It might have been Bill Maher who noted that if they could manufacture a drug that made you feel as though you were fucking Kate Boswell it would make crack look like aspirin and it is hard to deny but it is here (though not a drug) and within my life time I think it will exist.
Facebook’s two billion dollar “the Oculus Rift VR headset” is gonna change your life and I am not sure if it will be for the better or for the worse. Dubbed game immersion it is a 360 gaming console that can be worn in bed and makes you feel as though you are literally there. According to contact.com , “Oculus VP of Product Nate Mitchell explained, “We have a demo where you’re standing on the edge of a cliff and your knees actually lock up subconsciously.”
I have actually tried one many years ago and while the one I tried was in its infancy, and the world I was immersed in was a cartoon world, still, it was like you were actually there. And that was in the mid-1970s.
Once these become what they will become, life is over. We will become pods. If reality can be tailored to our desires, it won’t be a game, it will be real life. Who wouldn’t resist, who couldn’t resist a world where they can have any one, do anything, rule everywhere: a world where they are the greatest. And more, since it is fiction, it is a world where their dreams, if they want to chop off children’s head s and eat them for dinner, well so what? So it, you’re not hurting any one.
Be King or queen, beautiful, young… anything you want but it won’t be real.
And so you end up with an answer: “what is real?” Since we are only around for a hundred years, why spend it dong anything BUT DREAMING. It doesn’t matter any way. Go on, die today. Do it. What the hell difference does it make? Nothing matters so why not have a blast. If there is no difference between virtual existence and real life, why bother with real life at all.
And music? Fuck loving the Beatles, you are the Beatles. You wrote “I Wanna Hold Your hand” and if all that interactive stuff, all the making decisions is too much, there will be programmers to hanfle it for you.
We have been building to this and now it is here. Sure, it will take a couple of decades to figure it all out but then? Then you can take your summer vacation from your bed; then you can get married and have kids and instead of being happy or unhappy YOU CAN DOWNLOAD A DIFFERENT FAMILY.
It goes back to the meaning of your life because even if you believe in God and heaven and hell and all that stuff, how can even the most intense 100 years of evil equal eternity of punishment. Look at eternity this way: our solar system has been around 4.5 Billion years and compared to eternity 4.5 Billion years is a blink of the eye. Does that give you a clue as to the time frame of eternal damnation in comparison not to eternity but to a blink of the eye of eternity?
So be clear: nothing that happens to us here matters in the slightest.
Given that reality, virtual reality seems a fair and equitable way of dealing with our mind bending insignificance. If we must be aware how little we matter, how completely useless and irrelevant EVERYTHING IS, why not have fun playing games that make us believe otherwise.
I mean really, isn’t that what we’re doing any way? Playing games that make us think we matter when we don’t? So obsessed with our feelings when our entire species is in the process of committing mass suicide, perhaps the mass illusion of immersion virtual reality is preferable? Certainly for most people. What’s the difference between playing a game where we rule the world and playing a game where we go to heaven. I am not an atheist, but there is no way not being an atheist means I can embrace the silliness of hell.
If indeed there is a God and it does indeed punish us with a minimum 4.5 BILLION YEARS OF DAMNATION for a 100 years of evil, the god is clinically insane and you are better off as far away from it as you can get. Did I say 4.5 Billion years? 100 BILLION YEARS IS NOTHING COMPARED TO ETERNITY.
The question of virtual reality is simply this: which way are you happier. Nothing else makes the slightest difference. Look: let’s stick on our virtual reality gaming headsets, and float into an alternative reality, leave the planet to the animals who don’t have to drive themselves crazy and phase ourselves out.
