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.....Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our 'direct' experience of the world through our senses is virtual reality too. For our external experience is never direct; nor do we even experience the signals in our nerves directly—we would not know what to make of the streams of electrical crackles that they carry. What we experience directly is a virtual-reality rendering, conveniently generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data plus complex inborn and acquired theories (i.e. programs) about how to interpret them. We realists take the view that reality is out there: objective, physical and independent of what we believe about it. But we never experience that reality directly. Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge—including our knowledge of the non-physical worlds of logic, mathematics and philosophy, and of imagination, fiction, art and fantasy—is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain's own virtual-reality generator. So it is not just science—reasoning about the physical world—that involves virtual reality. All reasoning, all thinking and all external experience are forms of virtual reality.
..........— David Elieser Deutsch (1953 - ), Israeli-British physicist. Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications (Penguin, 1998), pages 120-121.
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