In a NY Times Opinion piece yesterday (We’re Probably in a Simulation. How Much Should That Worry Us?), Farhad Manjoo comments about Virtual Reality and his interview with David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at NYU:
“Virtual reality is now advancing so quickly that it seems quite reasonable to guess that the world inside V.R. could one day be indistinguishable from the world outside it… Whenever it happens, the development of realistic V.R. will be earthshaking, for reasons both practical and profound. The practical ones are obvious: If people can easily flit between the physical world and virtual ones that feel exactly like the physical world, which one should we regard as real? You might say the answer is clearly the physical one. But why? Today, what happens on the internet doesn’t stay on the internet; the digital world is so deeply embedded in our lives that its effects ricochet across society. After many of us have spent much of the pandemic working and socializing online, it would be foolish to say that life on the internet isn’t real. His upshot is this: ‘Virtual reality isn’t the same as ordinary physical reality,’ but because its effects on the world are not fundamentally different from those of physical reality, ‘it’s a genuine reality all the same.’ Thus we should not regard virtual worlds as mere escapist illusions; what happens in V.R. ‘really happens,’ Chalmers says, and when it’s real enough, people will be able to have ‘fully meaningful’ lives in V.R. To me, this seems self-evident. We already have quite a bit of evidence that people can construct sophisticated realities from experiences they have over a screen-based internet. Why wouldn’t that be the case for an immersive internet? This gets to what’s profound and disturbing about the coming of V.R. The mingling of physical and digital reality has already thrown society into an epistemological crisis — a situation where different people believe different versions of reality based on the digital communities in which they congregate.”
The column’s author Farhad Manjoo, apparently a true fan of The Matrix, speculates that our grandparents might have created a Virtual Reality world into which our parents were born and raised, and that my Boomer generation, and those younger, have never even seen the actual world. For me, that concept rang a distant bell: at certain critical crossroads in my past, I have found myself wondering whether the path chosen, the happy ending, the illness or crisis averted, existed in just one of many alternate universes, and whether, right now, there are other versions of my life simultaneously playing out. (Science fiction writers tend to think in dystopian ways, and should probably read fewer of Manjoo’s columns).
And how do you disprove such a thing? In a way, Manjoo has a point. As political divisions grow ever deeper, those digital communities, or social-network silos, in which different people congregate have lost all connection, like floating pieces of a melting iceberg. They live in their own virtual realities, each equipped with its own set of alt-facts, methodologies, and interpretations of the truth. Most importantly– and this touches on Chalmer’s assertion that what happens in virtual reality “really happens”–they choose real-world actions based on those virtual realities.
In the Metaverse, all versions are equally valid. One person get a booster shot against Covid; another shoots a store guard for asking him to put on a mask. One marches in protest when Republican-led state governments enact voter-suppression laws; another marches against an imaginary flood of voter fraud, exemplified by the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. One government plants trees in urban spaces to cool the city and trap CO2; another faced with climate change, in Indonesia, plans to move its flood-threatened capital city to Borneo, where the construction will eliminate a thousand square miles of forest and habitat for leopards, orangutans and many other species already threatened by human activity.
No wonder Facebook wants to divert attention away from its complicity in the spread of disinformation. Will changing its name to Meta, and shifting its focus to the Metaverse, accomplish this? The answer, I am sad to say, is probably Yes. The American public has a microscopic, minute-to-minute attention span. And then there are the other, more complex interests at stake: short-term investment gains; television ratings; numbers of followers, clicks and “likes” on social media; advertising budgets; not to mention unprincipled politicians with their fingers always in the air, testing the wind.
Speaking of television ratings, I just watched the Netflix movie Don’t Look Up, and was struck by the sheer number of celebrity actors ( Meryl Streep, Leonardo diCaprio, Mark Rylance and Cate Blanchett, to name only a few) helping to sound the alarm about climate change. A five-mile-wide comet due to collide with the Earth (a “mass-extinction event”) within six months, in this movie, represents the catastrophic effect of climate change on our lives and that of future generations.
A fast-approaching comet in the sky is so much more specific and observable to the human eye than climate change, its timeline so much more compressed, that you would expect maximum effort to change its course over the critical six-month period. “Just look up!” scientists plead with the disbelieving public. But corrupt politicians and entrepreneurs counter at huge rallies, “Don’t look up! Don’t look up!”– the crowds take up the chant, and it’s not until the final days that people begin to panic. Staring into the happy world of their VR goggles won’t prevent the comet from striking. Well, at least they won’t have to deal with the equally urgent timeline of climate change, right?
By now, this all sounds painfully familiar, whether it’s a repeated call to follow the science on climate change and Covid, or an angry crowd chanting about freedom while invoking the Nazis and making specious comparisons with the Holocaust. Let’s all put down our Virtual Reality goggles for a moment and take a look around us. On this Holocaust Remembrance Day, let’s not forget the events that really did happen, the facts that really are true, and the immediate actions the world really needs to take.
Fourth World 