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Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality
Is virtual reality merely a video game that consumes and distracts the player immersed in its simulations? Or is it an immaterial world, rich in meaning, beckoning people to a better future world inside computers? In Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality , Philip Zhai tackles these questions with keen logical analysis and concludes by advocating a stance that transcends these two opposing view of virtual reality. Zhai argues that the combination of three technologies―digital simulation, sensory immersion, and functional teleoperation―in a well-coordinated manner amounts to a re-creation of the whole empirically perceived universe. His analysis of the nature and significance of this re-creation is eye-opening and completely original. This book will be invaluable to philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and anyone interested in technology's growing impact on our lives and minds. The thought experiments in the book are mind-stretching and enlightenling, and make abstract concepts interesting and tangible.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published June 25, 1998
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March 28, 2017
If you missed the episode where Mr. Magoo took a job as a logician, Get Real will give you a nice recap. With author Philip Zhai the most stringent academic reasoning sets to work on premises crafted by the kludgiest of engineers. The whole thing is at once too glib and too intricate. The book centers on Zhai’s “Principle of Reciprocity” (PR) which stipulates that “all possible sensory frameworks that support a certain degree of coherence and stability of perception have equal ontological status for organizing our experiences”—putting on some VR goggles, that is, is the same as visually perceiving the world with your eyes; and so on. With enough of the right gear the “virtual” and “actual” become indistinguishable. In support of his principle Zhai musters a platoon of questionable premises, blindly navigating a minefield of possible objections to cheerfully land himself safe on the other side. He describes a scenario where you’re taking a nap and somebody swaps your regular glasses with a pair that instead show you a 3-D movie to try to trick you into thinking you’re inhabiting a new reality when you wake up. Discovering the trick is a fairly trivial task in these more primitive initial stages, but as the addition of new hardware makes the situation more and more interactive and immersive, how would you tell the difference, Zhai asks. The necessary hardware, though, becomes so overwrought that it quickly stretches credulity. In a more advanced scenario, after a harrowing realistic experience you’re offered a cookie. You bite in and, Huh?!, there is no cookie. It’s merely a virtual experience you’re having, and in the actual world where your non-virtual body is the fact that there’s nothing to chew on but your tongue is the giveaway. But one level intensified, when you bite into the virtual cookie in the real world (hereafter only “real”) a cookie indeed enters your mouth!—because a robot there has fed you one.
And this is how the whole setup works. It’s robots all the way down. Whenever in the virtual environment the situation exceeds the duplication capabilities of goggles, headphones, and a haptic body suit a robot steps in to perform the function. And so in addition to feeding us they will be stimulating our genitals for cybersex, and in the case where sexual reproduction is desired, carting the semen from our males across the globe to impregnate our females. In our current burgeoning age of teledildonics there is indeed precedence for this kind of thing—some of it. It’s not the point (here at least) that any of this could be strange and creepy, but that it’s, again, overwrought and dubiously practicable. The book’s depiction of cybersex goes on for pages like some Kama Sutra retrofitted with robots to amalgamate the disintermediated sex act, cataloged in a lost language at once too salacious for the suburban US 1950s yet too prudish for the decade that followed. (My copy of the book was a used copy formerly belonging to a high school library. I got a lot of amusement imagining a sexually repressed youth stumbling across such lurid explications after furtively browsing various human anatomy entries from the school encyclopedias.)
Because it’s the book’s the most illustrative depiction of human/robot, virtual/actual interplay I’m include a somewhat lengthy excerpt here, but if this kind of cyber-prurience bores you, feel free to skip it.
I’ll never listen to Jaron Lanier’s “Music of Changes” the same way again.
(A few questions did arise while reading this. Is scent recreated? The VR clothing apparently “will do its job” to cover the sense of touch, but apart from the artificial mouth it’s left unspecified what precisely the lips and tongues are in contact with when Mary and Paul “begin to explore and search each other passionately”. And then we see that the process is “guided by the information”, and while it was not much worried over at the time Get Real was being published, these days “digital information” is nearly synonymous with “digital information leakage”. With a recently settled lawsuit over a surveilling smart vibrator, it’s safe to assume at this point that virtual sexual intercourse will not be the only process that this information guides. What third-party processes are concurrently thus guided?)
