Our ability to create images and impressions that deceive the senses via technology has grown by leaps and bound lately. Computers hit the scene less than seventy years ago. Thirty years ago, graphics were still limited to dots and lines. Now we can create a photo-real digital images of nearly anything, and photo-real movies are rapidly becoming a reality. This trend will continue. Our ability to make CGI images that ape reality must improve, given how much we’re investing in it. At the same time, we’re learning more about the human brain, and thus we’ll become better at having computers interact with that brain. Given these trends, I’d say that total virtual reality (TVR) is inevitable.
What do I mean by total virtual reality? A computerized experience, in which the technology provides inputs to all the senses, that is indistinguishable from real life. A state where the user has no way of knowing that what they sense doesn’t exist in the physical world, only in a virtual one.
Having reached a state where the TVR technology exists, economics will guarantee that it becomes available to people. And some people, I rather imagine, will want to use it to flee reality entirely and substitute a digital experience for any real experience. Could this be done? I see no reason why not. All you need is a TVR headset and possibly some other equipment to make the experience real, plus an IV to keep your body nourished and some other medical means of dealing with bodily waste. If you had enough money to pay somebody to maintain all this equipment for the duration of your life, you could just step into the TVR and kiss reality goodbye.
Here’s the debate question: would it be moral to do such a thing?
I say no. It’s been a general agreement in all societies that avoiding reality is morally wrong. (Except possibly in a few weird tribes and cults.) Most cultures condemn hallucinogenic drugs. More relevantly, we disapprove of people who create their “own little worlds”. Some rich crackpot who decides to build a property where he or she stays totally cut off from reality and constructs a fantasy scenario instead is frowned upon. In our culture, Michael Jackson creeps people out because he did exactly that. There’s a general agreement that such behavior is a sign of moral decay and societal decline.
What say you?