Penetrating The Brain-Body Barrier — Dystopian Visions for the VR of Our Future
A baroque projection of death, murder, and more, into technologically simulated realms. The future we might see.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” -Hassan-i-Sabbah
Breaking Through
VR will become more popular and realistic in the coming years. Currently, VR systems are external. They seek to create a simulated outside reality, as sound, sight, and touch.
The first bypass that needs to happen for a VR revolution will follow from stimulating the brain directly. We have already seen progress in these technologies.
The field of neurotechnology is on the rise, and once its more utilitarian precedents have been established in medicine and practicality, it’ll be appropriated by VR programmers and designers — to manufacture new realities, for their consumers.
Advancements in modern technology will spur a newly galvanized entertainment industry. It will be a new form of recreation altogether, though one should be reluctant to call it such, considering its gravity.
We can expect aesthetic appeal in these programs to cover two broad ranges of offerings for assimilation.
On the one hand, we will find the hyperreal: the ultimate simulation of experiences all too real to us, yet unobtainable for our present life situation.
A life unlived — lived through VR. It will not be our life, but it will be a life.
The other aesthetic side will focus on the surreal, the fantastical — what couldn’t ever be possible for us, filtered through a convincing but ultimately illusive fireworks show, encoded on the neural level.
This will not be life, it will be phantasmagoria itself.
Here are some examples and analyses of what we might see.
The Human Swan Song
Death: how many dreams have we had, how many daydreams that have taken us to that pivotal, gasping moment — and beyond?
As terrifying, as fascinating, and realistic as those visions in our imaginations may be, technology will exponentiate on that capacity for inner experience.
Computing power and brain stimulation apparatuses will develop like freight trains in time, at equivalently blistering speeds.
In the coming decades and centuries, VR enthusiasts will become well-acquainted with viewing and wholly assimilating awareness of the edge of our mortality.
The result: we will no longer fear the end when our day truly comes. Our real death will seem like just another illusion to us.
An Intimate Obscenity
Sex: humanity’s obsession with it is as old as time, and it has grown, continuously.
Considering its proliferation is a simple way to turn for hints at the direction erotic VR will take — how focused we are on developing AI to be like us, love like us.
Future steps will allow consumers to indulge in fetishized, elaborate sexual scenarios. The sex robot will seem clumsy and crude by comparison.
VR will provide a seamless interface, an extension of our already-approaching-incorporeal selves, as we become more plugged into technologies.
The VR world of erotica will be more detached from what we could imagine doing in person.
There will be an increasing disjunct between the flesh and the mind. How much of love, sex, eroticism is in the mind?
Far-future VR will extend the limits of this, of what is conceivable, and permitted. A dividing line will be drawn in the sand that people will or won’t cross.
No matter how real it seems, when you enter those virtual worlds, what you’re experiencing is not real. People will become more and more addicted to a lie.
This line will cut between the sacredness of sex as something still almost wholesome and pure, to be enjoyed with others, or sometimes even hard-won, paid for, commodified.
And the solipsistic desperation for sensate, immediate pleasure, that is cheap, and fake.
These will be the decisions we face.
The Ethics of Virtual Murder
Violent and shocking video games have persistently dodged any attempts at censorship.
What happens when virtual reality elevates the experience to the next level?
Freedom of expression and lifestyle will soldier on — a lack of censorship will prevail for responsible adults.
An ever-sloping path of transition, for acting out our darkest fantasies and violent impulses, will finally have traction beneath our feet.
More lines will be drawn in the sand about what people will and won’t be willing to do, in the safety of their own simulations.
It will not be real, but to our immediate cognition, there may be very little apparent difference.
The Hero Complex
We may all have latent fantasies of who we would like to be — if we could be anyone: a rock star, a CIA agent, a martial arts magnate, an elite computer-hacker.
AI and neurotechnology working together will put us inside of another life, one that aligns with how we could be if our imaginations were brought alive in reality.
Of course we will still have our daily existence. One of these two lives will be like an alter-ego. Our time in one world will be limited by our stake in the other. A psycho-social conflict will rage on.
There is at least one reason these will mark such a concrete shift from current video games: sometimes we will forget which of us is the real one. We may even feel that the nature of reality becomes subjective, considering technology.
Even advanced VR today doesn’t allow us to truly forget of its virtual-ness. We’re distinctly aware of the artifice, while in the simulation.
The neurologically stimulated consciousness of being in those constructed realities will be virtually indistinguishable from the external world faithfully delivered by our raw faculties.
A Virtual World
Living another life will be a goal and a possibility. Video games have stagnated for some time, in how much stock we place in them, because the realism is missing. They still feel like entertainment.
Revolutionary advancements will surpass the plateau and allow us to live less illusively inside that world. Thus the line between life and supposed entertainment will be blurred.
We will become divided binarily. Users on the one hand, non-users on the other. The users will have imploded their reality into the VR-powered internal combustion engine of the mind.
Harnessing Electricity
Consciousness will be further reduced by scientists and inventors to electrical signals in the brain.
Of course there will be risks: trauma, mind control, collateral brain damage.
Nevertheless, the capitalistic machine will triumph, and new markets will take shape in virtual space.
The world turned inside out — this is the future we will see.
Control electricity, and you control what is real.
No wonder they call it power.