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.
But this is where humanity is heading, says the philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for embracing the fate. 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.
Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, makes the case to embrace VR in his new book, Reality+. Renowned for articulating “the hard problem” of consciousness – which inspired Tom Stoppard’s play of the same name – Chalmers sees technology reaching the point where virtual and physical are sensorily the same and people live good lives in VR.
“A common way of thinking about virtual realities is that they’re somehow fake realities, that what you perceive in VR isn’t real. I think that’s wrong,” he told the Guardian. “The virtual worlds we’re interacting with can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual reality is genuine reality.”
But where does this leave the physical world? “In the short term we’re pretty clearly going to be based in physical reality and I certainly wouldn’t recommend abandoning it,” Chalmers says. “But in the longer term, it’s possible to imagine people spending most of their lives inside virtual reality.” The pursuit of the physical may come to seem a novelty or a fetish, he adds.
There are plenty of pitfalls to be wary of, he 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. The risks may be trivial for decades yet, Chalmers says, but a gradual trend towards virtual living could eventually raise new health issues.
“If virtual worlds are controlled by corporations, as they seem to be right now, will that lead to potentially dystopian realities where the corporations are controlling everything in our environments? I think there are obvious reasons to worry about that,” Chalmers says.
It is unlikely everyone will turn to VR, and some people, Chalmers says, will still value sheer physicality.
“There may be a sense of authenticity in interacting in our original biological form. But it’s hard to see why sheer physicality should make the difference between a meaningful life and a meaningless life,” he writes. “In the long term, 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.”
Get in your prison cell apartment and put on your VR headset and don't come out! When you get hungry or thirsty just tell your warden Alexa and your filtered poop-water and bug burger will be left on your doorstep. But, no human contact, cause you might find out the truth get sick, so it will just be dropped through the doggy door.
But don't worry, we will eventually just hook you up to an IV that filters your urine and poop. Then you will be self-sustainable and you can just sit in your prison cell apartment all day living your life as a superhero. You'll basically be an individual sewer treatment facility, that turns your waste into your food and water. You won't even have to burden yourself with physically eating or drinking. It'll all just be given intravenously on a schedule to ensure you're getting the proper nutrition.
Plus, in your VR reality you will be able to have a girlfriend. Or even 10 girlfriends. Or maybe even a boyfriend, girlfriend and a tranny. And you'll be able experience all the sexual degeneracy intimacy the mind can fathom.
And all of your sterilizations, vaccines, opioids and hormones life-saving medications that keep you safe will be put into your IV whenever your discreetly implanted nanochip records indicate you're due for them.
You won't have any responsibilities, and nobody will be able to hurt your feelings. In VR, nobody is allowed to use bad words, or make fun of people. Everyone is whoever they want to be. Because reality is a social construct.
In a couple hundred years, the sixth extinction will be complete and humans will be gone from the planet. All of the destruction and carnage humanity did will be reversed. Then the elites good humans who moved to space will be able to visit their vacation homes on earth, and experience the planet in its natural form.
And anyone who says that VR isn't reality is just a climate change denier who is also probably a Christian, anti-vaxer, racist and conspiracy theorist. But don't worry about them, they'll be rounded up and put in prison probably get sick from a virus or die from a climate change event.
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