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ElvinRath t1_j50z9ep wrote

I know how to answer this one!

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For instance, in current VR, we can do things like killing people and risk our (virtual) lives.

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It is technically possible to do those in real life, but as ChatGPT would say, it would raise some moral and ethical concerns that is important to consider.

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Also, in VR it's probably technically posible to simulate reality bending powers, time travel, planet scale destruction, etc...

Things that are probably not possible in real life. Or not practical, at least...We can't all destroy earth each monday.

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VR should have its place, and real life should have its place too. I mean, I can understand that you don't wanna leave the real world, and I can probably agree with that, but certainly VR offers some things that are just not practical in the real world, or would raise a lot of ethical concerns (And not like the ones by ChatGPT, that it's concerned about everything... real ethical issues, like hurting other people/do things that affect other people... In your own virtual world, nothing of that is a problem.)

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King_pineapple23 t1_j512n17 wrote

With endless possibilities you are really emphasizing in destroying the world

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ElvinRath t1_j51e9qt wrote

Yeah, well, the idea was to mention things that were problematic.

Don't worry, the world is full of cats, I would never destroy it.

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OldWorldRevival t1_j5127i6 wrote

Well... I mean those things are fun and what not. But those are diversions - forms of entertainment, just an expansion of what we already do now, but more complexly, if that makes sense.

That is, they will only add new things to do, forms of empty entertainment. Entertainment itself is rooted in meaning, however! Films, games, movies, TV shows follow storyline, and story reflects lived experience and condenses it.

This is more what I mean. It will add new diversions, addictions and forms of entertainment, but it won't add anything fundamental that we lack without VR.

It's like when people try to fill a void in their heart with things, rather than meaningful experiences with people.

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raishak t1_j51al84 wrote

Simply put, VR will always be more adaptable and cheaper. The goal will not be to unlock a utopian world, but rather to supply the demand for escapism more and more human's desire. This is a physics problem first and foremost. It requires much less energy to represent an experience than to create it physically, as our brains necessarily much smaller in scope than the world they operate in. You can see a mountain and take that experience with you in your mind without having to move the mountain physically.

Maybe it's the cynic in me, but brains and utopia are incompatible. The brain navigates problems. Without the wonders of modern civilization, there is always a problem to solve. In our world, we sometimes don't have anything to do, as the systems around us do so much for us. So, we fill the gap with anything we can find.
"Diversions" as you say, even the "meaningful experiences with people" are this. There are diversions that speak to our more basic drives (start a family for example) that can sustain us for much longer than our artificial entertainment, but many minds "see through this" and find themselves on the losing side of a battle with their mental health. This is not an anomaly, it's the expected outcome of making the brain unemployable. In your utopia, if humans could live healthy for 1000 years, I suspect mental health disorders would be the leading cause of death.

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OldWorldRevival t1_j51qg9j wrote

Well, maybe people would still choose to perish.

I think you make a lot of assumptions about reality that merely come from a subjective sense of objectivity (maybe your intuition for neural nets will help you see what I mean now that we have chat gpt and things like that to illustrate some ways that our intelligence may work).

And, we might very well build systems off of such biases, and the limitations of those biases might make a living clusterfuck nightmare.

Just having been down the nihilist Machiavellian road, learning as much as possible about human nature (which ironically was the path out of nihilism and rationalist naivete), I am indeed concerned about the direction this is all going.

I feel like I am seeing people not only fall for the same traps, but do a worse job at actually seeing their way around such traps within a rationalist framework.

Sociopaths are an interesting phenomenon - people without a lot of the social fabric programming, who end up being very good at manipulating or living in such a space.

IDK. People just don't understand how absolutely pitch black materialism is because they still choose variations of religious thinking to cover up the root nature of their true belief system, without noticing that this is what they are doing.

This is why the fact that a bunch of nihilisits are seeking some sort of escape or self-actualization through transhumanism terrifies the living shit out of me.

I am in touch with the absolutely lost pitch black parts of my soul and the brightest of brights. I understand the allure of power, sadism, control, dominion, lust, as well as the genuine religious drive that actually transcends those things.

I worry that my rights will be horrifically violated by people like you who choose to augment themselves with this technology without fully appreciating their inner nature.

I almost went down the completely opposite road. I am convinced that if I had gotten medication for ADHD sooner, I would have gone down this dark road and would have had the material resources to sustain and satisfy me through it to see myself as one of the wielders of this technology.

Yes, that is what I once pursued, and maybe you can still feel a little bit of my own rationalist arrogance somewhat talking down to people on this sub. But that's why I was choosing to go down such a route - I was getting tired of people with trivial minds for things like philosophy running the world.

And everything I've seen here as a supposed rebuttal or argument to any points here have been painfully trivial while coming from a place of equal arrogance........

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raishak t1_j523uvn wrote

The original discussion was about what could be done with VR that could not be done in reality, but I digressed and commented on the more philosophical reasoning you had about why reality was better than VR.

