Internet DNA Podcast

A brief exploration into the how, why and when of stepping into immersive virtual reality and at what point that virtual reality becomes actual reality and vice versa.... children will accept any reality they are born into. 

 WARNING: perhaps don't take a Solpadeine when trying to do a podcast as you may sound like you are already in that amniotic fluid... as Abi does.

Transcription

(this transcription is written by robots… so don’t be surprised!)

Hello and welcome to this week's episode. It's net DNA with me, Abby and me. Dan. This week I'll topic, it's so complex. I can't even say the title without reading off my screen. So here we go. This week we're going to be discussing amnios and the transition through augmented to virtual or immersive reality. Dan, enlighten us a little so I'm sure everyone's aware of the scene from the first matrix where everyone just lives in an amniotic fluid and they live in a completely what we would consider off official construct, but they're not even aware of it. They think that it's real life. What that sentence you said is how do we transition from, or do we want to transition from our current lives through to maybe a fully constructed life and why would we want to do that? So you said through augmented, we'll be able to stump in and out of the virtual side of things or the augmented side of things easily and therefore it should enhance our lives quite a lot. They're great for shopping. If you want to see what clothes look like without getting undressed or seeing what a headstone might look like on you. So I think the idea would be that we would first go through mentored, and it's not quite taken off yet because everything's a bit clunky still, but great for learning the history of a place you might be in or even helping you with languages and another country. Yeah, I can see a time where either it'd be like contact lenses or directly into your brainstem. Wow, that sounds horrible. So I would much rather whilst living my ordinary life, so it'd be very much a choice and it would be in and out and in and out. So you can augment your reality. You might highlight your friends as you walk down the street. Of course, the military application is an illness helping you to see at night knowing the terrain. You might see people that you didn't even realize that. So you can see how little bits of this might be really useful. But lowly. You can imagine how as you become more and more into your augmenting reality and less and less in your actual reality, there comes a question of what you see is your physicality. When you can experience all of that physicality conceptually through your mind. So if you can go and run and jump and play tennis and golf and ride mountain bikes and skydive in virtual reality and to you it's indistinguishable from reality, then it makes the question of what you're doing lugging this ridiculous body around and all its associated diseases when you could just live in the amniotic fluid, should we call it and just be fully immersed. I think there's a few things here. Firstly, it's a generational thing you're never going to get from now to augment it, to enhance to fully virtual without going through generations. So the generation that gets there needs to not know what it was like two steps before you're slowly changing over generations. So we knew what it was like before the internet and then the next generation, they've got one foot in the augmented reality and then the next generation have got half their body and so it's [inaudible]. It's not a huge step, but what you said earlier, I was quite interested because the thing about the [inaudible] is they didn't know that they were in a virtual world. Now they're, I think the big difference is it that you move forward and you don't know because if you knew your brain might not be able to cope with it, or is it that you do know and you've willingly moved into it? I'm going to guess it's going to happen like this, that you go into it fully knowing what's going on. Generation one of the Amniox, they know it's virtual. It's clearly not pure reality. It's not quick enough. You can see the difference a bit like if you watch a 1950 scifi film, it's quite obviously stuff on strings, but as you move forward, so gen two gen three, gen four actually at some point it probably will be possible to just go, they don't even need to know anymore. They may just be created in test tubes. They've always lived in that. That is reality to them. There is no other reality. See, we cling to this idea that there's a physical reality, but once you've been born as an amnio, you have no concept of anything other than what you've been born into and therefore effectively that is your reality. If reality is just perception, then you perceive everything that you are doing in an amnio as real, then that is your reality. That's thought through this and I thought, why would I want to move into a virtual world? Why would I want to give up my buddy? Well, you can do anything. You can be anyone. You can fly, you can thrive. Five boards, you can walk on water, cysts on clouds, right? Zebras through the Savanna. It doesn't matter. You can do it all and you never die and you carry on forever, but the problem is all those things I'm sure, and the fact that you have no parameters, it becomes boring. If you can live forever and do anything, then I think you'd probably get as whole, not even a generation, a whole universe of lazy people because why bother? One has to assume that for this system to work, that you'd have to have a purpose because humans crave a purpose. It doesn't matter what that purpose is, but they need to have a purpose. One of the things if you were to build this construct is you would have to build that purpose into it. If you take it into, let's say it wasn't even really much of a choice of you turning into an amnio because the world is so devastated by whatever that to live in the real physical world is very, very dangerous. Imagine Chernobyl. There's a very good and valid reason for you not to want to go outside and live in a physical way. The human race is faced with extinction and the only way to keep the human race going is to upload our