[This is an entry for lsusr's write-like-lsusr competition.]

David Chalmers says you should treat technological VR as real and be ready to live there. Intuitively, this is suspicious. Conveniently, Chalmers lists the ways he considers things real, one of which is a crux.

Things are real when they’re roughly as we believe them to be.

If you believe virtual minerals are minerals, it follows that the only good way to get them is to dig them up and refine them. That is, you submit to the in-universe laws.

But that assumes you're acting on that world from inside the VR's interface. If you are a human outside the computer then you have better options.

If you use another program that directly edits the save file, the effort to make some outcome in a virtual world is a Kolmogorov complexity^[1] of that outcome. To get virtual minerals, don't dig. Just write in a large positive number for how many you have. Even if you have to write that program yourself it's still a better option. The cost of programming amortizes away over enough edits.

Once you operate sanely like that, the in-universe laws stop mattering. You can rewrite numbers and copy-paste designs without caring about gravity, conservation of mass, or damage mechanics.

A virtual world run on a computer is internally consistent and has a substrate independent of your mind. But you influence its objects sanely by treating them completely unlike how the virtual world shows them. Either you believe the virtual castle is a short list of coordinates, which is trivial, or you believe it's a vast building of stone brick, which mismatches how you ought to see it and makes it unreal.

Two cases remain where this breaks.

• Someone else holds the VR server.
• The only reality you can access is the inside of a simulation.

In the former, you can still convince, bribe, hack, or social-engineer your way into a easy, large-scale direct edit. Working with or against a human in your immediate reality is still outside VR. Someone else's virtual world is "real" if and only if it satisfies the other conditions Chalmers recognized^[2] and you can change it more by working from within it—treating the virtual objects like the real equivalents they claim to be—than from convincing, bribing, hacking, or social-engineering its owner.

The latter is probably already happening^[3]. Whoever controls the simulation is a sort of God. You can't convince, bribe, hack, or social-engineer God as you would another human. You might be able to via prayer or ritual, but all our guesses as to how (aka theistic religion) are almost certainly wrong. If you can break from the simulation to a level below it, do so. I can't. If you can't, either, your strongest influences will follow the rules of objects as the simulation shows them. Then the objects are real.

Steve can't escape Minecraft, so if he's simulated with a mind, he must take the square trees around him as real. They are unreal to you. This is not a contradiction because "real" is not just in the object, but its perceiver.

1. ^{^}

   I assume an efficient, feature-rich save editor, like Vim for a video game. If it's more like Notepad, you might as well make your own, better editor. Then the second case applies.

2. ^{^}

   It must affect something (such as your mind, as a participant) and it must keep existing even if people don't believe in it.

3. ^{^}

   Actually at two levels, of which the other is the simulation in your brain. The brain's "VR" differs from computer VR in that most actions in "VR" get a direct counterpart in the surrounding reality that would otherwise offer a shortcut. The exception is (day)dreams.