Could you resist a true virtual reality and should you?
Could you resist a true virtual reality and should you?
Lets assume we develop the capacity to create virtual worlds that are near indistinguishable from the real world. We hook you up into a machine and you now find yourself in what effectively is a paraller reality where you get to be the king of your own universe (if you so desire). Nothing is off limits - everything you've ever dreamt of is possible. You can be the only person there, you can populate it with unconscious AI that appears consciouss or you can have other people visit your world and you can visit theirs aswell as spend time in "public worlds" with millions of other real people.
Would you try it and do you think you'd prefer it over real world? Do you see it as a negative from individual perspective if significant part of the population basically spend their entire lives there?
Fully would. As long as there is no massive downside IRL.
If I could have any experience I wanted and see all the things in the universe without like, living half my life span or my descendants being farmed for fertilizer, then for sure.
The one downside is there would be minimal knowledge gain. Unless that's also part of the virtual world.
This proposition feels like drugs without the physical side effects. If I’m [Edit: not] happy with the world I live in, I should try to make it better. Diving into a world without racism, climate change, pollution, or people with radically opposing views while we solve none of these problems in the real world isn’t healthy, I think.
Assumptions:
- Stasis: When i spend months inside VR, my meat prison does not degrade faster than it would have leading my current livestyle. So at least something like the Matrix. Mind Upload would be perfect.
- Variety: The VR is large enough i will not get bored for at least 50 years.
- Control: The VR device is owned and operated by me, without requiring connection to some corporation. My VR life is owned by me. So no Corporate Dystopia. I can end the VR any time i want.
- Immersion: I can choose my avatar, the graphics is good and i can set the amount of pain i want to experience.
- Affordable: I can financially afford to stay in VR for at least 50 years.
Positives:
- Exciting: Every day can be an adventure. The best food can be copy-pasted. Have a house in the woods without having to sacrifice amenities. See the world without pollution. Dive trough oceans without having to catch your breath.
- Much less suffering: No more exercise (unlike my meat prison my avatar does not need exercise). No unwanted pain: Set pain to off if you don't want to feel exthaustion, stubbing your toes,... No more disease, No worrying about wrecking your body.
- No more physics: Meals will remain fresh and warm even after weeks of hiking/climbing in the snow. Teleportation will be available.
Negatives:
- ?
If such VR is ever achieved, almoset everyone will live in it, and those living in it will look back and ask themselves how humans were ever happy to live like we do today.
It all the depends on the how and the what.
First of all, if the virtual reality is able to replicate physical sensation indistinguishably from the physical world, it's not virtual, then, is it? Then it's just alternative reality. If that was the case, the only dilemma would be the implications to the physical world. Will your body still exist, or are we talking San Junipero here?
As long as there are implications to the real world, then I believe a significant percentage of people will not abandon it, because of empathy.
I personally would only live an alternative reality if there was no one I love back in the real world anymore, or if I were to die.
As for virtual reality in the realm of possibilities, there will always be something missing, as addictive as it may be, so there will always be something to bring you back to reality
As for just trying it, hell yeah! As long as there are no negative consequences physically that I know of before hand.
I'd be a thousand percent down if I didn't think it'd be a subscription service that only exists to exploit me
I would love to immerse myself in the digital worlds like in Ready Player One. You could live in the cheapest and shittiest place possible but still have a blast with your virtual avatar and haptic suit. But, instead, we got the Metaverse with Zuck's low res trees and Eiffel tower lol
Once I can pick and choose my body and change it on a whim, and it feels like my body, Im gonna end up staying in VR unhealthily much.
Even with the tech we have today, when I first used VR and selected a body for something like VRChat, I started feeling like the body was my own. You know the "fake hand" experiment? Something like that. But the illusion is quickly destroyed as soon as I touch something or movement dont match up. And the effect gets weaker for each time.
It was such a cool feeling. I want it again.
You are actually describing my “ideal” world as I outlined here!
My vision is heavily inspired by Terence McKenna. I imagine a world as it might have existed during prehistoric times. Lush forests teeming with exotic wildlife, clean air, and crystal clear water. No highways full of billboards, no parking lots, no shopping malls, and no cars. Just safe grounds and paths for humans embedded deep within all of this nature. At a birds-eye view, it may look as if humanity has completely abandoned technology and regressed back into its childhood. Yet if you were to look out through the eyes of one of these utopian people, you would see the most wonderful augmented reality display. Information, communication, entertainment, education, global economies… almost everything has been de-materialized. Humanity’s ceaseless pursuit of technology has been mostly divorced from our physical environment and mother earth is bustling with life again. The only technologies that remain in the real world are those that help all of us live happy and healthy lives (modern medicine, delicious food, solar power, etc) all the while the shared virtual reality in our eyes is limited only by our collective imaginations. We are finally living in accord with nature without having to forsake our innate desire for knowledge and progress.
This idea of complete control over your reality reminds me of the book/novella The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Suffice it to say the story suggests that such a reality would ultimately be meaningless.
I would say it sounds great though, even if eventually it gets really depressing.
Yes, I would want to resist it. Life is about ups and downs, and I think the better idea would be to have an open-source augmented reality, maybe through glasses that you wear or contacts on your eyes, that can project shared images, like virtual props that everyone else can see, or just act as a VR HMD and replace all your vision with a virtual world for a while.
