Imagine that you have access to a holodeck, just like in Star Trek: a complete virtual world with near perfect versimilitude, easily programmable to create any situation you can imagine, including lifelike characters that are basically indistinguishable from real people. I’ll further stipulate that the nature of holodeckery makes it impossible to record or spy upon an adventure in progress; thus, your holodeck experience is perfectly private.
What, in the realm of deviant and impossible things would you want to experience? Death? Murder? Rape? Mutilation? Would it be a good idea or a bad idea to indulge in such scenarios?
It’s commonly accepted that people fantasize about these things, both as victim and as attacker, and that this implies nothing at all about the fantasizer’s desire to actually experience them. I think it’s also plausible that many people would, given the holodeck and the privacy, actually live out these scenarios. It opens up a new world for S+M devotees, and bondage enthusiasts. It (very arguably) provides a safe outlet for those who feel some compulsion to commit these crimes in real life; just as arguably, it provides a training ground for those same people to develop a taste for it that will eventually require the real thing, just as serial killers often start by mutilating animals.
Personally, I’d be very curious to experience my own death in a couple different ways. One ex-girlfriend of mine would almost certainly, at one time, have wanted to experience being raped. It wouldn’t surprise me to find a lot of high school males acting out school shooting sprees.
What would you experience? What would you resist experiencing?