# Virtual Reality **Domain:** Computing / Experience / Simulation **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Evolving **Related:** [[Reality+]], [[Simulated World]], [[Receiving Theater]], [[Transition Consent]] --- ## Definition **Virtual reality** is an interactive, computer-mediated environment capable of organizing perception and action as a spatial field. ## Corpus Context The corpus distinguishes virtual implementation from unreality. A virtual environment can contain genuine experience and relationships while remaining dependent on external hardware, operators and jurisdiction. ## See Also [[Reality+]], [[Simulated World]], [[Receiving Theater]], [[Transition Consent]] ## Relationships - **Edge Annual Question source relationship:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] preserves the annual-question source corpus from which a proposition-specific quotation is connected to this entry. - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "In a century's time you could be lying on a beach on the east coast of Brazil, controlling a robotic device roving on the surface of Mars, and be subjected to both experiences simultaneously, as if you were in both places at once. The feedback from that robot billions of miles away will be perceived by the brain as if it was you up there." > **— Miguel Nicolelis**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”* [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/A Brain on Earth Could Inhabit a Robot on Mars by Miguel Nicolelis|A Brain on Earth Could Inhabit a Robot on Mars by Miguel Nicolelis]] > "Third, and most importantly, future self-continuity can be manipulated. Simple manipulations include writing a letter to one’s future self, whereas more sophisticated interventions involve interacting with digital renderings of future selves in virtual reality. These interventions can change behavior. For example, adolescents who write a letter to their future selves make fewer subsequent delinquent choices, and adults who interact with an age-progressed avatar later allocate more available cash towards retirement plans. While the active ingredients of these manipulations remain to be isolated, enhancing the similarity and vividness of future self representations seems to help. Scalable future self-continuity interventions may open up new channels for enhancing health, education, and wealth." > **— Brian Knutson**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to Be More Widely Known?”* [[reminders/Identity/Future Selves Can Be Engineered to Change Present Behavior by Brian Knutson|Future Selves Can Be Engineered to Change Present Behavior by Brian Knutson]] > "Homuncular flexibility isn't the only source of hints about how weird human experience might get in the future. There also questions related to language, memory, and other aspects of cognition, as well as hypothetical prospects for engineering changes in the brain. But in this one area, there's an indication of high weirdness to come, and I find that prospect dangerous, but in a beautiful and seductive way. "Thrilling" might be a better word." > **— Jaron Lanier**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”* [[reminders/Identity/Human Experience May Become Beautifully Strange by Jaron Lanier|Human Experience May Become Beautifully Strange by Jaron Lanier]] > "As we invent and expand worlds of 1s and 0s the primary criteria for success and viral replication is whether we can breathe life into their virtual realities. Be this a direct reflection of daily life, a la Facebook, multi player massive worlds, or a replicating, self reinforcing network reproductive logic. The digital world accelerates expansion, survival, virtual life through mutant hyper growth. It becomes a fast forward caricature of what we have strived to build throughout centuries of breeding and agricultural practices, of building layer upon layer of civilizations in great cities." > **— Juan Enriquez**, *2012, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, or Beautiful Explanation?”* [[reminders/Digital Life/Digital Worlds Accelerate the Evolution of Virtual Life by Juan Enriquez|Digital Worlds Accelerate the Evolution of Virtual Life by Juan Enriquez]] > "Virtualization has the important intellectual side-effect of leading us towards a better understanding of the relation between emergent properties & virtual machines or systems. Thus "I" am an emergent property of my body & mind; "I" (my subjective experience of the world & myself) am a virtual machine, of sorts; but "I" (or "consciousness") am just as real (despite being virtual) as the pull-down menu built of software — or the picture that emerges from the pixels. Like industrialization, virtualization is an intellectual as well as a technological & economic transition; like industrialization, it's a change in the texture of time." > **— David Gelernter**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?”