Let’s Create Better Realities: Level 2

The Virtual Animal

The OASIS and the concept of computer generated virtual reality isn’t all that unique because living in virtual reality is kind of our thing as a species.

To be human is to exist largely in virtual reality.

Humans have three characteristics that allow us to live in states of virtual reality:

• First, we’re a highly social and cooperative species. The way we achieve this is by constantly reading in each other’s inner worlds. In psychology, this ability is called theory of mind: imagining and understanding what another person in thinking and feeling. This is not a completely unique human capacity, but it’s definitely a defining human characteristic.
• Second, we have a powerful ability to transport our minds to the “elsewhere and elsewhen.” We can transport our minds into the past and into possible futures. We can also mentally transport into various places and situations. In short, we can cognitively teleport.
• Third, using complex language in addition to these skills, we can generate and spread stories, which are essentially reconstructions or creations of any combination of location, time, characters, and situations. These stories can be descriptions of past events, partially truthful (exaggerated or distorted) representations of past events, stories about possible futures, or even completely fictional stories.

Any of these three abilities allows our consciousness to jump out of the present, the real, physical world, into an augmented or virtual reality. Combined, these three powers allow quite fantastic feats of mental teleportation.

And the hardware that has bestowed us with these extraordinary powers, our brains, also allows for even more fantastic forms of virtual reality: dreams, especially lucid dreams, and psychedelic experiences, utterly dazzling examples of virtual reality.

Without getting too caught up in the why and how we developed these cognitive capacities, evolutionarily speaking, these abilities have allowed bands of humans to cooperate extremely effectively by allowing them to form strong social bonds, to plan ahead, and to learn from past experiences.

Constantly Plugged In: Our Virtual Existence

Our relationship to our mental virtual realities actually tracks closely to the relationship people in the universe of Ready Player One have with computer generated virtual reality.

One significant similarity is the amount of time spent in virtual realities.

Even disregarding the modern era filled with technology and media tempting us with endless virtual realities, we humans have always spent much of our brain hours in virtual realities separate from the real world. Most of our time isn’t spent considering our ambient surrounding temperature, our momentary states of hunger, the safety of our surroundings, etc. It is actually spent in various states of divorce from physical reality. Here are some examples:

• Social Virtual Reality: The state of constantly evaluating and thinking about our peers, friends, neighbors, and tribesmen. We are constantly living in mental models of other people’s relationships with each other, friendships, romantic interests, and rivalries. We are constantly thinking about our children’s progress and emotional states. And so on.
• Stories: We are constantly telling, listening to (mentally experiencing), and retelling stories. From hunting stories, tribal history, to family anecdotes, we are endlessly living in mini virtual realities of stories: learning from them, being entertained by them, being bored by them, etc.
• Cultural Virtual Reality: This virtual reality can be incredibly complex and can take a lifetime to absorb. Cultural realities are a hodgepodge of values (what’s good, what’s bad, what’s valuable, what’s appropriate), history (tribal history/stories), relationships with other tribes (allies/enemies/frienemies), archetypal heroes, and even one’s place and relationship with that culture.
• Mythological/Religious Virtual Realities: Beyond the real world and beyond mental virtual realities exists forces (Gods or spirits) and rules (commandments or divine desires) and events (creation events, floods) that believers must learn about, believe in, and do their best to abide by.

Likewise in Ready Player One, a prevalent theme is the amount of time everyone, especially the younger generation, spends in the OASIS. So much so that the OASIS starts being much more real and begins having much more meaning for humanity than the real world: exactly like mental virtual realities.

Another significant similarity between mental and virtual realities in Ready Player One is the layering of simulations.

The OASIS isn’t the only computer generated virtual reality in Ready Player One. In fact, there are several categories of virtual realities in the Ready Player One universe.

• Activities in the OASIS: Players can participate in all sorts of activities within the main OASIS simulation such as participating in group quests, visiting various worlds, chatting up other avatars, having romantic flings or becoming Gunters and participating in Halladay’s Easter Egg. This category is the mental virtual reality equivalent in the OASIS, where the OASIS is a substitute for the real world and the activities are the virtual realities generated by our minds.
• Simulations within simulations: Players can experience distinct simulations within the general simulation of the OASIS such as a simulation of old arcade games like Pac-Man which players can play using their OASIS avatars. Playing Pac-Man in the OASIS is very similar to playing one in the real world where players attempt to eat as many white dots, cherries, and blue ghosts as possible all the while still being subject to the rules of the OASIS. So just because a player stops to play Pac-Man in the OASIS does not make his/her avatar immune from, say, attacks from another OASIS avatar (unless, of course, Pac-Man happens to be in a non-PVP zone).
• Standalone simulations: These simulations are virtual environments apart from other simulations, running on your personal console or on servers separate from OASIS servers. In Ready Player One, people can experience virtual environments outside the OASIS such as dedicated chat rooms, educational simulations, personal offices, or any of the three gates of Halliday’s Easter Egg Hunt.

