The Dream of Virtual Reality

I think most of us can attest to the fact that a dream can sometimes linger in our imagination, for good or for ill. It may haunt us with its sweetness or with its strangeness. We may wake relieved or disappointed, and through the day we remember it with longing that wrecks our heart or an uneasiness that disquiets our mind. So, while a dream is a ... See more

“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.” 

Every progress in science in the last decades, from the moment it was absorbed into technology and thus introduced into the factual world where we live our everyday lives, has brought with it a veritable avalanche of fabulous instruments and ever more ingenious machinery. All of this makes it more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything... See more

Indeed, the power of the dream lies in its ordinarily immersive quality, and, while virtual reality is often touted as an immersive media experience, it remains still, as far as I can tell, a comparatively inelegant, awkward, and sometimes disorienting experience. Additionally, of course, you potentially encounter other people in virtual worlds, al... See more

I’m not sure how common this way of thinking actually is, but, whatever the case, this strikes me as a rather banal observation if all Chalmers means by it is that virtual reality exists. Of course it exists. Of course the experience of putting on VR goggles and navigating a VR environment is a real, genuine experience. What matters is the specific... See more

Chalmers’s argument, then, is anchored to his expectation of dramatic technological advances. In order to argue that “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,” he must presume that the technology will yield a subjective experience that is basically in... See more

In Chalmers’s vision, we would, as Arendt feared, 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 ... See more

Chalmers explains that “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.” “The virtual worlds we’re interacting with,” he adds, “can be as real as our ordinary physical world. Virtual reality is genuine reality.”

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? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? H... See more