Zhai’s intention seems to be for the Principle of Reciprocity to stand on strictly theoretical grounds—the fleshed out hypotheticals are not the focus, that is, but there merely to illustrate the underlying principle. If you found yourself in two scenarios, so it goes, where the sensory inputs were identical (the first unsupplemented by any external gear and the second a perfect reproduction of the same sensations via a VR rig) you’d not only be factually unable to tell the difference, the difference would be meaningless. But Zhai is far too blasé about the practicability of such a simulation. At a certain point what can and cannot be done in practice makes a very big difference. The virtual experiences he describes require such an improbable encumbrance of gear that it’s not at all convincing that a true one-for-one would be even hypothetically possible.
It’s hard to imagine how the simulation would not be discovered. You might be able to simulate a deep sea dive with a pressure suit, but what sort of contraption would be necessary to simulate a zero-G experience or multiple-G acceleration? What if the equipment malfunctions or breaks down? What if the body is dropped or jostled by one of the robots transporting it? What if there’s a terrible accident in the actual world that houses your body? Say your actual body suddenly loses a limb while sublimely in the virtual world you’re transfixed in the Lord of VR’s music? What do you attribute mismatched phenomena to? For all the hype, today’s VR equipment is having certain problems with conditions such as VR sickness, something like motion sickness, and more psychologically existential problems like “post-VR sadness”, also called VR hangover. Certainly technological fixes will arise—improved algorithms, even electrical stimulation of the vestibular system (GVS)—but it’s hard to see how some sensory mismatches would only be overcome by being born into the virtual environment or else introduced at a very young age while the brain is plastic enough to lay down new sensory associations so that there’d be no mismatch in the first place. But the problems of machine malfunction or unintended manipulation of the physical body still pose a problem. I have an excellent pair of noise-cancelling headphones; the loudspeaker announcement for the next stop while I’m riding the bus may be blocked out, but that only heightens the sensation of the soundwaves travelling through my body. I feel the announcement in my arms and in my chest.
While we’re continuously uncovering new dimensions of plasticity in the brain, there’s a degree of fixity that needs to be reckoned with as well. Zhai doesn’t see much issue with traveling in and out of the virtual world and indeed thinks it’ll be fairly common, but if one world is contingent on certain set of sensory integrations while the sensory integrations of another world are far at odds, on what grounds can we expect our brains to seamlessly migrate back and forth? Zhai seems to have a lack of appreciation for theories of embodied mind. To be fair, the books was published in 1998, and a lot of the work in this area has come out only since then; here the book is merely dated.
As the list of qualifications and robotic appendages necessary to buttress the argument steadily pile up, the Principle of Reciprocity becomes more and more enfeebled by its encroach on tautology. The final step would be to hack the virtual right into the brain as in The Matrix. Here there may still be software glitches, but at least complications like mechanical breakdown of robots that manipulate our bodies, etc. would be avoided. At this endpoint of direct brain interface the argument approaches something along the lines of “If you have no means of discovering the differences between two things, then they are indistinguishable.”
There’s a postulate at work in all of this more fundamental than the Principle of Reciprocity which Get Real never confronts, that simulation is always subordinate (informationally, thermodynamically) to the simulator. And this is why there will always be a tell, information leakage, that exposes virtuality. Simulator encompasses simulation, not the other way around. How is scientific discovery possible in the virtual world? In Zhai’s final test of whether or not you’re in a simulation he suggests that you smash a macro object into smaller and smaller bits of matter, finally bringing it down to the quantum scale, and send it through a particle super-collider. To fill out the virtual world we could “just copy physical laws, as we read in a typical textbook of physics, and incorporate them into our ultimate programming.” So you could just program a super-collider—including the energy that it would require, Zhai notes, which would not actually be required by the simulator—and if the results are as expected even at such scales we cannot tell virtual from actual. But part of the reason we build larger and larger particle accelerators is that we don’t know the results. How do you just copy out the laws of physics from a textbook into the programming of the virtual world if those laws are precisely what are under investigation? You could program some mysterious dark matter into the virtual world, but how would you penetrate beyond what is known? Zhai does address this:
The question PR is addressing is not whether one world or the other contains more truth or is more fundamental, but whether the two are experienced as equally real. Do the initial inhabitant-scientists not pass on their knowledge that the world is virtual to their descendants? Is this knowledge lost or overwritten simply by the progressively more fleshed out virtual world? New methods of science should arise tuned to the possibly different physical laws of the virtual world, and the idea is that other things being equal, things would be equal, but there are too many sources of information leakage from actual to virtual to take much of this very seriously.