These varieties of simulations and games are quite comparable to our present day human realities. We too live in layers of virtual reality: simulations within simulations, participating in all sorts of activities, playing all kinds of games, following endless sets of rules, protocols, and conventions all nested in one other.

Let’s take a simple example: the game of basketball. This is a game with its own rules, actions, and goals. This game can be played in all sorts of simulations. It can be played on a driveway between two people for fun in the context of a friendship. It can be played in a prison yard for stress relief and exercise in the context of a corrections facility or a prison industrial complex (depending on the nation-state, a collective virtual reality, that the prison is located in and depending on the observer’s political leanings, yet another virtual reality). Basketball can also be played in an arena for entertainment and profit in the context of the NBA, which itself lives in the simulation or virtual reality of capitalism.

Another example is that of mythology or religions. These are grander simulation, the overarching reality where supernatural/cosmic forces or powerful/influential people have shaped the real world and existing mental realities of present day. As mentioned before, these mythologies or religions usually have their own rules that believers must abide by. So just as Gunters playing a fateful game of Joust in the OASIS must abide by the specific rules of the game of Joust while on their quest to find the copper key (following the rules of Holliday’s Easter Egg Hunt) all the while the follow the rules of the OASIS, a Christian merchant living in Armenia must abide by the rules of money, commerce, Armenian mores/values, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Christian God.

Yet another fun simulation within all these simulations arises from the ways that people navigate the inherent incompatibilities of all these human simulations (the values of profit in commerce versus the values of poverty in Christianity), which every person, gender, culture, and generation deals with differently.

VR Tech Is Nothing New

So computer simulated virtual reality like the OASIS isn’t an actually the first example of virtual reality. It’s merely the another version (albeit a high-tech, high fidelity version) of millions of virtual realities that humans have resided in for millennia.

Here are just some examples of old-school VR technology:

• Expressive faces: Our expressive faces have allowed us to peer into each other’s minds, transporting us into each others’ thoughts
• Language: Our complex language has allowed us to communicate, construct, and understand complex virtual realities
• Music: Music has allowed us to express and transmit emotions much faster and more viscerally than language transporting dozens or hundreds of us into a shared emotional virtual reality
• Writing/Books: A relatively recent technology, the written word and the even newer technology of books allowed for incredibly deep, detailed, and immersive VR experience that allows the reader to travel through space, time, body, and mind all at once.

The Insanely Virtual Animal

As if it wasn’t clear by now just how immersed humans have been in virtual realities and just how old VR is in our species’ history, two more fun observations:

First, we’re so immersed in VR that it’s often difficult to distinguish the virtual reality from the virtual reality platform. In Ready Player One, this distinction is fairly clear. Haptic gloves, VR headsets, VR consoles, and servers make up the VR platform and the OASIS constitutes the virtual reality (as do other standalone simulations).

But old-school VR can be trickier. For instance, how would one classify symbols? From the the clothing we wear, to the pictures we draw, to the jewelry we don, to the stars that we anthropomorphize, to the metaphors we use, symbols are integral to the human virtual realities. Yet are they the technologies that deliver the virtual reality experience or are they the virtual reality themselves?

Second, we tend to think of the modern era with its pervasiveness of media, technology, and screens as the time when VR has really taken off. Yet VR was historically such a powerful, dominant force that the philosophy which identified it as the obstacle to human happiness, well-being, and enlightenment, Buddhism, and which developed a practice to combat it through the practice of focusing on the present moment, meditation, was developed thousands of years ago!

Buddha was essentially humanity’s collective parent, turning off the television, unplugging the video-game consul, or confiscating the iPhone and telling us to go play outside or interact face to face with our friends!

In the next post I ask what the real reasons are for Ready Player One’s dystopia .

NEXT POST – The Real Cautionary Lesson of Ready Player One: Level 3