In order to make sense of this “virtual” world, and to recognise it as such, requires that those within it – be it Duhring, Tegmark, or whoever – to examine it first, to categorise it, analyse it, identify its laws and processes. For the virtual humans – or in Tegmark's terminology “self-aware substructures” - in this virtual universe, things would be no different than for real humans in a real universe. Only if someone from outside this virtual universe were to examine it would it be different, as in when someone observes a computer game or simulation. But, then, who is this being outside the virtual universe? In what way would they diverge from the concept of a God?
Alternatively, we might conceive a universe that is governed purely by the laws of mathematics, but which arises spontaneously on that basis, without any external design or construction, as required by a computer model. This seems probably closest to Duhring's argument, however, he believes that these principles are absolute and eternal, whilst modern science proposes the idea of a multiverse, in which different rules apply in each.
Either way, it is not these principles, existing independently, and being simply conjured from the ether by the process of thought that is involved, but an examination of the reality (virtual or otherwise) by human beings (virtual or otherwise), in order to discover them.
“Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here are only forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of humanity which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the question, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of the Idea, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere prior to the world, from eternity, just like - a Hegel.” (p 43)
Whether that external world is a “real”, “material” world, or a virtual world, itself does not matter, so long as it must conform to a set of rules, rather than being purely arbitrary and chaotic. A world such as that depicted in various religious mythologies, in which these laws do not apply, where seas can be parted with the strike of a stick, water turned into wine, horses can fly, and so on, would clearly be different, but science, not to mention our own experience, shows that such things are, merely, fairy tales, at best, and the work of charlatans and deceivers, at worst, as The Amazing Randi has shown.
“In fact, let us compare Hegel’s Encyclopaedia and all its delirious fantasies with Herr Dühring’s final and ultimate truths. With Herr Dühring we have in the first place general world schematism, which Hegel calls Logic. Then with both of them we have the application of these schemata or logical categories to nature: the philosophy of nature; and finally their application to the realm of man, which Hegel calls the philosophy of mind. The “inner logical sequence” of the Dühring succession therefore leads us “quite spontaneously” back to Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, from which it has been taken with a fidelity which would bring tears to the eyes of that wandering Jew of the Hegelian school, Professor Michelet of Berlin.” (p 43-4)
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