said: `The theory of perspective is a scientific convention; it is merely one way of describing space and has no absolute validity'. So what's going on? Why is accurately modeling the 3-D world so important for computer programmers? Could it be that `correct perspective' means something after all? In fact, even before virtuality could contributed this debate, the critic and aesthetician Sir Ernst Gombrich effectively refuted Read: `The belief that perspective rests on a convention arises from confusion between relational models and images': In other words, that fact that our image of the world cannot be represented on a two-dimensional sheet of paper does not alter the fact that perspective drawing does represent the true relations between objects and scenes seen from a single viewpoint. And although it is true that different cultures represent the world differently in their painting; in order to move about the world, all human beings use the same map - the first spear that felled an animal employed impeccably Newtonian ballistics.

First published in The Guardian, 16 february 1995

Virtuality reinforces this important truth. Virtual reality has something to say to the quantum sages too: The currency of computing is the electron, which of course obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Electrons sometimes behave like waves and sometimes like particles, according to the quantum Complementarity Principle, and it is impossible to determine accurately the position and momentum of an electron (the Uncertainty Principle). The theoretical explanation of electron behaviour is non-deterministic; ie. you can never be sure exactly what a single electron is going to do. But the first thing you learn about a computer is that it is rigidly determined. Short of a catastrophic total failure, and assuming you're not doing floating-point maths with a dodgy Pentium chip, it always responds to keystrokes in exactly the same way. So, if quantumly uncertain electrons can, en masse, behave in a very determined way, what does this say about other aspects of our large-scale reality? Quantum sages have made much of the idea that quantum uncertainty pervades every aspect of existence - that quantum principles are behind consciousness, for example: But it could be that just as the electrons in the computer lose their uncertainty when they hit the screen, our large-scale reality is also untouched by the quantum world. We are always being told that quantum mechanics has dissolved the solidity of the world. But it is obvious that the macro property of wispy fundamental particles is the solidity we are often painfully aware of. Two thousand years ago, Lucretius understood that qualitative change comes with a change of scale - far too many today have forgotten it. Anti-realism has taken a deep hold in the late 20th century. It seems to be the product of a loss of nerve engendered by rapid technological change and the shocks caused by the breakdown of civilisation in two world wars and dozens of lesser, but no less brutal, conflicts. Eliot wrote the theme song of the century early on when he said:

Go, go go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality

But it would be a neat paradox if the search for virtual worlds - a search Eliot would have equated with his other symptoms of 'distress of nations and perplexity' -

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behavior of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry

- were to bring us back face to face with our existence in three dimensions and unrepeatable time.