Generative Reality: The Dawn of Mind-Crafted Worlds
Imagine something in your mind. It could be anything at all: an apple, a moving car, or yourself looking out across a beautiful landscape. Do your best to make it as vivid and realistic as possible.
You are probably able to visualize such an image on command, but it’s probably one which lacks the crispness and depth of the world outside your mind. You see the scene, but you are not there. Moreover, it doesn’t feel real.
But what would happen if the images in your mind felt so real that the boundaries between your imagination and reality started to blur?
Now, imagine if you can, a technology which could increase the vividness of your inner world to equal or surpass that of the external world. To a level where you are able to generate entire worlds within the confines of your own mind, in a way which feels entirely real. Welcome to Generative Reality.
The Mind’s Eye: The Key to Limitless Possibilities
What you just did in the above exercise was to use your mind’s eye to generate mental imagery.
The ‘Mind’s Eye’ is our ability to fabricate images, sounds, and scenarios within the confines of our minds. It’s the canvas on which we daydream, visualize, and imagine. ‘Mental imagery’ are what we call the experiences that the mind’s eye generates.
What you just did in the above exercise was to use your mind’s eye to generate mental imagery.
The Spectrum of the Mind’s Eye
The range of this ability is vast and varies greatly among individuals. Some people experience what is known as ‘hyperphantasia’, and are capable of conjuring up detailed and vibrant mental images that seem almost as real as the world around them. When visualizing a sunset, they can see the brilliant hues of red and orange in great detail. Some can even feel the heat, or hear the waves crashing on a nearby beach.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who experience what is known as ‘aphantasia’, and who live completely without mental imagery. They can think about a sunset, but they can’t see it in their mind’s eye.
Most people fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They are able to generate mental imagery, but it often lacks the vividness and sensory depth of external reality. They can imagine a sunset, but the image is somewhat fuzzy and lacks the crispness of reality.
Why do we even have a Mind’s Eye?
No matter where we find ourselves on this scale, the mind’s eye is useful to us in a myriad of ways. From planning our future actions to recalling past experiences, mental imagery plays a crucial role in how we navigate our lives. It allows us to simulate different scenarios and outcomes in our minds before we act, helping us make decisions and solve problems. Moreover, it aids our creativity, enabling us to invent new ideas, create art, or invent stories that go beyond our immediate reality. It even plays a role in how we regulate our emotions.
What is Generative Reality?
Generative Reality (GR) is an umbrella-term for all the tech and science efforts to harness our mind’s eye. It aims to augment our interactions with our mental imagery, and to use this for our betterment.
Imagine being able to visualize with such clarity that the images feel just as real as the world around you, and then applying this towards creativity, problem-solving and improving mental health. That is the promise of Generative Reality.
In order to unlock this promise, we need to navigate the many pitfalls such technologies will have. This level of power over our internal reality comes with the same vast level of responsibility. We’ll return to this towards the end of this article, but for now, let’s take a moment to bask in the glory of what GR might entail.
From VR to GR
Generative Reality is the coming use of technology to enhance our mental imagery. In its fully-fledged form, GR is similar to VR, but with an important twist: instead of launching you into an environment that is pre-made for you, in GR the environment is made by you, using your own imagination.
Generative Reality (GR) is the next step beyond Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), as it doesn’t just simulate worlds, but allows for the creation of new worlds that are shaped by our imaginations.
The Streaming Metaphor
In metaphorical terms, Generative Reality can be compared to using a streaming service. Your imagination consists of all the available content, including all the characters and plot therein.
Your consciousness is you, choosing what to watch, and then viewing it on the screen.
Your mind’s eye is the screen itself, and your mental imagery are the pictures moving on its surface. Generative Reality aims to upgrade your screen from a black-and-white 1950’s television, to an 8K, Ultra High Definition Smart TV.
With fully-fledged GR technology, you will be able to not just imagine a sunset over a calm sea, but to actually experience one that is tailored exactly to your liking, complete with the ability to change colors of the sky and the sound of the seagulls. You will be able to control this scene in real-time, change the colors, the weather, the landscape, all the while sensing it as clearly as you would if it was all happening around you.
All this, using nothing but your thoughts to guide the experience.
The Potential of Generative Reality
Being able to see, hear, and feel vivid images in one’s own mind through GR technology sounds neat, but why would we even want such a thing? Is there any purpose behind this, beyond giving us the ability to retreat into our own fantasies?
Generative Reality is in fact a treasure trove of possibilities, going far beyond allowing us to delve into ‘pleasure worlds’ of our own making.
