In the foreseeable future, it is expected that the majority of consciousness in the universe will spend their time in the digital world. I argue that in order to unlock the "goodness" of the digital world, we need to focus on a new kind of science--the science for the possible world (SPW). The essential idea is that we are creating a new set of laws of nature (LoN) for a possible digital world, thus it requires a new kind of methodology--SPW to study the LoN for the possible world. In the following, I will try to sketch some reasons for taking this worldview and what SPW would look like.
Why Digital?
The hype of creating metaverse, AGI, and decentralized social systems based on crypto all points toward a more digital world in the future. There is enough economic incentive to make a hybrid world of digital and physical reality. It is not crazy anymore to think about digital minds (whether they are self-conscious AGI or transhumans uploaded to the cloud) floating around in the universe, and we want to make sure that this world is at least as interesting and flourishing as our current world.
The exciting thing about the metaverse, or the digital world is not that we get to live and interact with each other exactly as we do in our physical world (eg. basically what meta aims to do), but that we have the power, for the first time, to create a possible world out of our own creativity and hopefulness. This is more than discovering the new land of America, and more than going to the moon or Mars, as in the digital world we are not limited by the laws of physics, but only limited by humanity's imagination to create a coherent world of beauty and designed for flourishment. Yes, we have a once-in-a-civilization's opportunity to impersonate an imperfect God and literally make rules of our own in the possible world. It is not an easy job indeed; I propose that we need a new kind of science for the possible world.
Science for the Possible World
We have relied completely on the continuing success of modern science in the past 400 years to make tremendous progress in human civilizations, thanks to one central principle of the scientific paradigm--throwing all theories against experiments. The falsifiability principle is relentless: it does not care about the mathematical rigor, consequential richness, or the artistic beauty of your theory (supersymmetry anyone?), but only if it can be falsified or verified by the physical reality.
However, the SPW relies on another criterion for its success--the complexity of phenomena generated from the digital laws of nature. In some sense, the physical reality is not a bad reality to live in, due to the rich and complex phenomena generated by a few unifying principles. The standard model provides a foundation for the stability of our world, filled with interesting particle interactions that the craft of nature can build upon; the central dogma of DNA codifies the complex biological world, where humanity thrives and finds its meaning. The real world provides us with its wonders and surprises for its habitants to enjoy and marvel at.
Thus, in order to make progress for SPW, we need to draw inspiration from the current science--looking for rules that generate complexity. There are certain proxies that we can rely on to find them: simplicity, symmetry, and mathematical richness. For example, the Yang-Mills theory is a beauty--purely from the principle of symmetry, it predicts all kinds of interesting particles and interactions that exist in nature and becomes the central building block of the standard model. Another example is evolution, where the simple rule of climbing up the fitness landscape results in all kinds of richness in the biological world.
Parameter Space
Instead of fitting parameters to verify the proposed theory against physical reality, the SPW requires an exploration of the parameter space that generates rich and flourishing phenomena. In the digital world, we can adjust the gravitational constant, the DNA codons, etc. as long as it does not collapse the complexity of states. This is quite hard! Scientists have spent their lives studying the feedback loops in the ecosystem and still have trouble perturbing nature. We would probably have a long period of trial-and-error in small simulations before succeeding in creating the new possible world.
Disciplines for SPW
There are a few concrete things that we can start to explore for the SPW.
PW-Physics (Possible-World Physics): Retired high-energy physicists have a job now to look for paradigms that will generate a stable and complex digital world. We will figure out what parameters are relevant in renormalization flow when zooming out to the scale that digital consciousness lives. Tweaking General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory to see what is the most interesting thing to take over to the digital world. No more despise for string theory being not even wrong, as long as it is useful as a phenomena-generator for the possible world.
PW-Biology: What are the substrate-independent principles that make life interesting? Just as neuroscience-inspired algorithms for ML, we should explore the parameter space for self-organization, cellular development, and intelligence. The change of perspective in PW-biology from biology is that we stop caring about how specific cells move, divide, etc, but how biological organisms as entropy-production machines work to fulfill and sustain themselves. Macroscopically, we need to study the what kinds of fitness landscapes and parameters of mutation, selection, and stochasticity open up interesting evolutionary trajectories that we desire to live in.
Epilogue
The object-level research agenda is awaiting to be formalized, and I think that it is a quite important paradigm shift in the history of science. If science for the possible world is designed well, the unbounded human potential will be unleashed to thrive in the digital world.