Can VR replace reality?

Let me get a little philosophical today.

Besides my game projects, I have been working in one project which is related to VR and AR (Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality), even when such project is not ready to speak publicly about it, it has make me think a lot about the VR and the future.

An emerging philosophy

The other day I read a tweet of someone asking Stephen Hawking why to look for other worlds if we can create ours (#VR, of course). If you have been around some VR discussions, it's very easy to perceive a very common "philosophy" about how virtual reality is not different than actual reality. There's a popular quote: "Perception is reality" (Lee Atwater as per Google), and even when it was not said thinking in VR, it summarizes quite well this philosophy. It is a common believing in that, if we can make a Matrix-like immersive experience we would be pretty much making a different reality which should not be considered inferior to the actual reality.

Since we are still far to get into the Matrix, most of the people just think superficially about this, and it's comprehensible since it's very complicated even describe what reality is, even when we live in it. However VR is making people to reconsider the value of actual reality against the virtual one. This is not that new if you consider real guys getting in love with virtual girls, the difference is that VR is getting (and will continue getting) so convincing that people won't be able to continue just rolling their eyes with disapproval when judging these situations. Since the obvious fact that the girl is not real and that she is "inside" the video games console is going away, I think it's a good time to start conversations about this.

The problem with discussing about VR, is that you need to end up talking about actual reality, and the problem with talking about reality, is that you will end up talking about infinity and the inherent value of things... well, at least that is true for me.

At the end of the day we are talking about humanity

Let's imagine these 3 scenarios:

1. You and 3 friends go into a VR space adventure, you can interact with each other as in real life but you are inside this awesome immersive experience. You spend there about 2 hours a day and start to gather some resources and building a nice Neptunian cabana with video game consoles and an area for super-gravity volley ball.
2. You go alone into a similar VR space adventure, you are having progress and feel quite motivated to continue building your Neptunian house, feeding your virtual Neptunian cows and going for a walk on the planet. You don't feel the need of having a real pet because keeping your cows healthy is enough for you.
3. You go alone into this VR space adventure, but this time your 3 friends are virtual friends, you selected and customized them. You are basically having the same experience as in scenario 1, to the extent your virtual friends act as actual humans. You don't feel the need of having any friends in reality, actually you spend most of your time with your virtual friends.

I think most of the people would agree with having the virtual experience in scenario 1 (some would prefer to spend there a little less time though). Maybe a little smaller amount of people would also agree with scenario 2, it is pretty much the current scenario for those playing any one-player game. However, probably most of the people would not agree with scenario 3, specially if you tell them that the one playing that game will be their brother, friend, son, daughter, husband, etc. Many of us probably will just think of it as a very sad scenario. Living that scenario would be pretty much the same as imagining your life instead of actually living it, or live watching movies because you like the world in the movies more than the actual world.

So, when we did that big jump between amazing experience and sad scenario?

Replacing your goods with virtual goods is not that bad, actually it is ecological :). Taking care of virtual pets, don't feel that bad either, as long as you don't forget to food your real pet because of that. On the other hand, replacing people feels just wrong, but why?

Well, because it reduces the existence of the other people to whatever you perceive from it, and means that you could just use people as objects to satisfy your personal needs, which is pretty much what the worst tyrants in human history did (and do). I know some of you are thinking that we actually do that very often, but I think we do it only to some extent and in a kind of subconscious way, and we actually believe that other people is important... Okay, at this point I will be positive and think none of you is thinking that humans are not more than a bunch of chemical reactions, with no significant difference to a match burning, and human rights don't have a reason to exist at all, please don't burst my happiness bubble, OK?

But, perception is reality... isn't it?

I may perceive something about you, and you may be perceiving something about me, but whatever my perception about you is, you are certainly more than that, reducing your entire existence to what I can perceive of it, is a very simplistic way to understand the reality. We cannot know if anything is real besides what we perceive, but using logic we can understand that the reality is more than us and our perception of it, we can understand that the world is not being back-face culled and that the whole place we are in, is being "fully rendered", not matter if you are looking to just a part of it.

At this point we should be able to start to descry a fundamental difference between VR and actual reality. VR is all about perception, the very purpose of anything created in VR is to be perceived (and understood) by people. On the other hand the actual reality is there and is happening even if nobody perceives it, it is much more than what we can perceive and understand about it, and its very purpose could make us to start discussing about religion. From a mathematical point of view, as per Gödel Incompleteness Theorems and surely some others, we know we are limited to understand the universe completely, because our main tool, Math, is incomplete and can't be completed. VR is created by human intelligence, so it will never reach a point where something in there is not understandable by human minds.

Finding a place for VR

We can see at this as a Set Theory case. VR is a subset of actual reality, even when the amount of possible virtual worlds is infinite, actual reality is a bigger infinite that contains all those infinities (google "bigger infinite" if that sounded too weird). So if the virtual universe gets bigger and bigger, it won't ever absorb the actual universe, it will only make the actual universe larger because it contains the virtual universe.

So it will be good to start thinking of VR as part of actual reality, just as Internet is part of it. Let's don't get confused because of the convincing graphics and the stereoscopic vision (and whatever comes next). VR is great and we don't have to make it to compete with actual reality to make awesome things with it.

So my proposal is to don't bother Mr. Hawking with all this, let's physicists do their job and let's make ours, we are doing really different things.

An exciting journey awaits

I'm very excited to see what the future will be and how VR and AR will transform our lives, and even more excited of thinking on contributing to it. I feel we are still very far of having a VR convincing enough to make people start wondering about all this. But, if you are thinking in contributing to the VR "state of the art", you need to start thinking in the final goal, we are making a powerful tool here!

Will it transform the entire entertainment industry? will it disrupt the capitalism itself? will it be useful for medicine? will it help to give people hope? will it help us to enhance education? [hype intensifies] will it enable us to feel we are Super Saiyans?!! Man I hope so!

I feel something big is coming, and certainly it could be dangerous, but humanity drama is surviving its own excess of power, there's nothing wrong with that, it is in the very core of humanity, so let's push harder and see how far we can go, surely we can make incredible things!