So now let's talk about virtual reality.
We have this idea that one of the things that our media does, one of the things the way
that we perceive the world does, is change the nature of how our psychology works.
Our psychology is designed to be adaptive to our environment, and so if I change the
way that we're interacting with the environment I change the psychology, and that has durable
effects.
VR is kind of a big deal.
It represents a radical increase in our capacity to modify the way that we perceive reality.
It's highly immersive, it's multi-modal, so in principle it can be visual, auditory, kinesthetic—I
mean we could layer other things potentially in, with electrical stimulation and olfactory
if we want to—but the idea is that our conscious sense of self-identity, our position in the
world, is actually a relatively loosely held construct.
There's been very good experiments on the way that you can actually cause someone’s
sense of even where their body is in space to just go away and make them feel like they're
15 feet in front of where they actually are, because we're always doing our best job to
integrate the total input of our sensory modalities to make a coherent gestalt of, 'Oh this is
world, and this is self.'
And what VR does is it provides enough fidelity of information and enough coherence of modality
to jack or hack that underlying mechanism whereby we actually create our construct of
self and world.
That's a serious fucking thing.
If you think about the way a little kid interfaces with a film, a movie; for a little while they're
sort of confused about what's real and what's not real when they're observing it, but there's
enough difference between sitting in a chair and watching a video and being in the world
that eventually you learn to recognize and separate the two.
In VR, and as we get better and better at doing it, that distinction goes away.
And this is quite important.
The line between what it means to be dreaming and what it means to be awake is going to
become very interesting, and it's going to become more and more interesting, because
remember VR is just one piece of a generalized consequence of accelerating technology.
So it's not just that we're going to be doing VR, we're also going to be radically improving
our actuation capacity in the world in general.
And so we can imagine circumstances where I might craft an object in VR, and then—say
in quasi-real-time—some mechanism is in fact actually 3D printing that object so then
I reach out, take off my VR glasses and the thing that I thought I was creating in an
entirely imaginary space is actually physically present in my hand.
That's going to cause some very interesting changes in the way that we relate to the difference
between what reality can do and what imagination can do.
And as I mentioned to you in our sort of conversation before this thing started, as a consequence
of all this VR is particularly effective at blowing your mind.
And I mean in terms of disrupting your underlying construct about what the nature of reality
happens to be.
And this is very good news and also extraordinarily bad news.
From the extraordinarily bad perspective it means that VR is extremely well-positioned
to create a designed reality that you're going to have a very, very hard time rejecting.
If you think about the way that propaganda, back in the early 20th century, got good at
understanding how human beings parse information to make decisions and getting in underneath
our psychological defense mechanisms, VR is 100 million times more capable of engaging
in that.
The good news is, is if we do a much, much better job at being—let's call it ethical—at
crafting a relationship between our power to affect the world and the way that power
affects us, so if we do a much, much better job at being ethical around VR, then it will
be the most powerful tool that we have for radically improving the way that we respond
to the world, for upgrading our capacity to respond to the world, because it would be
a much more embodied and whole system hack for our deep constructs.
Does that make sense?