[visarga]

> Of course the input that goes into creating that "VR world" is from sensors getting data from interactions with the actual world

This process might not be so arbitrary, for example in an experiment at Google, an unsupervised machine learning system discover the concept of cat from raw images all by itself. The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively and we just gave it a name.

[amatic]

It discovered a statistical measure of features that happen to occur on cat images, on the pixels of those images. It might be something like brains do, it might not.

[Karnickel]

    > The concept of cat might be present in the world objectively

It exists in a world with sensors similar to that of humans, and hardware and software made by humans mirroring their world experience. You are still within the exact same (world) box.