brains. Yeah. In case our bodies in a safe shell and keep it alive for whatever reason. And we may have the view that one day we'd like to come out of it, you know, it may be that we go into a very obviously constructed world, we know it's constructed, but what I'm trying to say is as the generation as it develops and gets better and better and it gets to a point surely where it exceeds our ability to perceive it has not real. That was a really interesting thing about people living in Alaska. And there was a great line from some guy and he basically lived in a tiny little heart. It's a hunt and collect and live pretty much like we did thousands of years ago. And he said what was really interesting was leading a life where there was no mediation between him and reality. And so what we're actually talking about is where there's nothing but mediation between us and reality. In fact, all reality is 100% mediated. Quite interesting to understand. We are already living in a fairly mediated reality. There are lots of things that we survive on and we live by that are not of our making. You don't have to go and hunt and gather your food other than if you consider driving to Tesco's and picking up some shopping. His point was, you make a mistake out here. You don't. It's that simple. Whereas if you live in a city, I mean, look at me, I've made a million mistakes and I'm still alive. Sometimes difficulty and hardship and challenge is what makes us alive and what's makes us feel the good thing. I could artificially give you challenge and difficulty in your life. In fact, one could argue the older hardship and difficulty in your life is artificial. I love the fact that you say in your life, all these decisions that you struggle with any of your own making that meaning this in the greater context of time, right? You don't. I think the thing that I think that we would miss is maybe the physicality of life and fully immersed. You could hug somebody, you could eat anything, you wouldn't know that you weren't doing it. And this is where I'm talking about. That's the point if perception where you get it to such a point where you're unable to distinguish between reality and what you're simulated. And at that point it becomes interesting to understand what reality means. Yes. Because if you think of something like his dark interiors that we're all watching at the moment, there are all these parallel universes. So which one you live in is your universe and that reality to you. But there are other universities that are reality to other people. So in that way, if living in this virtual world is your reality, living in this sort of horrible collectic space in a closet and is not, who's to say what Israel and what isn't real. Exactly. Take the blue pill or take the red pill. But I still do wonder that if you can do everything, life becomes futile. If you can't die, life becomes, if I could fly out, if I could fly now with my life immediately become a few times, no, but if you couldn't die, it might. Okay, so what you're saying is we need to die. That's really important. Maybe you can live 150 years, but you need to die because if they don't have an end, you'll just drift off into or what the fuck is the point? Let's say you were going to build this immersive reality or part of it. I think you have to make that be a struggle and a point, but that's about designing a world in which humans can in a way that they feel connected to. So reality is what you feel you are born into. Yeah. I think there's a great line about children, which is children will accept any reality they're given. How do children in war time survive? That's what they know. Their minds are subtle enough to accept anything. I mean is when you said if you're going to build this virtual world, which means that some human with flaws is building this world for everyone to move into and then we get onto the people that really don't want to live in it because they've probably taken out any freedom of choice. They've probably removed the ability to have challenge. Sadly, I feel with human beings that even if you removed all Wars and all reasons to have Wars, we'd still be able to create new ones. Well, that's what the culture books are all about. Remove all want from life. What becomes a part, so in O and M bags, the sketchbooks, are they happy? The happiest when they have a challenge, they're not unhappy. If that's the correct way of putting it. Humans around the world, they want the same thing. You know, they want to better themselves. They want to do something, they want to achieve something. They want to make their Mark on the world. Oh wait, boiling it down to if we all moved slowly. Generation by generation into a virtual world is the only thing that we would really need in there to keep us believing and plotting on would be a challenge. Yeah. Game-ify literally it just be a great big game and it would be designed to keep you interested. I mean that's one way of looking at it. Maybe we would design it with a slightly more communal attitude towards it. It be interesting to see what way would play best. It would be a continual development. It would be very interesting to see what kind of worlds different people are accepted. I'm stuck camp between two worlds because quantum physics, I'm quite prepared to believe that we have parallel universes, other people living the same lives, but in different ways or there's many strands and there are different strands that we could be living on at any one time and so there's not a huge step between that and a virtual word because how do I know that I'm not in a virtual world. Exactly. It wouldn't work unless people felt that it was better than the world they were already living in. Yeah. So then what are the, has to be really bad, or the virtual world has to be really good. We've put a lot of things out there and there are no completion. So I feel a little unsettled, but it's food. Just food for thought because there are no answers. It is literally an exercise in thinking, and I think that's not a bad thing. Well, bye bye.

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Dan & Abi work, talk & dream in tech. If you would like to discuss any speaking opportunity contact us.