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Guest
Guest
Imagine a perfect virtual reality device. You hook yourself up to the machine- maybe there's a helmet to interface with your brain, some cords to attach to your body, and some other science-fictiony stuff to get it working. You turn it on. Immediately you find yourself in a another world: whatever world you want. The problems you had in your old world are gone. You can do anything.
To me, this sounds close to paradise, but many seem to see it differently. Someone not as enthused as me might say: "yeah, it'd be cool, but it wouldn't be real." Wait a minute. Does it matter whether or not it's real? What does it mean for something to real? The more I think about it, the less I understand the common distinction made between "real" and "unreal".
When people wonder whether something is or isn't "real", they are asking whether or not their thought of that thing is something that corresponds to something that "exists out there", or whether it only exists their mind. If something is real, that means your thought corresponds to the right thing. If something is unreal, either your thoughts correspond to the wrong thing, or nothing.
In the real world, the environment you interact with is matter interacting in complex ways. In a virtual world, the environment you interact with is also matter interacting in complex ways. The difference between the two situations is how the matter relates to the creation of your world. If you compare a real and virtual cup of coffee, one is made of electric currents, transistors, memory cells, and so on, and the other is made of ceramic and paint; but both are ultimately made of the same type of matter everything else is made of. Both virtual and real processes can result in the creation of the same category of thing: in this case, coffee cups. In both situations, there are coherent rules which relate the worldmatter to your perception of the world, and as you interact with the world, you follow these rules in a logical way.
So if both worlds correspond to stuff that actually exists, and if that's how we define real, both situations seem to be equally real.
If realistic VR becomes available to me in my lifetime, I'm going to gigacope and fulfill my own isekai fantasies.
To me, this sounds close to paradise, but many seem to see it differently. Someone not as enthused as me might say: "yeah, it'd be cool, but it wouldn't be real." Wait a minute. Does it matter whether or not it's real? What does it mean for something to real? The more I think about it, the less I understand the common distinction made between "real" and "unreal".
When people wonder whether something is or isn't "real", they are asking whether or not their thought of that thing is something that corresponds to something that "exists out there", or whether it only exists their mind. If something is real, that means your thought corresponds to the right thing. If something is unreal, either your thoughts correspond to the wrong thing, or nothing.
In the real world, the environment you interact with is matter interacting in complex ways. In a virtual world, the environment you interact with is also matter interacting in complex ways. The difference between the two situations is how the matter relates to the creation of your world. If you compare a real and virtual cup of coffee, one is made of electric currents, transistors, memory cells, and so on, and the other is made of ceramic and paint; but both are ultimately made of the same type of matter everything else is made of. Both virtual and real processes can result in the creation of the same category of thing: in this case, coffee cups. In both situations, there are coherent rules which relate the worldmatter to your perception of the world, and as you interact with the world, you follow these rules in a logical way.
So if both worlds correspond to stuff that actually exists, and if that's how we define real, both situations seem to be equally real.
If realistic VR becomes available to me in my lifetime, I'm going to gigacope and fulfill my own isekai fantasies.
