Science Quote by David Deutsch

Deutsch isn’t daydreaming about better goggles; he’s staking a claim about what the laws of physics allow. The line reads like science fiction, but its intent is almost legalistic: if a physical process can occur, then a sufficiently powerful computer can, in principle, simulate the experience of it. “Every possible environment” is doing the heavy lifting here, smuggling in a key Deutsch move from quantum computation: the universe doesn’t just permit computation, it is computation-friendly in a way classical intuitions underestimate.

The subtext is a quiet demolition of “you can’t model reality” mysticism. Deutsch’s broader project, from The Fabric of Reality onward, argues that explanation and simulation aren’t pale shadows of the world; they’re extensions of it. Virtual reality becomes a philosophical crowbar: if you can generate any environment consistent with physics, then “real” versus “virtual” stops being a moral hierarchy and starts being an engineering detail plus a question of constraints. The point isn’t that we will build it tomorrow, but that nothing in the rulebook forbids it.

Context matters because Deutsch writes after the computational turn in physics, and as a founder of quantum computing he’s acutely aware that “possible” includes things classical machines can’t efficiently represent. The provocation is aimed at both technologists who sell VR as novelty and philosophers who treat experience as uncomputable essence. He’s inviting the reader to accept a bracing implication: reality’s richness may be bounded not by imagination, but by physical law.