The idea that one lives in a virtual world may start out more as an ontological proposition, but as it gains hold it becomes unavoidably metaphysical. There are indeed arguments and hypotheses now that we inhabit a simulation. This is at first something that first surfaces in news feeds as an off-the-wall hypothesis, and such arguments might better be met with skepticism for the time being, but if we start seeing reasons to take them as more than something to mindlessly spread at cocktail parties, especially if we started seeing hints of information leakage, attention begins to reorient from the simulation to the simulator. The stronger the signal, the starker our reorientation. Zhai is correct that if you don’t know you’re in a simulation, one world, compatible with our senses, would conceivably be as real as the next, but how in practice do you keep the reality of the virtual a secret?
Another of the book’s conjectures is that while the physical world can be simulated, consciousness cannot. Virtual inhabitation always requires a teleoperating brain situated somewhere in physical space. There’s no chance for conscious AI in Zhai’s mind. (I’m somewhat skeptical—at least agnostic—to this possibility myself, but for different reasons.) He critiques philosophies that presuppose that first-person perspective arises from third-, claiming that it’s really the reverse, that the first- (first-person experience, qualia, etc.) is fundamental and that this is what needs to be explained in order to account for the third-person viewpoint. A lengthy argument that the first-person viewpoint cannot be accounted for by (the locality of) classical mechanics is tidily concluded with an appeal to a brief and utterly mystical version of quantum mechanics (which computers are unsuited for, hence no conscious virtual agents).
[Review continued in comments...]
And this is how the whole setup works. It’s robots all the way down. Whenever in the virtual environment the situation exceeds the duplication capabilities of goggles, headphones, and a haptic body suit a robot steps in to perform the function. And so in addition to feeding us they will be stimulating our genitals for cybersex, and in the case where sexual reproduction is desired, carting the semen from our males across the globe to impregnate our females. In our current burgeoning age of teledildonics there is indeed precedence for this kind of thing—some of it. It’s not the point (here at least) that any of this could be strange and creepy, but that it’s, again, overwrought and dubiously practicable. The book’s depiction of cybersex goes on for pages like some Kama Sutra retrofitted with robots to amalgamate the disintermediated sex act, cataloged in a lost language at once too salacious for the suburban US 1950s yet too prudish for the decade that followed. (My copy of the book was a used copy formerly belonging to a high school library. I got a lot of amusement imagining a sexually repressed youth stumbling across such lurid explications after furtively browsing various human anatomy entries from the school encyclopedias.)
Because it’s the book’s the most illustrative depiction of human/robot, virtual/actual interplay I’m include a somewhat lengthy excerpt here, but if this kind of cyber-prurience bores you, feel free to skip it.
Combined with an interactive VR process, two persons of the opposite sex will be able to finish, aided by manmade apparatus, the physiological process on the actual level, and be sensually and emotionally fulfilled on the virtual level.…
On the female side, there will be an artificial male mouth (lips, teeth, tongue, saliva, etc.) and artificial male genitalia, both imitating male flesh as closely as possible, but planted with micro-sensors all over the surface, and moved by motors connected to the computer (the Engine). The penis should be able to be in states of arousal and non-arousal and somewhere in between, and can ejaculate semen-like stuff at the right moment, of course.
On the male side, there will be an artificial female mouth, and artificial female genitalia, both planted with highly sensitive micro-sensors and moved by motors connected to his computer. As for the sense of touch from other parts of the body such as breasts and hands, the regular VR clothing will do its job there as usual.…
Let's call the female Mary and the male Paul. In the virtual world they meet for the first time here in a concert hall. Jaron Lanier, the Lord of VR, will play his “Music of Changes.” Mary and Paul are seated next to each other mutually unknown. As soon as Jaron begins to play, Mary and Paul immediately feel a sort of synergy going on between them in the way they respond to the music. Now it is time for an intermission. They strike up a conversation about the music and Jaron, and very soon romance develops: during the second half of the concert, they hold and squeeze each other's hand following the ups and downs of the music. When the concert is over and as they step out of the concert hall, their passion bursts out like a storm.
They manage to set up a private room on the spot (assuming they can do that in the virtual world), and their lips and tongues begin to explore and search each other passionately and their naked bodies intertwine and struggle like a hurricane. As their mutual stimulation escalates to the peak, they are ready for the intercourse. “Mary, you are my dream,” Paul gasps; “You are my reality, Paul,” Mary murmurs in return, as their bodies move back and forth in a harmonious rhythm. Finally, as Paul pours his passion with an explosive ejaculation, Mary screams with an implosive contraction.
For all the alleged physical and emotional intensity, we should not forget the fact that Mary and Paul are only having intercourse in the virtual world. On the actual level, the lips, the tongues, the saliva, the genitalia, etc., are all artificial surrogates for the receiver of the opposite sex….
