This is a long, rambling mess, but I think it has some good ideas.
My process of thinking remains greatly influenced by Edward de Bono. I was actually at one time a certified teacher of the Six Thinking Hats method. Never made a dime on it–well, a couple hundred dollars–but I think he is the one who really implanted within me the idea of heuristics, of which the Six Thinking Hats is an example. So too is Plus, Minus, Interesting: what is good about this, at least potentially, what bad, and what interesting?
Imagine if all universities did PMI’s consistently on both Capitalism and Socialism. Socialism–what I think I may start calling Anti-Individualism–would not stand a chance. Not if enough history were added to the equation (White Hat, in the other heuristic).
What they do, in practice, is M on Capitalism, and P and I on Socialism. They focus on what doesn’t work here, and what COULD work in some planned future civilization, which they find very interesting.
It is baffling to an average intellect like mine why the focus would not be on figuring out what HAS worked–why our poor live better than the kings of old (who did not have cars, computers, telephones, reliable indoor plumbing with hot and cold water, air conditioning, and a host of other things, including penicillin)–and doing more of it.
Be all that as it may, I wanted to talk about virtual experience, which I think we need to recognize as a very important social experiment, one whose full consequences are very complex and still emerging. I’m sure there is a huge literature on this, one I am unfamiliar with, but which has college level classes taught on it. I read–and presumably completely misunderstood, since I now know I misunderstood nearly everything I read in my teens and twenties–Marshall McLuhon’s “The medium is the massage”.
What he might have said, and which I now WILL say, is that there is a fundamental difference between sitting around a campfire, listening to a story telling, reading that same story–now made permanent–in a book, seeing that story acted out on stage by actors, and seeing that story enacted by actors in your living room. Both book and film lack interactivity and spontaneity. They cannot evolve. A story can be new to you once, but not twice (although of course if you wait long enough, much of the plot will seem new to you; I watched The Shining because I couldn’t remember most of it).
If you figure that the average American spends some obscene amount of time every day watching TV–I fear it is something like 8 hours–and that kids watch AT LEAST that much, and likely more, you have to grant that LARGE segments of our cultural and social experience are virtual. They are not real, in the sense of being interactive. I could spend the rest of my life in my man-cave interacting with virtual people, whose lines never change.
[I am wandering, which is sometimes useful. Ideas come to me. What if you filmed and acted out 15 different versions of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and the version that played was random? What if sitcoms were filmed live and viewers sent in suggestions during commercial breaks? What if the same setup were done 20 times, 20 days in a row, with a different result every time?]
[Squirrel]
In my game Assassin’s Creed, they have on-line events. I don’t hook up to the internet, because that would be one more damn thing the NSA could look at. I’m quite sure they have the money and know-how to develop predictive indexes and psychological profiles based on how people play these games.
But to return to the point, I could theoretically assault a fortress with my buddies, who are playing the same game at the same time. All of us, virtually together. What is good about this, what bad, what interesting?
Well, with all life questions, I guess you need a tool, a heuristic, to answer that question. We must define good.
What is the purpose of life? My personal answer is “to cultivate Goodness”, which I define as “a volitional character disposition in which you can live happily by yourself, and are capable of sharing the happiness of others.” As I recall, I also defined it as “sharing happiness gladly”. That is shorter. Logically, to share, you must possess.
On the plus side, then, you are doing productive virtual work together, which creates a bond of shared purpose, and thus connection.
On the minus side, you are sitting in your underwear in your parents basement, eating Doritos, and no actually useful work is being done. You are not helping anyone do anything real.
Interesting: how effective is this at building and supporting actual, real world friendships? You don’t stay in the basement forever. You have coffee or something together.
Overall, though, and I am well aware I am meandering, how much do we mistake the virtual world for the real world? What part of our brain sees real people as virtual, and virtual people as real? Do the two get confused on some deep psychological level, and does this denigrate the purpose of developing deep satisfaction with life, and an enveloping web of beneficial social relationships? Does virtuality foster and support alienation?
I must say, I feel a vague sense of dread when I see little babies playing with iPhones. I have seen kids still in strollers twice in the past few days playing video games on (I hope) their parents telephones.
Do you not feel that this is a social experiment whose long term effects are completely unknowable? My gut sense is that it will affect their empathy; their capacity for emotional self regulation, absent these devices they have become addicted to; and their overall capacity for happiness, understood in a deep sense. They are born addicted to crack, and will only give it up with great reluctance and effort.
