come on Mike, these are materialists neuroscience nerds... they are doing their own version of shut-up-and-calculate:
“It’s not real, but it doesn’t matter,” Slater said, watching me. “In some sense, it’s a real experience.”
well sure... I mean if you believe reality is "out there" (i.e. outside of yr mind)
happy to host (roast :)) any of them on Skeptiko.
Hey Alex
I mean only that VR opens up ways of engaging that are closer to the metaphysical than the physical. It breaks the rules that tie us to thinking that reality is out there by creating a medium of experience that has no physical location beyond a piece of tech.
I think most tech is analogous of magic, or psi, in any case. It collapses time and space, and negates gravity. Even the humble 'smart phone' gives us the capacity to see and communicate remotely using the least possible physical media. What was once exclusively open to possessors of mysterious powers is available to 'ordinary' folk for the price of a tiny device still anchored in the physical.
Tech opens up what is possible to be imagined, not just assembled as a physical thing. I remember in Mack's
Abduction reading about a woman who complained that ET had 'made' a conference room because they interpreted her desire to 'conference' in a literal way. That's pure VR to me, albeit with a level of sophistication way beyond what we can do.
VR is also the tech version of what we older folk remember as imagination, whether finely honed as visualisation or not. Now you can get even better affects with VR. So maybe its a case of moving out of what we are deluded into thinking of as 'solid' reality in to what we know is way more fluid and tenuous.
Astral travellers report that some folk end up captured in domains of their own beliefs. We seem to go willingly into fabricated experiences via movies using 3D tech and complex sound systems intended to immerse the viewer in a convincing experience. And then the movie is over and they come back to 'reality'. Humans will find any excuse to 'escape' the constraints of the material world.
My VR device used to be a novel.
Of course these nerds are doing materialistic science, but they are dismantling the foundation of their own beliefs as they do so - but don't yet know it. Tech dismantles materialism because it is all based on a metaphysical premise - what we imagine we are is more real and valuable than what we physically are. We are not using tech to help meet biological and physical imperatives, but psychological and metaphysical ones. Tech is dematerialising us. The more it evolves the more the physical (time, space and gravity) is just an annoying legacy of a past that is better transcended and forgotten. Tech heaven is to transfer consciousness into a post biological medium, usually thought to be tech based.
Er, that would be the spirit/soul guys. That problem has already been solved, but you keep on worrying your pretty little materialistic heads about it and keep us entertained - and save us having to imagine stuff.
I like VR precisely because it is a crude analogue for a disciplined imagination. It stimulates discontent with the materialistic, even while imagining it is getting somewhere that has materialistic credibility. The latest data is the we humans are becoming more religious. I do believe that that is partly down to the fact that our tech taps fundamentally religious impulses in us (well apart from blowing the crap out of people we don't like - but even so?). That impulse is magical and animistic in essence and tech validates both - we can know stuff, talk to and see people from a distance, and do so using a tiny device that talks to us. In a century what is that tech going to look like? Will we not seem to be clairvoyant, clairaudient, all knowing and god only knows what else?
VR will get us there - that's what I am saying.