#37. Is VR the human being’s opportunity to tackle Plato’s allegory of cave challenge?
Virtual reality, from the philosophy perspective, does not simply mean a not-real reality. I believe it will be an infrastructure after next generation’s smart devices. It will be a more real reality than the current reality, or the “real” reality that we cannot achieve in reality at the moment. In other words, it will present those things that we cannot access, manage, touch or see in a transformative way, ranging from the spread of knowledge, analysis, appreciation to living experiences.
Human being is an interesting phrase. From the perspective of palaeontology, human beings are defined as homo sapiens, which means intelligent species. In the early 20th century, Johan Huizinga, a Netherland cultural historian, wrote a book called Homo Ludens. In this book, he said that humans as species, are naturally fond of games and love playing. So we can tell that intelligence and games are the two core aspects of human beings and they should also be the directions that human beings are heading for. The future will surely meet these two attributes. The last industry revolution extends human’s arms and legs and five senses. The next revolution would extend the most complicated organ that we have, the brain.
Actually, what we have been doing is to release the potentials of our brains, no matter in the age of computer, Internet, the current smart devices, or in the future AI or VR. The process would probably last one or two hundreds years, just as the industry revolution. As we know, the industry revolution extended our legs, because we invented bicycles, cars and air planes; it also extended our eyes because we created telescope and microscopes. Humans physical characteristics have almost all been extended in the last few centuries. But our brain is still left intact, waiting to be explored.
At least two major changes will happen in the process of next revolution, in my opinion.
One change is that humans will get rid of everything we don’t need. For example, we don’t need to learn how to play chess because we have AlphaGo. We don’t need to learn a foreign language because we have google translate and so on.
The other one is what to fill in human brains once the unnecessary things were abandoned. Here comes VR. VR could be an infrastructure through which humans gain more experience, or something that we could not image today.
These changes are exciting but also require lots of efforts to figure out. Take the software programming for example. At the beginning, our thoughts follow machines, thinking how to achieve physical changes using binary code. Then comes C language, then Java, then R. Now in google, programmers only need to tell the machines their requirements, then the computers could generate the app or services for them. Although designers of VR are still required to follow VR hardware, technology will surely release these limitations, letting programmers focus on their core business logics.
Ok. Let us come back to “reality”. What should we do now? I think we should learn to be a person who can think independently and study in-depth, and become one who is curious about future and loves to explore the future. Only by this way could we embrace the future without being left behind.
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