Keep in mind, as all other parts of the VR outfit, these artificial sex organs are not only stimulators, but also sensors at the same time. So when Paul inserts his erect penis into the artificial vagina, for example, the opening of the artificial vagina immediately responds and measures the size and shape of the penis. The information will be transformed and transmitted to Mary's facility and the artificial penis will be, guided by the information, inserted into her vagina almost at the same moment, and its size be adjusted accordingly to imitate Paul's as precisely as possible. At the same time, the artificial penis will measure Mary's vagina in a similar way, and the information will be transmitted and used to adjust the artificial vagina Paul is dealing with. Of course, the back and forth movement will be controlled in a similar fashion. Because this is a real-time dynamic process that keeps going from the beginning to the end of the sexual encounter, the described rhythmic coordination will be felt just like an actual encounter in the actual world.
Now we have to deal with a tough and critical issue, that is, how Paul's sperm can be ejaculated into Mary's vagina in such a process if they want to have a child. As we know, since Paul and Mary are far apart actually, what Mary feels ejaculated into her vagina cannot possibly be the same thing that Paul ejaculates actually at that moment. Therefore, their first affair after the concert cannot lead to Mary's pregnancy by Paul's sperm. But Paul's semen is nevertheless ejaculated into the artificial vagina. We also know another fact: sperm can be kept alive outside the human body as has been done for many years in a sperm bank. So now if Mary and Paul decide to have a child after their first intercourse, they can, through the control mechanism discussed in the last section, have Paul's sperm transported to Mary's actual place and be ejaculated from the artificial penis next time they make love, and so on and so forth. Or, if they prefer, they can utilize the technique of artificial insemination so as to totally separate reproductive process from sexual intercourse. In such a case, Mary may choose any semen-like milky liquid or whatever she likes as the substitute for the semen to be ejaculated into her vagina during the intercourse. She can even choose to use another man's semen to get herself pregnant when she has cybersex with Paul, if Paul has no legitimate reason against that.
I’ll never listen to Jaron Lanier’s “Music of Changes” the same way again.
(A few questions did arise while reading this. Is scent recreated? The VR clothing apparently “will do its job” to cover the sense of touch, but apart from the artificial mouth it’s left unspecified what precisely the lips and tongues are in contact with when Mary and Paul “begin to explore and search each other passionately”. And then we see that the process is “guided by the information”, and while it was not much worried over at the time Get Real was being published, these days “digital information” is nearly synonymous with “digital information leakage”. With a recently settled lawsuit over a surveilling smart vibrator, it’s safe to assume at this point that virtual sexual intercourse will not be the only process that this information guides. What third-party processes are concurrently thus guided?)
Zhai’s intention seems to be for the Principle of Reciprocity to stand on strictly theoretical grounds—the fleshed out hypotheticals are not the focus, that is, but there merely to illustrate the underlying principle. If you found yourself in two scenarios, so it goes, where the sensory inputs were identical (the first unsupplemented by any external gear and the second a perfect reproduction of the same sensations via a VR rig) you’d not only be factually unable to tell the difference, the difference would be meaningless. But Zhai is far too blasé about the practicability of such a simulation. At a certain point what can and cannot be done in practice makes a very big difference. The virtual experiences he describes require such an improbable encumbrance of gear that it’s not at all convincing that a true one-for-one would be even hypothetically possible.
It’s hard to imagine how the simulation would not be discovered. You might be able to simulate a deep sea dive with a pressure suit, but what sort of contraption would be necessary to simulate a zero-G experience or multiple-G acceleration? What if the equipment malfunctions or breaks down? What if the body is dropped or jostled by one of the robots transporting it? What if there’s a terrible accident in the actual world that houses your body? Say your actual body suddenly loses a limb while sublimely in the virtual world you’re transfixed in the Lord of VR’s music? What do you attribute mismatched phenomena to? For all the hype, today’s VR equipment is having certain problems with conditions such as VR sickness, something like motion sickness, and more psychologically existential problems like “post-VR sadness”, also called VR hangover. Certainly technological fixes will arise—improved algorithms, even electrical stimulation of the vestibular system (GVS)—but it’s hard to see how some sensory mismatches would only be overcome by being born into the virtual environment or else introduced at a very young age while the brain is plastic enough to lay down new sensory associations so that there’d be no mismatch in the first place. But the problems of machine malfunction or unintended manipulation of the physical body still pose a problem. I have an excellent pair of noise-cancelling headphones; the loudspeaker announcement for the next stop while I’m riding the bus may be blocked out, but that only heightens the sensation of the soundwaves travelling through my body. I feel the announcement in my arms and in my chest.