The mind’s eye is a cognitive tool with great potential for improving our lived lives, and GR seeks to further build and improve upon this innate capacity, while also navigating the issues that come with this level of power over our internal realities.
Memories and Emotions
We constantly use mental imagery in the way we model the world to ourselves. These mirror images are imperfect representations, but they allow us to form memories and maps, and in turn help us in problem-solving and decision-making. Generative Reality would allow us to enhance these mental representations, affording us increased abilities in navigating our own lives.
Furthermore, our mental imagery is tied to our emotions, where it serves as an enhancer of both positive and negative states. In this context, Generative Reality has great therapeutic potential. For example, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), widely regarded as the gold standard in mental health interventions, makes use of mental imagery in generating more beneficial patterns of thought and behavior, a process which can be enhanced through GR. As mental imagery is an important driver of depression and anxiety, GR can also aid in the prevention of and recovery from these issues.
Supercharging the Creative Process
Mental imagery also plays a pivotal role in creativity. Whether it’s a painter visualizing their next masterpiece, a musician composing a new melody, or a writer crafting a vivid scene in a novel, mental imagery is often a starting point for creative endeavors. It allows us to experiment with ideas, mix and match elements, and see potential outcomes before we even lift a brush, play a note, or write a word.
Generative Reality has the potential to take this creative process to a whole new level. By enhancing the vividness and controllability of our mental images, GR can serve as a powerful tool for creative exploration. With it, you could walk through the landscapes you want to paint, hear the symphonies you want to compose, or interact with the characters you want to write about, all within your mind.
With the ability to govern these mental images in real-time, GR enables your mind’s eye to become a canvas for creative expression, providing an immersive platform for creative experimentation, revolutionizing the way we create and innovate.
Symbiosis of Mind and Tech: The Engine Behind Generative Reality
While this may sound like the premise of a science fiction novel, advances in technology will render GR a tangible possibility in the years to come. There is an array of technologies currently in development which together point towards this future. One such technology is Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs).
Unlocking Generative Reality with Brain-Computer Interfaces
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), such as those under development by Elon Musk’s Neuralink, have recently (May 2023) been approved for human trials. BCIs are a technology which lets your brain communicate directly with a separate device, allowing you to control it with your thoughts.
Generative Reality technology aims to make use of BCIs to strengthen the neuronal signals involved in generating mental imagery. This could allow for real-time enhancement of our mental imagery.
The potential of BCIs for Generative Reality can hardly be overstated. BCIs could allow us to control and enhance our mental imagery with unprecedented precision. This could open up new avenues for creativity, learning, healing and personal growth.
Moreover, BCIs could potentially enhance our cognitive abilities in other ways. They could be used to improve memory, attention, and other cognitive functions, which could in turn enhance our ability to visualize mental imagery. This would make the experience of Generative Reality even more immersive and powerful.
Neuroprosthetics, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, and Epigenetic Therapy
Advances in neuroprosthetics, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and epigenetic therapy are just some of the other promising technologies that could play a significant role in the development of Generative Reality.
Neuroprosthetics are a type of BCIs that can substitute or improve the functionality of a part of the nervous system. In the context of Generative Reality, they could potentially be used to help people with aphantasia or physical blindness experience mental imagery.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive procedure that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. It’s currently used to treat depression and other disorders, and TMS could potentially be used to stimulate the parts of the brain involved in mental imagery, thereby enhancing our ability to generate and control these images, without the need for cybernetic implants.
Epigenetic therapy, which is the modifying of the expression of our genes to treat diseases and improve our function, also has significant potential to interact with GR. On the one hand, our mental imagery is one pathway to influence our epigenetics. On the other hand, the mind’s eye is known to in some people become impaired due to epigenetic factors, and epigenetic therapy could prove useful in turning the mind’s eye back on.
Generative Reality When?
Getting to the point where we have fully-fledged Generative Reality technology will take time. The brain areas responsible for mental imagery are spread out, and would require very accurate decoding and stimulation, which presents significant challenges.
However, with humanity being in the middle of a revolution in AI and machine learning capabilities, how much time is needed is an open question. We might get to this point much sooner than we think. And when we get there, we better be prepared for what meets us.
The Psycho-Social Landscape of Generative Reality
’This all sounds well and good’, I hear you say. ‘But wouldn’t this be extremely dangerous?’ My answer: You bet your whole ass it is.
I’ve been debating myself on whether this article should even be published, as doing so is potentially letting yet another technological genie out of the bottle. This is the first one with the power to literally grant wishes, at least on one level of reality (our internal one).