But bodily autonomy is very important, give people a choice and let them be informed by publishing the source code, PCB diagrams and all that kinda stuff so they know how it works and that they're not being controlled.
Here is an article on a book of a professor of philosophy and neural science about this subject :
You know, I feel like it would all seem pretty vacuous to me pretty fast. Maybe there'd be more opportunity in the real world as everyone dips into simulation, though.
Sign me up!
We are in a virtual world.
Continuous macro geometry which suddenly converts to discrete units when free agents interact or observe it?
Sounds a lot like how we're currently building voxel-based procedurally generated worlds where a continuous seed function determines geometry which is converted into discrete units to be able to track state changes by free agents to what's initially determined by the seed function.
We even have sync conflicts and lazy optimization in how it handles tracking these changes.
So to your question - are you able to resist the allure of this world? Should you? Does it being virtual or not change whether or not there is meaning in your life?
Though I'm not really interested in being a king of my own universe. I'd much rather be a traveler through the universe of another. And I suspect there's much more interesting universes out there than simply an educational sim of what life was like in the late stages of humanity and the establishment of what came next, so I'm game to explore.
Also, the creation and variety of virtual worlds we are creating and will continue to create is very much part of the narrative of this reality. And so while traveling through this virtual world, I'm certainly keen on exploring its precursors. We've already come a long way from Pong.
At the same time, I'm not a fan of replaying things, so while I am curious and look forward to whatever is the next world in my queue, I think it's important to take time to appreciate the one I'm in at the moment, as I am certainly am never coming back to this shit hole, as beautiful and majestic as its entropy driven 'design' can be in moments.
As with most things, balance is generally a good way to go.
Reminds me of a short story, where a girl is sent to a VR planet, for robots studying humans
There she has a.. VR coffin, which she slowly learns can perfectly simulate reality, or the AI will send probes for her to experience things in reality.
She eventually realizes that they will make perfect human proxies, and starts to plan her escape from her VR coffin
Wish I could remember the name!
What's happening to the users' bodies and how are things handled financially for this hypothetical scenario?
Okay, where do I have to sign?
I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you'd only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that's not the case. There's this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.
Oh and I'll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It's an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.
Just watch the TV series "Westworld".
(Edit: or one of the many other scifi movies / series / books discussing exactly that question.)
I would rather be interested in trans corporal to the real world. Being just free of the corporal realm and be able to live as a flying 🧠
Good try, Mark.
Reminds me of this comic
https://twitter.com/Merryweatherey/status/1185636106257211392
For me it depends on who controls it really, say Amazon becomes the skynet and creates such seamless vr I will never even try it out, resisting isnt too difficult im that case
I'd jump in, but i would still need a crafted experience. I find designing my own sandbox to be a bit dull. Remember the last season of the Good Place? Turns out infinite wish fulfilment might not be that effective at making us happy. And it certainly won't help us to develop.
But if there are fun, designed experiences that are engaging and challenging to do inside this realm, sign me the fuck up.
Question though: how is time experienced on the inside? Because if our virtual experiences happen faster than real time we could get some real world advantages by studying and training in virtual.
Read "Infinite" by Jeremy Robinson. It's a Sci-fi novel that explores a bit that idea.
I would jump in head first. Anything that will make me run from this reality.
I think it would be great to try out things that are impossible in the real world without any risks. Not necessarily crazy things, but things that are just not available to me irl. Like designing stuff without any limits of ressources or money. That way we could improve the real world by testing things in the virtual.
It quickly turns into a philosophical question of what you really want to do in the real world and why. It doesn't make much sense to better your real world for things that could be easily done in the virtual. However, since your life even in the virtual world depends on your real survival, there would still be things to do.
Then there's also the thing that your virtual world would be limited to your own imagination. At some point, that will get boring even with virtual people around. It would still make sense to exchange ideas with actual people in order to expand your own virtual world.
I think there is a flaw in these kinds of arguments and that is the assumption that a perfect simulation would even be desirable. Why not enhance it with abilities like teleportation, third person views, searches and other HUD-like UI elements,...? I can tell from years of using Second Life that those don't ruin immersion nearly as much as VR-proponents seem to think.
Ready Player One Matrix And maybe others but I don't know.
It would be extremely hard to resist. Such tech may be expensive, tho it could still be owned by poorer people once it decreases in cost, as it would allow to escape their poorness.
Tho because mostly companies will do things like that, I mostly see something like in Ready Player One. Where you have a giant social network/game, where you can participate in plenty of different activities which can look like the real world, or not.
The Matrix version where you are in a world filled with "real people"/AI, where you have the same world but have some super powers, well not really sure. Do you really want to have powers, what to do with them?
It's also difficult to get a world like that. Social interactions are pretty much needed for most people. Even if these people don't see it directly, getting out, buying something, it's social interaction. If those AI people aren't good, the experience would most likely be mediocre because of the objective it implies (recreating a similar world but where you can do anything). Tho maybe if it is used as a game, maybe it could interest more people.
However it would enphasis the social distancing of many people and break many things. This is why I'd rather see it as like a social media/game universe.
Another issue in the question now is well, there is no such thing. So it's difficult to even know if it would be interesting or not. Would we be absorbed all day in it like people were in Ready Player One? Will companies try to control us? Make us buy things?