Ok, bear with me here, cause I’m gonna be doing a little bit of rambling before I get to my debate question. (skip the next paragraph if you want).
I was reading a review of Strange Days where the reviewer mentioned that watching a movie where everyone is plugged into the net via a brainjack would be really boring. So I thought of the matrix, and how if tech like that ever becomes available there’d be people (me probably for one) who’d spend all their time in a matrix type evironment by choice. Which I think could make for an interesting movie, where everyone’s in the matrix by choice, and aware of it, but that’s a digression. Anyway, that got me thinking (and here’s the question):
Question:
If we were plugged into a virtual world through our brains (skipping vr goggles 'n stuff), would we see in our heads like we do in dreams or would we see through our eyes?
When I’m having a dream I don’t usually think that what I’m seeing is a dream, but when I wake how I see what I see is noticibly different from when I’m asleep. If you follow that :).
Intriguing. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t know anything about virtual reality, but here’s my 2 cents. I think that in the absence of VR goggles or something, then folks who plug into a virtual world would get confused by the two conflicting images they see: the virtual world unfolding in their mind’s eye and the real world they see with their physical eyes. At first folks may be able to separate the two conflicting images, but after extended exposure to the virtual reality–especially if they do not surface enough to the non-virtual, real world as a way to take a break from the virtual world–the virtual world may become more “real” than the world folks observe with their physical eyes. I guess folks could project the virtual world onto the physical world and convince themselves that they actually do see the virtual world with their own eyes, but I don’t think that folks are capable of seeing a virtual world in the same manner that they use their physical eyes to see the physical world. Man, what a scary thought. [shudder] Okay. I’m going to stop writing now because I’m starting to confuse myself. I hope this makes sense.
If someone thinks what they are seeing is real, then to that person, it is real. The “reality” we speak of is really just our brain’s interpretation of the five senses, and who’s to say we interpret it “correctly”.
daddy-o, I imagine we don’t interpret what our five senses transmit to our brains correctly. Yes, perception is reality for the individual, but I thought what Silentgoldfish–cute name, btw–was getting at is two things:
1.) What’s the difference if there is any between what we see in our brains or mind’s eye when we dream–that means with our eyes closed and us being in another state of consciousness-- and what we see with our physical eyes when we are awake. Of the two states, waking or dreaming, which level of perception translates more into a virtual reality experience?
2.) What does virtual reality say about an indivdual’s power to control the images s/he sees? Yes, initially there is some level of control because the OP mentions that the person chooses to immerse him/herself in the virtual world and s/he wouldn’t obscure his/her own physical eyes from the chance to view the physical world with goggles. But I think that after that initial freedom to choose to immerse the self in a virtual reality, the person loses control over his/her ability to validly/correctly perceive anything. That person is passively sitting back and viewing and perhaps accepting/believing another person’s interpretation of a reality. Perhaps they will think critically about the validity of the images they are perceiving in the virtual reality, but perhaps not.
Anecdote: A friend of mine volunteered to do a virtual reality experiment. He put the goggles on and was placed in a room. I think he saw the room before he put the goggles on, and it was an ordinary room. He was directed to put the goggles on and walk around the room. In the virtual reality that was presented to him in the experiment, he saw that a few feet away from him was a cliff, and that if he stepped over it he’d fall. He told me it scared him to death because even though he’d seen the room he was in and he knew he was doing a virtual reality experiment, he ACTUALLY BELIEVED that cliff was there, and he couldn’t make himself step off that virtual “cliff,” even though he’d perceived the reality of the solid room. Scary. Now of course, I don’t know how realistic the virtual “cliff” was that my friend perceived, nor am I really sure what that experiment he volunteered for was designed to test, but what my friend told me about how he reacted to the virtual reality that was presented to him, still gives me cause for concern.
I think there is a difference between what we see with our physical eyes and what we see with our mind’s eye in the absence of stimulus from our physical eyes. What we see with our mind’s eye, whether we’re dreaming or immersed in a virtual reality is really based on what we remember observing from a reality we observed with our physical eyes. What scares the hell out of me is that virtual reality appears to be more about the potential to remove the control an individual has over the active interpretation and presentation of images.
I’m sure either is a possibility. Realistically, everything we see/hear/feel/etc. is just a bunch of funny electrical bursts going off in the neurons in our brains. If those neural pathways could be intercepted and properly altered, then - theoretically - we should be able to experience VR as if it were reality (assuming a computer powerful enough to accurately recreate the electrical signals). Most likely, however, there would be glitches and discrepancies that would clue us in that VR is not real.
It’s possible that the absence of discrepancies would be more obvious.
