There’s been plenty of talk, here and elsewhere, of the ethics of AI, of the recreation of human intelligence. Virtual Reality is the same ball park, only its a recreation of the world, not of the self or intelligence.
So I might ask the same sort of question: if it were possible to recreate human experience, the world as such, in all its glory, so it was pretty much indistinguishable from real life (like Arnold’s character experiences in Total Recall) would this be dangerous?
What are the ethical arguments against a government licensing such a technology? This is for a novel I’m working on, so serious and non serious answers are all worth hearing.
A further question, for a bonus point: What was the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in the aforementioned film, directed by Paul Verhoeven?
If it were possible to recreate human experience virtually then there should be no ethical argument against government licensing such a technology if it harms none nor plays with anyones’ rights. It would be just another form of entertainment or experience. One wants the experience fine, another doesn’t want it fine. But the entertainment can be there for all to experience or not. In all the virtuality that makes it seem real, it will be artificial, but if one likes it, why not, if it plays with no one’s feelings or rights?
What is most fascinating about virtual reality (for me, anyway) is the way in which it is really just reality stripped of its virtual component!
I am completely new to this board, and I don’t know how much philosophy you know or what areas interest you, so please forgive me if I am telling you stuff you already know about… But you might be interested in thinking about virtual reality in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between the Actual and the Virtual. It’s a distinction which is too complicated for a brief post, but I think it’s best to think about it like this:
The Actual is easily accessible to us: shapes, causes, effects, words, concepts. The Virtual, meanwhile, is a murky world of possibilities, nomadic distributions, hidden causes etc. For Deleuze, there is a reciprocal relationship between the Actual and the Virtual - which is the experience we have of life. But only the Actual is directly presented to us, in the forms of concepts etc.
From a Deleuzian perspective, virtual reality is impossible (or, at the least, improbable), because a computer program could never operate in the way that the Virtual does. Maybe someday we will have computers which don’t work with bits of code but, for now, that is for the science fiction writers such as yourself!
Thankyou, and no, I am not that familiar with Deleuze at all. I’ve certainly never come across this discussion before.
I see it somewhat differently, I think that as long as the virtual recreation is sufficiently detailed that the brain cannot process it all at once then the brain can be tricked into taking it for real, or a decent enough approximation of the real.
However this notion of the virtual as the trace, the possibility that it could have turned out differently as well as the recognition that it turned out the way it did, is seemingly quite similar to my own.
My novel is actually using VR as an allegory for mass media, I play with worlds where all rules governing media have broken down (not too far from where we are now) and the various possibilities that come from that. Semiotic futurology, fun stuff. I wish a publisher thought so.