The Fabric of Reality - David Deutsch

In this book on the philosophy of science, Deutsch says: “Time is not a sequence of moments, nor does it flow.” Instead, “we exist in multiple versions, in universes called ‘moments.’” … “Other times are just special cases of other universes.”
 
Our typically parochial thinking is bounded by ego-centred time, as well as culture and place, and so when well-informed science projects deeply into distant futures, I tend to get excited like the big kid I am. The Omega point and the spread of intelligence throughout the universe! Yeah, bring it on!
 
Even if the truth will never be anything more than a representation, it can still be true.
 
“Imagination is a straightforward form of virtual reality. What may not be so obvious is that our ‘direct’ experience of the world though 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.”
 
Most of reality is invisible to us. “The objects and events that we and instruments can directly observe are the merest tip of the iceberg.”
 
Deutsch makes a curious point about the future of our solar system. We tend to think of the death of the Sun in 5 billion years’ time as inevitable: an implosion followed by an explosion as a red giant. However—and to take one step further the lesson of quantum theory that the observer is not separable from the observed—the scientific laws that make this outcome apparently immutable fail to take into account the existence of life. We do not exist is isolation from the universe: we are part of it, and our evolution could change the evolution of our star.
 
Intelligent life could one day control the Sun: “one cannot predict the future of the Sun without taking a position on the future of life on Earth and in particular on the future of knowledge.”