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?
To expand on this, one thing I haven’t seen in the comments yet, is how pivotal and amazing this would be for the handicapped and disabled community. I myself have a broken body and being able to do things in VR that I can’t in the physical world would be incredible.
This makes me wonder, how often do people's disabilities manifest in their dreams? Presumably the rates would be different for those born with their disability and those who got it through illness or injury later in life.
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.
There is no invention (that i can imagine) i would look forward to if Mind Upload VR was real.
That would mean stagnation, but progress is only good if it reduces suffering. And i just can not see how making faster computers and learning physics can reduce suffering if there is Mind Upload VR, where all pain is optional.
As long as the VR is more like a Matrix where the body still ages and dies, of course i would want research to continue so death does not rip me from my awesome virtual life before i have played it trough. Maybe even multiple times.
I agree that progress will most likely slow down once Matrix VR is real because why waste your precious years lerning physics and biology when there is affordable VR?
Once Mind Upload VR is there i can actually see science progressing much faster, because if you have a processor that can simulate one conciousness and be loaded 10%, you can either put 9 more people on it, or you could speed up time 10x, so the mind that is researching new technology will experience 10x more time than real time and be done with research much faster.
Or you could store yourself on disk and wait 1000 years to have science catch up.
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.
This proposition feels like drugs without the physical side effects. If I’m 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.
you’re assuming though that the virtual worlds wouldn’t help to solve (or at least make irrelevant) those things
virtual worlds would likely be significantly more efficient than reality: if you don’t need to make physical products because you only need software and 3d models, manufacturing for most things just evaporates… less extracting resources from the earth, less energy spent refining resources and assembling parts, etc… no need for lighting, entertainment and social venues, office space… people would need far smaller houses so when they do need to travel, it’s probably going to be somewhere much closer to them - and for that matter, why travel?
perhaps lots of our worlds problems fall away when people can have whatever they like - when we aren’t competing with each other, and exist in a (virtual) world of plenty, perhaps some of societies more intractable problems will just cease to be problems. i’m not saying that would happen, and i don’t have any citations, but i’d say it’s certainly possible
what’s so special about the real world? if your experiences are fundamentally the same thing, why does it matter if it’s a real or a virtual experience? certainly there are things we can’t do virtually - scientific advancement and generally discovery likely requires some interaction with the real world, but even than could be done via interfaces to the outside world rather than specifically existing all the time in the real world
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.
And that's assuming that nobody will create VR world's where the oppressed groups are tortured or target for hunting practice.
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
Well, in a world that has technology this advanced, you could maybe make your body do actual work in the real world (controlled by your employer) but you would still experience the virtual world as op has explained.
Sounds like a black mirror outline. I shiver at the idea.
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.
It's not obvious to me that this would be a downside. Real world already is dull and depressing to many people. If they can be happy in the virtual world then that seems like an improvement to the status quo
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.
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
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.
A very cool vision, but people would still have to live and grow food somewhere, and generate absurd amounts of energy. Assuming we can do vertical hydroponics and cold fusion, the centers of human civilization could be massive, but isolated and surrounded by unspoiled nature.
The question, then, is what stops people from multiplying endlessly and covering the planet in fusion-fueled mega-structures?
Education in the form of a cultivated social desire to live in harmony with our planet and not overpopulate it? I’m really not sure! I know I’m a romantic but a boy can dream. There has to be a more sustainable way for humans to live on earth though. Virtualization or dematerialization is the most realistic way for us to have our cake and eat it too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s fine, but moderation is key. If you spend all your time (or even your life!) there, then that’s unhealthy. You’re using it as an escape and avoiding the real world.
But why? What if someone is truly happy in the simulation while in real life they're miserable. I doubt that on their death bed they're wishing they didn't spend more time doing meaningless work and having no friends.
I wanna live in the project zomboid universe or into the radius VR. There's just something about living in a apocalypse and trying to survive that makes it appealing for me.
Knowing the food I make my Zomboid PC eat, I definitely wouldn't want to. Time to eat an entire can of sardines and wash it down with some evaporated milk!
Give me the outcome of The Good Place as well where you can choose oblivion after there's nothing left to do.
San Junipero was one of the few "happy" episodes of Black Mirror but it didn't ask the question of "where are we in 10,000 years?" like The Good Place considered.
This is where we start getting into the realm of philosophy as it relates to science fiction esq "true" Artificial Intelligence.
Taking the post at face value these AI persons that populate your individual pocket dimension would be, for all intents and purposes, sentient artificial minds, or at least controlled by 1 central mind.
So does that AI deserve human rights? Do laws apply to the and interaction had with them? If all they know is humanity then are they also "human"? Is this theoretically infinitely intelligent super computer even capable of truly understanding humanity, emotions, life in all of its facets?
I fully accept that I am getting too deep into this funny internet post but there have been hundreds upon thousands of books, thought experiments, and debates over this EXACT premise. Short answer is there is no answer. It's Schrodinger's morality lol
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.
One issue with learning and training, is that you'll have the same limitations as now. You are still human, just connected to a machine and time cannot accelerate to learn faster.
However if we could move, change time to whatever place we want, create whatever we want. And still look real.
Then that would maybe make something very interesting for learning and training. It wouldn't be faster. But for example a teacher would be able to create a world where they can help the students learn better, with images, simulations, stories...
However that may also create some issues where it wouldn't be wise to recreate wars, death and other things which can be shocking for people. Because of that realism, it would be very hard to distinguish between a simulated war/death and a real one.
Tho it would maybe create a huge benefit for training for flying a plane for example. Cheap and no risks to break anything.
Of course, but I'd still want to contribute to the real world. Luckily my contributions are non physical, so I could work from VR.
And I'd have to log out occasionally to exercise.
Unless the machine you're connected to somehow stimulates your muscles so that they don't athrope then exercise is probably one of the few things you couldn't do in VR. The reason is the same why you can't exercise in your dreams either.
You can do the activity ofcourse and it feels like working out but it does not translate to physical gains in your real body.