“Don’t mistake your reality for a reality simulation.” Jordan Greenehall
What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning? For many people in today’s modern world, motivating factors exist predominately in another reality, a dimension existing just outside the comfort zone of their lazy chairs. A place designed from here, but not entirely made up of here nor there. A collection of bits and pieces of our imagination, knowledge, understanding of the world, our preferences, hopes and fears. Interwoven into each other and fed back to us in more bits of sight, sound and symbols, interfacing through an artificial intelligence.
“If we don’t communicate with the outside world–to gain information for knowledge and understanding–we die out to become a non-discerning and uninteresting part of that world.” –John Boyd
It’s becoming our destiny, a machine we can’t seem to stop. These ‘other’ realities come with their own sets of limitations and rules. Where things change at warp speed but nothing is ever forgotten because everything is recorded with binary accuracy. Just a hand’s reach away from bed side, dinner table and toilet seat. It’s here and it’s growing into our every cell because its being implemented into our everyday lives, homes and businesses.
These extended realities are also our extended identities. Expressed through which-ever medium available— Phone, Notebook, iPad, Laptop, Desktop and any variety of Virtual Reality Gear. As they wake each morning, a generation of already half cyborgs, they awake again into their online avatars, plugging into reality within reality.
Who isn’t jacked in? Apparently in 2015, 53 percent of the world’s people but that number has gone down. More currently according to World Internet Stats, as of 2018 there are 4,208,571, 287 internet users world wide, within a population of 7.7 Billion. That’s more than half the world’s population. Nasdaq estimates that by 2040, 95 percent of purchases will be done through eCommerce.
In our virtual realities there are many more things for the nervous system to be instantly gratified by (and let’s face it, equally disturbed by) compared to what’s accessible in most small towns and through regular everyday interactions. One of the reason’s why it’s becoming so addictive aside from the money we can make online, is that it exposes people to completely new ways of seeing the world. Like taking a trip outside your country for the first time and realizing there’s so much more to life then you were led to believe. Or is there?
People can never totally lose touch with their actual lives, they’re firmly planted in it, inescapable to the smells and conditions of its sensorial stimulation, yet for a huge percentage of the population their nervous systems are no longer attached to just one reality. Limbic systems jacked into another dimension, connected to millions of other limbic systems across the globe. Sharing ideas and “money energy” at the speed of light. All while contributing to a global web of consciousness far more vast than anyone can experience without it.
This is allowing humans to transcend unhealthy societal and cultural beliefs much quicker, being exposed to such a variety of information all at once helps to orient one’s own perspectives in the grand scheme of things. The flip side is that it can easily send us spiralling into a state of separation and protection. Creating too much cognitive dissonance all at once. Not only having to transcend non serving beliefs through a myriad of mad virtual mobsters but equally trying to escape the increase of psychological pathologies associated to fragmenting oneself into different perceptions of reality.
–“With VR, you’re not interpreting the medium: you’re in it; which means that the medium is disappearing, that your consciousness becomes the medium.” Chris Milk
What can easily be hidden behind an online avatar can not so easily be hidden during real life interactions and vice versa. What can not so easily be expressed offline can easily be done online. These include controversial opinions, beliefs and desires. Because of this, many are finding an oasis of acceptance in niche online realities that can never truly be shared with the same fluidity during face-to-face human contact.
I keep going back to this quote from Jonathan Pageau and it’s implications in growing virtual realities. “Religion addresses much more than just rules, it address how consciousness engages with reality. Patterns of behaviour in the stories and rituals, establish space, time, hierarchy, our relationships to others in unity.” The reason why I keep going back to it is because I myself have been dubbed by false reality matrixes propagated on-line, those with the purposes of controlling perceptions, those which can actually affect our-very bodily cells. If we don’t learn how to become more sovereign as our use increases over time, our natural limbic systems will continue to be affected in unpredictable ways.
This is the gamble we’re taking as we integrate more and more technology into our lives. It’s also why there’s an increase in the importance of developing mental and emotional independence from it. Before we become rapidly assimilated into soft-cyborg slavery, we ought to contemplate the implications unfolding.
What can be more enticing than a brain emulation that feels you into a sense of freedom, purpose and belonging? One you have access to anytime of the day, one that allows you increased income and freedom of expression on a global scale. Many are growing accustomed to managing the split, many are disassociating from actual reality and perhaps real life global responsibilities.
The fact that it’s not slowing down but rather growing exponentially, is both scary and exciting. Extending into our homes with Siri, into our cars with Tesla, into our cryptocurrency accounts and yes even into our hearts with platforms like Match.
So the questions arising for a generation of Facebook and Youtubers is: who are you without your online personas and businesses? Even more importantly, who is humanity without the internet? Who will we become when our human flesh suits have been replaced with full on cyber suits? What will become of our consciousness? Will it still exist somewhere in cyberspace, all interconnected as one? Will it consist of heart and soul?
In the least it might solve the problems of world hunger and the climate crisis. In the worse case it might decimate everything that is considered sacred to our human experience here.