And of course there are several qualitative leaps being proposed in virtuality. Step one is just a linear progression of the present. Microsoft already has these things you stand on, and you put virtual reality goggles on, and you “walk” and move in a 360 degree range of motion. When you kill someone, you are actually moving your hands, making the neurological match even more precise between reality and imagined reality. What does this program? Other than correcting the ennui of the uncreative, what concrete social good does this serve? I am open to persuasion, but I wonder how such a person could be happy in a log cabin on a pleasant spring morning in a beautiful valley, sipping coffee, without an electronic device for a hundred miles. And that capacity, in my view, is central to what is important in being human.
And I wonder, too, what thousands of hours spent playing video games looks like in a life review, when we die. I think I’ve commented on this before, but do the moral decisions made in video games affect our actual characters? On the one hand, I think if we can achieve catharsis of some sort, get in contact with and heal some energy that needs healing . . .
[this is my own goal in playing these games, in addition to what I read are some mild neurological benefits. Actually, for me, personally, also doing something just because I want to. I am a very compulsive person, and have always had great difficulty doing things just because I wanted to. I don’t play. In a formal sense, play that is useful is a socially connected integration of our frontal cortex and our fight or flight response, and this is not that, but if we define play as “undirected activity”, or better yet “autotelic activity”, pace Csikszentmilyi (?), then it would still apply]
[Sorry]. . . then this is good. But most people get addicted to these things, and roll right by whatever cathartic effect there may have been, and may in fact wind up reinforcing negative patterns, particularly of avoidance.
Then there are those who preach of The Singularity, the atheists Great Hope. Imagine you can be anywhere and do anything. You can be Ultron, and exist virtually everywhere. You can know anything, be anything.
Is this good? Is this empowering? To the fans, of course, self evidently, how can I ask this question? Stupid, stupid, stupid. And I suppose if did in fact view the body as a machine, this would make sense to me too. What else do they have?
But I would say this: multiplicity of experience is no match for QUALITY of experience. It may be that the best possible human experience would be sitting on a front porch in a mountain valley with people you love, feeling connected with God and all of creation. Because we ARE connected. This is science, even if most mainstream scientists lack the balls and vision to realize this and do the research needed to map out the hows.
But could a machine reproduce this? It seems to me that as we begin piecing together the actually mechanical components of our experience–how various hormones, neurotransmitters, and status of our nervous system affects our experience–that we can develop drugs that mimic the physical component of certain experiences. You can create an out of body experience, for example, with ketamine. It is my understanding that stimulating certain parts of the brain creates a “God Experience”. And of course taking LSD and mushrooms and peyote–which are physical substances, composed of knowable chemical elements interacting in ways we will eventually understand with our neurochemical functioning–create and have always created “mystical experiences”.
But (I contain multitudes, many of them contradicting the last) we are also energetic beings. We are light beings. What I would submit is that what neurochemical reactions do is merely open up to conscious awareness existing realities. It may be that the role of the part of the brain which opens us up to the God experience actually works in general to BLOCK the God experience. It is a step-down transformer, whose function can be temporarily suspended.
In my current Kum Nye block, we are trying to open up to space. One of the exercises was to do certain movements, and then feel the connection of my body with surrounding space, then expand my “body” into space. You can do this. You can feel this. And I felt this strong sense of the improbability of my body existing in a stable form. Every atom in your body is filled with space. Every atom in your body is in constant motion. Everything in our bodies is in constant motion, is in a constant process of creation and recreation. I feel this.
And space itself is full. It is filled with energy, oceans of energy. This is a BASIC postulate of Quantum Physics, one of the most successful physical theories ever developed. The space in our bodies exists in a much larger space. They talk in the lectures of feeling “space meeting space”. I think this is what they mean.
I will offer a story I read long ago, in my teens, titled “With Friends like these”, by Allan Dean Foster, which I will offer as a model, before contradicting myself. In that story, the gist is that everybody on Earth lives in scattered, bucolic communities. They use oxen and metal plows, and make most everything by hand. They live simple lives. But we come to find out that they possess immense power. A small child points a stick at threatening aliens and their ship and they disappear in ash. The entire center of the planet is filled with machines. The whole planet is connected telepathically, lives in harmony, and has no government.
Here is the short story: http://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2b79sa/text_with_friends_like_these_alan_dean_foster/
I was impressed then, and remain impressed with this model. All unplanned physical difficulty is removed, but the dignity and beauty of simple physical work is retained. Peace becomes an active process (although at some point one does say “It’s been so long since we had a decent war”).
This is where I would contradict this. Do we need the machines? If we can find conclusive evidence of the survival of death–and it would in my view only take a few years of dedicated research to provide all the proof needed, which indeed largely exists NOW–and we are not threatened by aliens, why not create a global simple life, viewing this world, as we should, as an inferior version of what we are all destined for? It is a stopping place, a training ground, nothing more. Why not make it more efficient?
If you are going to dream, why not go all the way? I can be accused of many things, but thinking small is not one of them.