* [[reminders/Simulation/The Self May Be a Virtual Machine by David Gelernter|The Self May Be a Virtual Machine by David Gelernter]] > “What makes immersive 3D virtual environments the perfect medium for learning basic math skills is not that they are created digitally on computers. Nor is it that they are the medium of highly seductive videogames. Rather, it is because they provide a means for simulating the real world we live in, and out of which mathematics arises, and of doing so in a way that brings out and confronts the player (i.e., learner) with the underlying mathematical structure of our world. If Euclid were alive today, this is how he would teach math.” > **— Keith Devlin**, *2007, Edge Annual Question, “What Are You Optimistic About?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Immersive Simulation Can Make Mathematical Structure Visible by Keith Devlin|Immersive Simulation Can Make Mathematical Structure Visible by Keith Devlin]] > “Our desire for entertaining virtual realities is increasing. As our understanding of the human brain also accelerates, we will create both imagined realities and a set of memories to support these simulacrums. For example, someday it will be possible to simulate your visit to the Middle Ages and, to make the experience realistic, we may wish to ensure that you believe yourself to actually be in the Middle Ages. False memories may be implanted, temporarily overriding your real memories. This should be easy to do in the future — given that we can already coax the mind to create richly detailed virtual worlds filled with ornate palaces and strange beings through the use of the drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). In other words, the brains of people who take DMT appear to access a treasure chest of images and experience that typically include jeweled cities and temples, angelic beings, feline shapes, serpents, and shiny metals. When we understand the brain better, we will be able to safely generate more controlled visions.” > **— Clifford Pickover**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Virtual Reality May Rewrite Memory Itself by Clifford Pickover|Virtual Reality May Rewrite Memory Itself by Clifford Pickover]] > “Can we develop a procedure that, in principle, would tell us whether or not our universe is a simulation (analogous to the way the now proven Poincaré Conjecture can tell us the universe’s shape)?” > **— Keith Devlin**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Can We Test Whether the Universe Is a Simulation by Keith Devlin|Can We Test Whether the Universe Is a Simulation by Keith Devlin]] > “First, your home is a constant, while the Net is a place you go; then the Net becomes a constant while your home is a place you go.” > **— Bruce Sterling**, *2004, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT'S YOUR LAW?”* [[reminders/Digital Life/The Net May Become the Constant While Home Becomes the Place You Go by Bruce Sterling|The Net May Become the Constant While Home Becomes the Place You Go by Bruce Sterling]] > “By seeing experience as a construct that merges prediction and sensory evidence, we begin to see how minds like ours reveal a world of human-relevant stuff. For the patterns of sensory stimulation that we most strongly predict are the patterns that matter most to us as both as and as individuals. The world revealed to the predictive brain is a world permeated with human mattering.” > **— Andy Clark**, *2017, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?”* [[reminders/Simulation/The Predictive Brain Constructs a World of Human-Relevant Reality by Andy Clark|The Predictive Brain Constructs a World of Human-Relevant Reality by Andy Clark]] > “Will we soon cease to care whether we are experiencing normal, augmented, or virtual reality?” > **— Andy Clark**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Simulation/Will Normal Augmented and Virtual Reality Become Indistinguishable by Andy Clark|Will Normal Augmented and Virtual Reality Become Indistinguishable by Andy Clark]] > “Physical universes are user interfaces for minds. Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant.” > **— Donald D. Hoffman**, *2004, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT'S YOUR LAW?”* [[reminders/Simulation/The Physical World Is a Species-Specific User Interface by Donald D. Hoffman|The Physical World Is a Species-Specific User Interface by Donald D. Hoffman]] > “What is historically new, and what creates not only novel psychological risks but also entirely new ethical and legal dimensions, is that one virtual reality gets ever more deeply embedded into another virtual reality: The conscious mind of human beings, which has evolved under very specific conditions and over millions of years, now gets causally coupled and informationally woven into technical systems for representing possible realities.” > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2016, Edge Annual Question: “”* [[reminders/Simulation/One Virtual Reality Is Being Embedded Into Another by Thomas Metzinger|One Virtual Reality Is Being Embedded Into Another by Thomas Metzinger]] ## Sources / Provenance - Developed through [[articles/Beyond the Sea|Beyond the Sea]] and the linked corpus.