While we’re continuously uncovering new dimensions of plasticity in the brain, there’s a degree of fixity that needs to be reckoned with as well. Zhai doesn’t see much issue with traveling in and out of the virtual world and indeed thinks it’ll be fairly common, but if one world is contingent on certain set of sensory integrations while the sensory integrations of another world are far at odds, on what grounds can we expect our brains to seamlessly migrate back and forth? Zhai seems to have a lack of appreciation for theories of embodied mind. To be fair, the books was published in 1998, and a lot of the work in this area has come out only since then; here the book is merely dated.
As the list of qualifications and robotic appendages necessary to buttress the argument steadily pile up, the Principle of Reciprocity becomes more and more enfeebled by its encroach on tautology. The final step would be to hack the virtual right into the brain as in The Matrix. Here there may still be software glitches, but at least complications like mechanical breakdown of robots that manipulate our bodies, etc. would be avoided. At this endpoint of direct brain interface the argument approaches something along the lines of “If you have no means of discovering the differences between two things, then they are indistinguishable.”
There’s a postulate at work in all of this more fundamental than the Principle of Reciprocity which Get Real never confronts, that simulation is always subordinate (informationally, thermodynamically) to the simulator. And this is why there will always be a tell, information leakage, that exposes virtuality. Simulator encompasses simulation, not the other way around. How is scientific discovery possible in the virtual world? In Zhai’s final test of whether or not you’re in a simulation he suggests that you smash a macro object into smaller and smaller bits of matter, finally bringing it down to the quantum scale, and send it through a particle super-collider. To fill out the virtual world we could “just copy physical laws, as we read in a typical textbook of physics, and incorporate them into our ultimate programming.” So you could just program a super-collider—including the energy that it would require, Zhai notes, which would not actually be required by the simulator—and if the results are as expected even at such scales we cannot tell virtual from actual. But part of the reason we build larger and larger particle accelerators is that we don’t know the results. How do you just copy out the laws of physics from a textbook into the programming of the virtual world if those laws are precisely what are under investigation? You could program some mysterious dark matter into the virtual world, but how would you penetrate beyond what is known? Zhai does address this:
First of all, the software in the VR infrastructure only specifies general rules that allow events in cyberspace to evolve by themselves. Continuous interactions among the first-order rules will generate second-order rules that even the original programmer does not know directly. Second, later people of later generations will be born into such a virtual world just as we are born into this actual world; they need to do a lot of science in order to know the laws of the virtual world.
The question PR is addressing is not whether one world or the other contains more truth or is more fundamental, but whether the two are experienced as equally real. Do the initial inhabitant-scientists not pass on their knowledge that the world is virtual to their descendants? Is this knowledge lost or overwritten simply by the progressively more fleshed out virtual world? New methods of science should arise tuned to the possibly different physical laws of the virtual world, and the idea is that other things being equal, things would be equal, but there are too many sources of information leakage from actual to virtual to take much of this very seriously.
The idea that one lives in a virtual world may start out more as an ontological proposition, but as it gains hold it becomes unavoidably metaphysical. There are indeed arguments and hypotheses now that we inhabit a simulation. This is at first something that first surfaces in news feeds as an off-the-wall hypothesis, and such arguments might better be met with skepticism for the time being, but if we start seeing reasons to take them as more than something to mindlessly spread at cocktail parties, especially if we started seeing hints of information leakage, attention begins to reorient from the simulation to the simulator. The stronger the signal, the starker our reorientation. Zhai is correct that if you don’t know you’re in a simulation, one world, compatible with our senses, would conceivably be as real as the next, but how in practice do you keep the reality of the virtual a secret?
Another of the book’s conjectures is that while the physical world can be simulated, consciousness cannot. Virtual inhabitation always requires a teleoperating brain situated somewhere in physical space. There’s no chance for conscious AI in Zhai’s mind. (I’m somewhat skeptical—at least agnostic—to this possibility myself, but for different reasons.) He critiques philosophies that presuppose that first-person perspective arises from third-, claiming that it’s really the reverse, that the first- (first-person experience, qualia, etc.) is fundamental and that this is what needs to be explained in order to account for the third-person viewpoint. A lengthy argument that the first-person viewpoint cannot be accounted for by (the locality of) classical mechanics is tidily concluded with an appeal to a brief and utterly mystical version of quantum mechanics (which computers are unsuited for, hence no conscious virtual agents).
[Review continued in comments...]
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