NAB
It is hard to imagine humans spending their lives in virtual
reality when the experience amounts to waving your arms about in the middle of
the lounge with a device the size of a house brick strapped to your face.
Article here
But this is where humanity is heading, according to
philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for embracing the fate. The Australian
professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University has written a
book called Reality+, which was publicized in The Guardian to
the irritation of at least one prominent armchair philosopher.
Michael Sacasas, who blogs at The Convivial Society, dismantles
Chalmers’ argument (from the article alone, rather than the book, which was
just published) in convincing fashion.
Chalmers essential thesis is that virtual realities are not
fake at all but instead “can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual
reality is genuine reality.”
He seems to advocate that advances in technology will
deliver virtual worlds that rival and then surpass the physical realm. And with
limitless, convincing experiences on tap, the material world may lose its
allure, he says.
First of all Sacasas dismisses this as a somewhat banal
observation.
“Of course, the experience of putting on VR goggles and
navigating a VR environment is a real, genuine experience,” Sacasas points out.
“What matters is the specific character and quality of the experience — what
sort of reality is it? — and its standing in relation to the rest of our
experience.”
To unpick the argument he makes an analogy between VR and
our dreams.
“A dream is ‘genuine reality’ but it does not follow that we
should treat it as the same kind of experience as our waking life,” Sacascas
says.
A dream can linger in our minds when we are awake, and so
can a VR experience. The two realities may intermingle, but they are each of a
different order, he suggests.
There are other similarities and crucial differences between
waking life and the stuff of dreams. “In a dream we are not always conscious of
the fact that we are dreaming,” he says. “Indeed, the power of the dream lies
in its ordinarily immersive quality, and, while VR is often touted as an
immersive media experience, it remains… a comparatively inelegant, awkward, and
sometimes disorienting experience.
“Additionally, of course, you potentially encounter other
people in virtual worlds, although their presence is highly mediated. Also, as
it stands, VR yields an experience that fails to engage the human sensorium in
full, and, critically, the dream arises out of our own psyche in its
interactions with the world and not from a tech company’s proprietary software.
But, like a dream again, the experience must always end.”
Chalmers further claims that eventually, “virtual worlds may
have most of what is good about the nonvirtual world. Given all the ways in
which virtual worlds may surpass the nonvirtual world, life in virtual worlds
will often be the right life to choose.”
Does Chalmer’s mean that we should look forward to the day
we uploading our consciousness to the internet as seen in sci-fi dystopia
like Transcendental and The Matrix or BBC dramas such
as Years and Years?
It’s not clear, but quoting from The Guardian article,
we learn that “Chalmers sees technology reaching the point where virtual and
physical are sensorily the same and people live good lives in VR,” and also
that, “Chalmers suspects we will ditch the clunky headsets for brain-computer
interfaces, or BCIs, that allow us to experience virtual worlds with our full
suite of senses.”
This is where Chalmer’s argument seems to fall down, as if
he has indeed gulped the Kool Aid of Mark Meta Zuckerberg and Ready Player
One.
He seems to envision that the good life for humanity is
merely an artificially triggered neuronal activity.
Even to get to that point of brain to machine interfaces,
there is an “expectation of dramatic technological advances,” Sacasas observes.
“He must presume that the technology will yield a subjective experience that is
basically indistinguishable from the experience of the non-virtual world. But
it is not at all obvious to me that the technologies Chalmers anticipates will
necessarily materialize.”
He dismisses this as another example of the “rhetoric of
technological inevitability,” or what he calls the “Borg Complex.” (Resistance
is futile, and all that).
Then even if we grant that the experience of virtual reality
will be indistinguishable from the experience of non-virtual reality and that
it may even be somehow richer and more pleasant — it will still be the case
that the experience will cease.
“The VR equipment will come off, you will disconnect from
the virtual world and come back to the non-virtual world. Unless, of course,
you posit an even more disturbing Matrix-like scenario in which human beings
can choose to remain hooked up to virtual worlds indefinitely with their
biological needs somehow serviced artificially.”
Does Chalmers imagine that really? There are signs he
doesn’t — but only in the near term.
“In the short term we’re pretty clearly going to be based in
physical reality and I certainly wouldn’t recommend abandoning it,” Chalmers
concedes.
He also notes, “As fulfilling as virtual worlds may become,
people will need real food, drink and exercise, and perhaps even the odd
glimpse of daylight, to keep their bodies from withering away.”
Assuming this even happens, Sacasas plays ethics with the
logic.
“I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is
already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that
a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing?
“The claim that, even now, virtual realities can outstrip my
experience of the world is increasingly plausible when I have lost the capacity
to wonder at and delight in the gratuity and beauty of the world.”
The combined impact of climate change, the degree to which
we are all ignorant of the environment around us (and its politics) by being
glued to screens, and the escape to new worlds pioneered by Jeff Bezos and Elon
Musk (as if this planet were not worth saving) means, for Sacasas, that we
“might have already begun to sever our relation to our common world long before
the virtual worlds Chalmers envisioned are ever realized.”
Is the chief appeal of VR in fact one expends no particular
effort and risks nothing of consequence. “The VR paradise, we are offered is
sanitary, safe, and comfortable,” he writes. “We are able to set aside the
lived body along with its frailties and vulnerabilities. It is, one presumes, a
customizable and programmable realm in which we can exercise maximal control
over our avatars and their environments, within the parameters established by
the proprietors of the virtual realm, of course.”
The metaverse does not yet exist and these sorts of
arguments can become overheated. But if we take it for granted that at some
time in the future technology makes all this possible then logically there is
the potential for genuine horror. If we’re all strapped permanently into
virtual worlds to escape the misery of our physical “non-virtual” existence
then who, he asks, will care for the sick or tend to decrepit infrastructure or
acknowledge the poor or concern ourselves with failing ecosystems?
“It amounts to the temptation to surrender and accept defeat,
to forsake the struggle, refuse responsibility, and escape into a realm of
virtual hedonism.”
In Chalmers’s vision, we would, be trapped in a situation
wherein we would encounter nothing but ourselves and those things some of us
have made. And it would be altogether likely that we would do so while swaths
of our common world increasingly became inhospitable to human life. If so, the
burden will fall, as it always does, on those who will not have the luxury of
retreating into virtual paradises.”
No comments:
Post a Comment