(Since at the moment this is all fanciful speculation, I don’t feel guilty dragging up SF scenarios); in a story called (IIRC) Visiting The Dead, dead relatives are reconstructed in VR and people could plug in, immerse themselves in the enviroment and go and talk to their lost loved ones; the problem of making the whole thing convincing is overcome by lifting all of the details from the participant’s memory, so that curl of hair on their forehead is exactly as you remember it, the precise shade of blue of their eyes is exactly as you remember it and so on (although what you experience may not be consistent with real events and objects).
It’s possible that, if VR ever does get to the ‘plug into brain’ level, that it can be made either subtle enough to allow your own brain to fill in the small but important perceptual details, or it could do like in the story.
In (speculative)reality, I think that even the best VR will give itself away as false due to product placements or advertisements.
This is true. If the system were plugged directly into your brain, it’s possible that you could, A: receive too much sensory information too quickly, instead of having “degraded” signals that traveled through your nervous system to arrive in your mind split seconds later, and/or B: have too perfect a memory of what is going on, again, since the “sensory signals” would be pumped directly.
I imagine that any such computer regulation of the VR simulation would need to compensate for any “too perfect” flaws such as this.
I’m not a scientist either, but I guess the brain must be able to somehow pick which image it wishes to “see”.
People under hypnosis can be made to “see” things that contradict what their eyes tell the brain. Similarly, sleepwalkers can bumble about with their eyes open, “seeing” something very different from reality.
Interesting! As mentioned, everything we perceive, including sight, touch, sound, etc., actually already takes place inside our brain. When you burn a cigarette hole in your hand, there is no pain in your hand; the pain is actually created in the brain and assigned to the hand.
So I suspect that a true jack-in style VR environment would probably be indistinguishable from reality (as you say it, “seeing with our eyes”, although it is actually our brains that perceive the image). Or it would be indistinguishable if a way was found to project data accurately to the brain without intermediary nerve receptors (right now VR relies on our hands, eyes, etc.).
When our own brains create images, for example during sleep, you usually note there are slight problems, “noise” as I like to call them. Typically dream physics are completely off, as is perception. I think VR would want to cut that out completely, or we would have crowds of VR enthusiasts stumbling around virtual reality wondering why when they try to run they don’t move, why they find themselves falling all the time, or why that callimastean bombshell never quite goes all the way, damnit.
What I’m trying to say is that perception is a horribly complex field, and as far as VR goes we have no other delivery mechanism in sight beyond the gloves and goggles (or variant thereof). It would be difficult to imagine how we would react to more advanced technology. Not much of an answer I guess, but we just don’t know enough our own brains to tell.
It might be strange at first but I think our minds can adapt fairly quickly to new stimulii. Apart from that, our brain fills in les than it just plain leaves out! Many wonderful experiments have demonstrated this, though the one I can think of offhand is the following setup:
Head firmly “bolted” in place, strapped to a bar. I would expect it to be not entirely comfortable, but immobility of the neck is mandatory. Next we set up some lasers that hit your eyes from the side (so you don’t see them). These are there to detect movements.
Now, on the screen in front of you is a large block of text… longer than the screen, in fact, so you can keep reading. Read away, my friend!
Oh, did I forget to mention that every time you move your eyes the program is set to switch words on the screen? Thus, “monitor” might be replaced by “display” (same word length, still making a sentence that makes sense to read). You never notice a thing! You’re just reading away, enjoying such an engaging but possibly wandering piece of text.
Anyway, my point is that we trash a lot of what we perceive. Necessarily, too, because we can perceive a lot of information and we simply cannot process it all (there are some retinal cells, I believe, which will “fire” even when a single photon strikes them!). So yeah, a pipeline into our brains might seem awkward at first, but if it supposed to represent the real world and we know it is supposed to represent the real world, pretty soon I’d bet it will represent the real world.
As far as it being “too perfect” I don’t think that is really a concern of the pipeline but of the computing power of our VR set-up and its ability to render textures. The “perfectness” comes from not having enough memory or processing power to make everything so individualistic, not because we might perceive more. Our machinery is going to get (almost exactly) the same signals and pay attention to them or ignore them in prety much the same way.
Myself, I always assumed that we wouldn’t bother piping things directly to the brain for VR–why not commandeer the existing sensory input channels? It seems to me that it’d be easier to tap into the optic nerve, etc. and simulate the impulses the brain would receive from the real eye than to try and directly stimulate nerve cells in the brain itself to produce the same results. This would eliminate some of the “too perfect” problems you’re discussing, I think…? Correct me if I’m wrong.
It seems to me that the only reason you’d need to tinker directly with the brain itself would be to do stuff like instant learning (like in the Matrix) or if you wanted somebody to experience something that couldn’t be simulated using the existing senses. (Directly trigger a memory, induce an emotion, etc.) Neither is really necessary for VR-type stuff, which I think is what’s being discussed here.