To respond to this, I'll start by saying I'd be more careful about assuming so much about another person merely through a short text comment. My predictions come from my own small experience watching the world, as do yours. My philosophy is more akin to pragmatism, not nihilism.

Truely the bulk of my response was directed at your last remark, about assigning meaning to a specific type of experience and discounting others. An honest question: what do you propose "meaningfulness" is measuring in human experience? What do you propose quantifies this void you speak of?

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OldWorldRevival t1_j526pmz wrote

The source of meaning, in my view, is also the source of the concept of quantification itself. Heh.

Quantification has limited scope and purview. It gives a subjective sense of objectivity without being innately objective in itself.

Being a data guy.... people ask for numbers and think they mean something because they vaguely make sense..... I've seen PhDs with quantitatively heavy degrees make this error in business..................... "this number looks sort of like what I'm looking for therefore it makes sense."

People misjudge how deeply they are biased, and the bias is very very deep, for everyone, and if you want to be in as rational as possible, you MUST assume this is the case with yourself.

I think seeing the deep irrationality in so-called rationalists started also shifting my perspective a lot kn these topics.

Meaning in general is only possible through human connection. But, meaningful things aren't always intensely pleasurable - they're just painful when absent. I.e. death of a loved one.

There is just a lot we do not know and may be totally unknowable about identity and consciousness. I.e. we might just end up killing people with mind uploading, and we'd have no way of knowing.

There may be something real and important to our reality, and existing in it as it is. Take a look at the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Also, just the hard problem of consciousness in general. Lots of people make a loooot of assumptions about a lot of topics.

As for meaning, it is something that can only be experienced. I.e. I could tell you I've seen a new color (hypothetically), and there would be no way to logically describe or quantify it.

Meaning works in that way. I'd also add... I have in this process of seeking meaning also experienced things that were something like seeing a new color.... i.e. seeing dark purple as a very bright color in a flash in my mind for a moment while listening to JS Bach.

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raishak t1_j53efsm wrote

Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of subjective experiences of other humans as much as your own? Do you acknowledge the same for other species of intelligent animals? Of a plant? What of the individual cells within your body? Do they have subjective experiences? I don't know how anyone can acknowledge that and then consider themselves an atomic consciousness. If you do, where reasonably do you draw the line? I believe you are raising human subjective experience above all others by claiming any human experience is essential. An objective reality can co-exist with a subjective experience of it.

We both agree the red light is red, and that it exists. We can agree because the relation its properties have with our entire experience of the physical world is consistent. I can find some light and measure the wavelength using a photosensor, without ever laying eyes on it, and tell you it will be red. You will observe it with your own eyes and agree it is red. Our experience of what red actually looks like is entirely our own and in no way can be compared. It cannot even be considered that they might be different because the operation of comparison is simply undefined for subjective experience. If you claim objective reality doesn't exist, you are entertaining solipsism. I will maintain that all of our subjective experience is rooted in an objective reality. If you claim you've seen a new color, we can recreate this and explain what causes this. If it's not something simple like a wavelength of light only you can see, it might be something more nuanced, like an internal experience unique to the micro-structure of your physical brain.

Many people entertain the idea that quantum mechanics hints at a link between the subjective experience and the physical universe through various interpretations. I don't think lay-people (me included) should be adopting any of these interpretations as philosophical evidence. We simply don't know enough yet. There are many experiments that have been and will continue to be done that further clarify the root of them that is the measurement problem. Decoherence theories for example are helping to explain what appears to be "wavefunction collapse" as the absorption of the quantum properties by a larger quantum system.

A question to end this long reply, since you mentioned it in your original post: do you consider panpsychism to be a valid idea?

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OldWorldRevival t1_j53l00i wrote

> Our experience of what red actually looks like is entirely our own and in no way can be compared.

I'm very well aware of qualia and a lot of the literature on it. Heh.

> Many people entertain the idea that quantum mechanics hints at a link between the subjective experience and the physical universe through various interpretations. I don't think lay-people (me included) should be adopting any of these interpretations as philosophical evidence.

Roger Penrose and the Wigner-von Neumann interpretation lol.

> do you consider panpsychism to be a valid idea?

It's not my favorite idea, hence why I mentioned a sort of inverse of panpsychism. Rather than consciousness "being everywhere," it is totally philosophically reasonable that consciousness exists nowhere at all, (even Descartes mentioned this, though that seems to be sorely neglected in the discussion of consciousness) since existence in space is not a requirement for consciousness. I.e. take the substance out of dualism in that case.

That said, an idea I dislike even more is emergentism - unless that emergentism references panpsychism. Why? Because emergentism ascribes more to emergence than emergence is capable of, a sort of logical jump to think that emergence means "fundamentally new phenomenon," which is just not the case. It ascribes magical qualities to emergence and is a way of completely avoiding the problem, and adds nothing to it.

> Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of subjective experiences of other humans as much as your own?

Yes. I am actually a former vegan, starting to maybe be winding back to vegetarianism, and this topic is fundamental to those choices.

Overall, I like the fact that you seem to have a solid grasp on this topic. :)

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