Does reality matter?

Originally published on Tumblr.

About 10 years ago Nick Bostrom argued that we may be living in a simulation. He and other philosophers have since put the chances of our living in a simulated world at between 20 and 50 percent. That’s pretty high.

This week I had a chance to play a game with an Oculus Rift and isolating headphones. It didn’t take me very long to forget about the “real world” and become very comfortable in a simulated world. Of course I could fly.

Within my expected lifetime we’ll have artificial pets that behave no differently from “real” pets. Will we be as emotionally attached? I suspect so. Will it be immoral to kill such creatures? I don’t know.

More and more I’m realizing that I’m losing my grip on reality. We all are, whether we realize it or not. We’re comfortably accepting new realities that aren’t real. Or at least they didn’t used to be real.

Let’s take a step back and consider the “in my day” argument, which is clearly related. Let’s think about our ancestors’ realities.

50,000 years ago: “In my day, most people died right after having children, or sooner.”
1,000 years ago: “In my day, most children died.”
500 years ago: “In my day, most diseases killed you.”
200 years ago: “In my day, trans-oceanic trips were all one-way.”
2 generations ago: “In my day, we saved up our whole lives to take a trip to France.”
1 generation ago: “In my day, we didn’t have computers.”

Today: “In my day, we knew the difference between the digital world and meat space.”

But that’s less and less true. In the past 20 years we’ve stopped making a distinction between a lot of physical and virtual goods. We buy books that are printed on paper, or downloaded to our computers. We read mail that arrives on paper or via a mechanism most of us can’t explain. We’re accepting virtual reality just fine.

Will the next two big shifts in our perception of “reality” go this smoothly?

Will we start having artificial pets without a fuss? I suspect so.

Will we start working and vacationing in virtual worlds? I suspect so.

In my day, you had to move your body to go to Paris. In my day, we thought that the idea of living in a simulated world was hard to understand.

We’re definitely losing our grip on reality. We always have been. The only difference is that it’s now happening fast enough for us to notice. These changes used to take millennia, then centuries, then a generation. Now, a single generation is experiencing many different realities in a single lifetime.