On Virtuality
In series two of Grant Naylor’s Red Dwarf (aka BEST SHOW EVER), shipmates Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Kryten are absorbed into the VR total immersion video game Better Than Life.
Better Than Life taps into the subconscious and allows users to live out their dreams and desires within a virtual setting. From the Red Dwarf Radio Show pt4:
“Better than life was intended to be the zenith of computer game technology. A metal band was placed across the forehead, and underneath it needle thin electrodes punctured the skull and burrowed into the frontal lobes. Tiny computer chips in the electrodes transmitted signals directly to the brain. No screens. No joysticks. You were really there. Wherever you wanted to be. It was only a month after its released that people realised it was addictive…It was the ultimate hallucinogen with only one real major drawback, it killed you. Once you entered Better Than Life, once you put on the headband and the needles wormed into your mind, it was almost impossible to get out. This was partly because you weren’t even aware that you were in Better Than Life in the first place. The game protected itself. Hid itself from your memory. Your conscious mind was totally subverted while your body withered and died…the only way out of the game was to want to leave it. But no one ever wanted to leave.”
User’s imaginations develop semi-plausible explanations to justify certain events. For example, instead of making a large, expensive car appear out of thin, the user’s imagination would create a scenario where they won the lottery, or created a successful business, so they could buy the car. While it is possible for friends to forcibly remove the headset that contains the game, the result is instant death from shock.
In an episode of Batman Of The Future, a similar VR game is played underground and becomes a new drug for dejected teenagers. Highly addictive and highly expensive, the game leaves user’s feeling inadequate about their “real” lives. Desperate gamers lie, cheat, and steal to support their habits and are exploited by the evil villain ‘Spellbound’.
Plausible?
There are already rehabilitation centers and support groups for addicted gamers as well. Yahoo has two clubs devoted to EverQuest or EverCrack as some call it: Spouses Against EverQuest and EverQuest Widows.The latter, which boasts over 1,000 members, has all the markings of a virtual Al-Anon meeting.
Earlier this year, a 19year old Thai man stabbed a taxi driver to death in an attempt to steal his cab and money to support his habit for ‘Grand Theft Auto’. When questioned he told police “I needed money to play the game every day. My parents give me only 100 baht a day, which is not enough”, he is also quoted as saying “killing seemed easy in the game”. (See here)
The lure of gaming has been predicted to result in a mass exodus from ‘reality’ into ‘virtual reality’. Edward Castronova, Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University author of ‘Exodus To The Virtual World’ suggests that “some people will be colonists – “the virtual frontier opens up and off they go and disappear” – others will just use virtual worlds to get together with distant family and friends. But there will be a group of people that spends all their lives there, and that the big question is the size of this group.”(see here)
Behavioural experts are treating virtual worlds as models for real world study. In 2005, a plague called ‘Corrupted Blood’ was introduced to the World of Warcraft game as a challenge for higher-level players. The virulent and contagious disease was accidentally carried out of its virtual containment area causing mass genocide in the densely populated capitals. Researchers from Princeton University used this as a model to study pandemic and were able to pinpoint factors for spreading including the ‘stupid factor’ where “Someone thinks, ‘I’ll just get close and get a quick look and it won’t affect me,’” Nina Fefferman from the Princeton University.
On technology
So there is potentiality and human desire for virtual living, but is the technology there? Funny you ask! Drexel University students have developed a mind control interface to play video games with. 
The device (which looks eerily like the controller in better than life) is a headband equipped with sensors that measure brain activity. By shining near-infrared light into the skull and measuring the intensity of light reflected back, oxygen levels corresponding to brain activity can be recorded. The device, originally developed by Drexel’s biomedical engineers to monitor the brain of patients under anesthesia, serves as a controller for the Drexel-developed video game Lazybrains. Not quite ‘better than life’ this technology is intended for medical applications, especially teaching kids with ADHD tactics for concentration. Sony has already patented the technology to send sensory data directly into the human brain, so movies or games could be equipped with smell, taste, and even touch capacities. Microsoft has also patented the use of the brain as a computer, a brain-computer interface system.
So the prospect of virtual living seems all the more possible. But if we can live online where we can look how we want, get what we want, and feel how we want, why in the heck would we waste our time with the real world?
In Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City’, humans are downloaded or copied into computers at the point of death as a kind of electronic afterlife. Their bodies are abandoned and copies are able to interact with humans in the corporeal world at real time. Using software copies can manipulate their new ‘world’ to align with their own set of physics.
“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain…The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” (Morpheus in The Matrix)
Perhaps The Matrix is an ideal solution in lieu of a deteriorating world. Our Matrix can be programmed to omit famine, disease, and pain. Debate over resource scarcity, global warming, and immigration will be nullified. Our finite world will be abandoned for an infinitely expanding multiverse where time and space are subverted (if not manipulated). If human experience is the totality human perceptions, then we eliminate objective reality. Matter is obsolete. We live contently in Plato’s cave.
…
Just some concluding comments on disembodiment from Eugene Thacker. Katherine Hayles also writes extensively on this topic (re: ‘How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics’). Can human consciousness be translated into an informational pattern, able to flow freely between organic and electric substrates?
One salient feature of such transformations includes the concept of “uploading,” in which the parallels between neural pattern activity in the human mind and the capacity of advanced neural networking computing will enable humans to transfer their minds into more durable (read: immortal) hardware systems (Moravec 1988, 109-10). All of this is made possible via a view of the body that places special emphasis on informational pattern. Once the brain can be analyzed as a set of informational channels, then it follows that that pattern can be replicated in hardware and software systems. As Ray Kurzweil states:
“Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated…. As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be soft- ware, not hardware…. the essence of our identity will switch to the permanence of our software. (Kurzweil 1999, 128-29)”
Hayles shows that the posthuman is founded on a strategic definition of “information.” This modern notion of information-most notably in the extropian concept of uploading-does not exclude the body or the biological/material domain from mind or consciousness, but rather takes the material world as information. This powerful ideology not only informs research in cognitive science but in the life sciences as well. Hayles’s critical point is that informatics is a selective process, and those things that are filtered or transformed in that process-such as a notion of the phenomenological, experiential body, or “embodiment”-simply become by-products of an informatic economy.
From Eugene Thacker ‘Data Made Flesh’
TP
