sticky_symbols t1_j556zz2 wrote on January 20, 2023 at 2:05 PM

Reply to comment by leechmeem in Instead of escaping to virtual realities, what if we just made our reality as good as any virtual reality could be? by [deleted]

One point people make is about internal consistency. That's a big part of what we call reality. If you could work to build things and make friends, and random chance frequently came along and changed everything, you wouldn't feel like that work was worth doing. I think we care more about whether our current reality is reliable than whether it happens to be base reality.

leechmeem t1_j56dhud wrote on January 20, 2023 at 6:39 PM

I think it's fine if you want to give your personalized reality meaning, it's just you shouldn't put it on a higher pedestal over the base reality. You play an MMO, you spend lots of time grinding in the game and you are satisfied, but it doesn't affect the reality you were born into. When the game shuts off, you go on with your day realizing that it never really had an impact on anything at all. If you decide to live most of your life in a virtual reality, what then if the game breaks or corrupts? Is it more reliable still?

If our internal feelings are only positive when we live in a virtual world and remain negative in the base reality, isn't that how addiction starts? Isn't that why we get addicted to meth, heroin, pcp? We'd only be lowering our desire to live in our base reality and change ourselves for the better for the favor of something you or someone else has created to live in. But on the other hand, our virtual realities can affect our base reality and make us better people in the base reality? It's very hard to say, and this question can't really be answered yet.

My belief is, you can play the game and have fun, but if you take the game too seriously, it'll leave you angry and disappointed.

sticky_symbols t1_j56iyym wrote on January 20, 2023 at 7:13 PM

That's all true of VR now. We were originally discussing VR in a post-singularity and presumably post-scarcity world. That type of VR could be a lot better, and not necessitate leaving for base reality at all. I'd eventually like to have my mind uploaded and backed up, rather than dependent on a physical body.