Virtual Reality has been hovering just over the horizons of our education and communication and entertainment media for decades. However, depending on the definition of VR, one might reach back centuries and say various forms of media such as the printing press might be forms of VR. IOW, media that create new models for human awareness, consciousness, and relationship to “the world” are at least partly, Virtual Reality.
But today’s versions of VR, are moving towards the most immersive mediated experience we humans presently know about. As each new form of media has come along, enormous changes to the structure of civilization have accompanied it. One might note that the creation of writing itself, was a core foundation stone for civilization, beginning back in the earliest agricultural city states in the “fertile triangle.”
Each seminal change or addition of new media, has had similar impacts on civilization, ordering and reordering all relationships in the economic and political and religious realms, and the forms of civilization that accompany it.
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Numerous big seminal media driven changes later… today, scientists are now exploring just how deeply disruptive VR might be to our present “common sense” understanding or awareness of who we are as humans, and what civilization “should look like”. Because of current leaps forward in processing power, and portable media immersion devices, and algorithmic analysis of real-time signals, and “BigData”, the impact of full immersion VR is starting to be discerned through scientific experiments.
And it portends another big leap into the unknown for “almost everything”…including of course learning and education. And DIY healthcare. But also in the fundamental ways we understand our “personhood”, “personas”, “self”, “what is real” etc etc.
To research VR a bit, here’s a Google Scholar link for a search “Lanier Virtual Reality“. Jaron Lanier was an early core explorer of ideas regarding VR, said to have coined the term Virtual Reality in 1989, and he has written acclaimed books and articles over the years since then.
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The article below from 4/1/18 New Yorker issue offers an opportunity to become informed on what some scientists are presently doing to establish more understanding of Virtual Reality. That includes exploring its relationship to our current forms of consciousness, and our civilization. We are treated to a report on the author’s actual lab VR experiences of a current set of experiments. The author also tries to convey the challenge to our present sense of “who we are” that his experiences suggest. Here’s my paraphrase below:
To sum up the current research: humans use models created by our brains to construct the world. Virtual reality also uses models to construct a world. There’s much to learn comparing and contrasting those two forms of awareness and consciousness.
In some ways, this is a “marriage” of the esoteric forms of religion… that talk about transcending the self in order to experience another realm of consciousness…with virtual reality based scientific research. Are we ready for this? We’ve certainly watched enough movies based on the stories of Philip K. Dick, who dug deep into our processes of awareness. “We can remember it for you, wholesale” …from the film “Total Recall”…explored how we, in the future, could have a lot of trouble telling the difference between what was “real” and what was “simulated”.
Apparently, that future is here in the beginning stages, and it brings up all sorts of needs for new forms of understanding.
Even as we consult the brains models of the outer and inner worlds, we don’t experience ourselves as doing so; we experience ourselves as simply existing. “You cannot recognize your self-model as a model,” Metzinger writes, in “Being No One.” “It is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it.”
Our mental models of reality are like V.R. headsets that we don’t know we are wearing. Through them, we experience our own inner lives and have inner sensations that feel as solid as stone. But in truth:
Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. . . . You are such a system right now. . . . As you read these sentences, you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model activated by your brain.
Okay, so that might seem pretty confusing at first…what is all the talk about “models”?
He looked at me reassuringly. “This doesn’t mean that nothing is real,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that this is the Matrix—the simulation is running on some hardware. But it does mean that you are not the model. You are the whole system—the physical, biological organism in which the self-model is rendered, including its body, its social relationships, and its brain. The model is just a part of that system.” The “I” we experience is smaller than, and different from, the totality of who and what we are.
What does having that awareness… which seemingly will become ever more widespread as VR tools become common place in the home, workplace, school etc …mean for the structures of our civilization? Millennials grow up connected through mobile devices and worldwide cloud to a Noosphere…to borrow a term from Tielhard d’ Chardin. How has that “changed” or “formed” them into something different from generations before?
IOW, today there’s an immersive “out of body” reality in which people live, as much as, and sometimes more than, the “old style reality” of the pre-communications revolution. You know, before the advent of cloud tools, social media, smart phones, DIY video viewing and production etc.
Yet VR seems to go far beyond what we are presently trying to assimilate into, and appears to be a harbinger of disruption far beyond what we have yet encountered. This will of course have huge implications for DIY learning and DIY healthcare, two huge future vectors, PSA believes, int the future US economy. There is also the potential for great leaps forward in an individual’s capabilities in those areas.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Are-We-Already-Living-in-Virtual-Reality-The-New-Yorker.pdf”]