I eventually decided to publish this article in classic “If I don’t do it, someone else will” -fashion. I figured that this article, followed by a longer publication series discussing the great possibilities and dangers of GR, would at least be a better way to approach the subject, than to let this technology be developed by for-profit forces without public investigation and debate.
The Purpose of this Publication
This publication has two goals: To discuss the risks and the rewards of Generative Reality, and to spread awareness of what is coming. This way, we will hopefully know how to make wishes more responsibly once the genie is truly out.
In the coming months, articles will be published exploring everything from the ethical implications of Generative Reality, to the near-future technologies enabling it, and everything in between.
As soon as we humans are made aware of a new possibility that is just outside our grasp, someone always inevitably sets out on a quest to grasp it. This publication will make you aware of what we should be grasping for.
Transformational Questions
Generative Reality technology heralds a new epoch in human creativity and expression. It brings with it the potential to profoundly transform ourselves and our societies. As we stand on the precipice of this new era, we need to not only revel in the boundless possibilities, but also to be acutely aware of the responsibilities and challenges involved.
The coming of Generative Reality will present us with significant psychological, social and ethical quandaries, perhaps greater than those we have faced at any previous time in our history.
What happens when we gain the ability to retreat into fully realistic worlds of our own imagination? Worlds which, through GR technology, are made just as vivid as this one, but are under our own sovereign control? As you are probably familiar with the hold that virtual worlds have over us through a medium as “two-dimensional” as a smartphone, you likely have some possible answers to these questions yourself.
Avoiding the Great Addiction
There has been a great deal of public concern over the addictiveness and mind-altering nature of certain forms of social media, and the follow-on implications for our societies. There are also concerns that VR and AR will intensify this trend by increasing immersiveness even further. The advent of GR is naturally going to supercharge this to the nth degree.
From what little we know about those people who experience extremely vivid mental imagery, this imagery can in some cases be intensely addictive and (anecdotally) even difficult to separate from outside reality.
This is something we need to deal with, to avoid a potential scenario where large portions of the population choose to retreat into their fantasies. This would subvert the promise of Generative Reality into a society-crushing ‘great addiction’ that there is little hope of coming out of, and is not what we need at this point in our history.
Preparing for the GR Revolution
And yet, all of these obvious and well-founded concerns are unlikely to be enough to stop the development of GR. And if curtailment is impossible, the question becomes one of how we approach it with as much care and grace as we can muster.
Under this paradigm, the way to deal with GR is not to ban it, but to handle it in ways that lead to good outcomes. Just as with the advent of AI, where AI alignment research is increasingly becoming one of the vital components of AI development in general, we need to take the same approach towards GR, and seek to align it with our interests as fully embodied humans.
Stacking the Odds for a Pro-Human Future
There is a lot of doomerism going around these days, especially in how we relate to technology. Having, for example, seen what technologies such as widespread social media access has done to us over the past two decades, many of us have become understandably skeptical of new developments, as seen in the aversion many hold towards proliferation of AI. In the same vein, a healthy skepticism of GR is definitely warranted.
Simultaneously, we need to view the coin from both sides. While technology can certainly be disruptive, especially in the short term, it has also continuously enabled more wholesome and optimistic futures. As an example, advances in chemistry historically led us to some of the worst horrors of the two world wars of the 20th century. It also enabled us to lead longer and healthier lives through development of new medicines.
Two sides of the coin. Heads or tails. The coin deciding our future with GR is soon going to be tossed. We want to make sure to stack the odds as much as possible to make the coin come out heads (GR is implemented to enhance our ability to navigate the world) instead of tails (GR is implemented as escapism, and used to escape into fantasy).
If we manage this, we will at some point in the future be able to experience the full, magnificent potential inherent in Generative Reality. A future where GR is used to strengthen the way we interconnect with reality, instead of weakening it.
GR brings with it a true paradigm shift in how we understand our own internal world, and indeed in how we understand the boundaries between our internal world and the world around us.
GR in its most pro-human form is not just about consumption, but creation. It empowers individuals to breathe life into their internal reality. The potential risks and rewards of doing so are as limitless as our imaginations.
The Generative Reality Grid
To avoid confusion between this publication and its subject, I’ll sometimes refer to this publication as the Generative Reality Grid.
Generative Reality Grid aims to explore Generative Reality in depth, and especially the risks and rewards associated with it.
If you don’t want to miss out on future articles which go into Generative Reality in ever more vivid detail, subscribe on Medium, and sign up for our Newsletter.
For an overview of Generative Reality, visit the Generative Reality Resources Page, where you will find all articles related to GR sorted and categorized.
The journey to Generative Reality begins now.
