To Live in Virtual Reality or Not to Live in Virtual Reality? (About the distinction between virtual reality and reality)

In this blog post, we’ll discuss whether we should live in virtual reality or real life.

 

What if the world we live in is not the real world? What if everything we see, feel, and interact with is not real, but all happening in virtual reality? If this is indeed the case, we will never be able to distinguish between these elaborately crafted virtual worlds and reality. One science fiction movie that explores this idea is The Matrix.
The Matrix is a 1999 movie directed by the Wachowski brothers and starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and other famous actors. The movie is set in the year 2199. It’s a time when machines have won a long battle against humans and are in complete control. The machines are raising humans in large numbers in incubators to use them as a source of energy. To suppress the human mind, they have created a 1999 virtual reality called the Matrix, in which humans live without question. The movie is about Neo, who was once a human in this virtual reality, and together with other humans who have escaped from the virtual reality, they fight against the machines to save humanity.
In the movie, Neo is faced with a choice between taking a red pill to wake up from the virtual reality and a blue pill to stay in the virtual reality. In the end, he chooses the red pill and wakes up in the real world. On the other hand, one of his coworkers, Cypher, betrays his teammates by choosing the virtual reality over the real world, where the quality of life is not guaranteed. The question that naturally comes to mind when watching this scene is. What would I do? This is a very difficult question to answer, and one that can be quite difficult to answer. But I think we can find the answer if we get down to the essence of the question.
The public perception of virtual reality is good. Anything is possible in virtual reality, and if you want it, you can make it happen. You don’t have the constraints of the real world. Therefore, if we live in virtual reality, we can live a rich life as opposed to a poor life, and we can fulfill our dreams once and for all. We can fulfill the love we never had in real life, and we can fly around as Superman for a day. We can think of many advantages of living in virtual reality. But the important thing is that these benefits obscure the true nature of the problem. The average person is so focused on the benefits of living in virtual reality that they fail to recognize the essential difference between virtual reality and reality. The most essential difference between reality and virtual reality is whether it’s real or fake. Identifying the difference between real and fake is the key to answering the original question.
To make it a little easier to recognize the essence of the problem, we need to assume an extreme and special situation. The situation is as follows You are at a crossroads. You can choose to live in the real world or in virtual reality. However, the real world is not a bad place, and the virtual world is an exact replica of it. You’re at a crossroads, and you realize that living in virtual reality means living in a fake world, not the real world. But you also know that the moment you choose to enter virtual reality, you will never recognize that you are living in virtual reality.
This extreme assumption allows us to focus on the question of what is real and what is not. What is the right choice for you to make in this situation? In my opinion, the two worlds are indistinguishable, meaning that there is no difference between choosing virtual reality and choosing reality. Here’s why We spend our lives interacting with the world around us, and all the information we get from our senses is collected, analyzed, and interpreted by our brain. That’s why we can’t distinguish between when we actually smell a rose and when we apply the same stimulus to our brain as when we smell a rose. This is especially true when we don’t know that we smelled the rose because our brain was stimulated. This situation is no different from the hypothetical situation mentioned earlier. If we live our lives in a virtual reality, we don’t notice the difference if it’s really not a single moment different from our real life. This goes without saying, especially if you don’t realize you’re in a virtual reality for the rest of your life. In an extreme example, the world we live in right now is actually a virtual reality, and we just don’t realize it! That’s why, in the previous hypothetical, it doesn’t matter which one you choose when you’re at the crossroads between reality and virtual reality. Both are ultimately the same space.
However, this logic overlooks an important fact. In reality, when people are faced with a hypothetical situation, almost everyone will have the same reaction.
“If I’m going to live the same life anyway, I might as well live it in real life!
What this means is that when faced with a choice between real and fake, the vast majority of people will choose the real thing, no matter how much the fake looks like the real thing. If this is the overwhelming majority of choices, then the conclusion is that the real thing is better and should be preferred, even if it is indistinguishable from the fake thing. However, before jumping to such conclusions, it is important to consider why people prefer the real thing over the fake. In this article, we analyze this from two perspectives.
The first is that there can be fakes because there are real ones. In other words, because the real thing exists, fakes that imitate it were able to emerge, and that’s why the real thing is valuable. If the real thing didn’t exist, fakes wouldn’t exist. This is the same as saying that a fake is only something that is dependent on the real. So it would make sense to choose the real, which has meaning on its own, rather than the fake, which is dependent on the real. However, we need to think more about whether the real has meaning on its own. Does the real have meaning even when it exists alone? No, it doesn’t. The reason the real is real is because it is among the fake. The real can only be real in the presence of fakes, and if there were no fakes, we wouldn’t call it real. By the same logic, we can say that the real is dependent on the fake, and therefore the real is not its own thing.
Second, it is human to want the real. To make this easier to understand, let’s put it in the context of this article. Interactions in virtual reality are fake, computer-generated, and no matter how close they are to reality, they violate the essence of being human. This logic is so vague that it’s almost pointless to discuss it. Until we define what it means to be human, this discussion cannot go any further. However, if humans are inherently inclined to prefer the real, then exploring this essence may provide answers to the questions we have raised in this article.
What is the essence of humanity? I believe that the essence of humanity lies in nature. We are one of the many life forms that exist on Earth. Like all other life forms, humans are a product of evolution, so whatever our essence is, it has been shaped by evolution, and if we want to know what that essence is, we need to look at the history of human evolution. All evolution happens because the most favored individuals survive and spread their offspring. In the same way, humans were selected by nature to evolve into what we are today. Humans have an inherent preference for authenticity because, during our evolution, individuals with this trait were selected by nature for survival. It’s easy to see why preferring authenticity over fake is a survival advantage. Some of our ancestors were unable to distinguish between a fruit that looked good on the outside but was rotten on the inside (fake fruit) and a fruit that was rotten to the core (real fruit). Other groups were able to make the distinction and even tended to prefer the real fruit. It’s no wonder which group survived and spread their offspring over time.
This ability to distinguish and prefer the real from the fake is what makes humans who we are. Through evolution, humans have come to prefer the real thing. This is our nature and essence, which brings us back to our discussion. If our preference for the real thing over the fake is a product of evolution, not rational judgment, then it’s not just a matter of instinct. It’s true that our evolutionary preference for the real over the fake has helped us survive. However, evolution is consequential, not causal, which means that we don’t know if the direction in which an organism evolved is the direction that will help it survive in the future. Therefore, when it comes to choosing between the real and the fake, if the nature of human beings shaped by evolution causes us to prefer the real for no reason, it is a side effect of evolution and an irrational decision.
To solve the problem of “Should I live in virtual reality or in real life?”, we have identified the difference between real and fake for humans, and concluded that human nature is to prefer real reality, but it is only a side effect of evolution. In the end, there is no difference between virtual reality and reality when we think rationally. The question of choosing between virtual reality and real life has become less about what’s fake and what’s real. Now the focus should be on the more realistic aspects. We’re going to have to weigh the benefits of living in virtual reality against the drawbacks. The benefits of virtual reality include the ease with which we can do the impossible, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, and the disadvantages include the fact that it’s physically impossible to stay virtual forever. This is an interesting topic and deserves to be discussed in depth. However, this discussion can only go so far because there is essentially no difference between real and fake, real and virtual.