To say that humankind was destined to develop and incorporate virtual reality as part of our evolution is perhaps a very fair and sound argument. It could be said that it all began happening as early on when the first hominids began to develop and use language to the degree of sophistication where vocabulary, grammar, and syntax could be used to describe things outside of the present tense*. Think about how revolutionary of a leap that was during our course of evolution! It really put us apart from other animal species: to be able to share and communicate ideas about things that weren't actually happening or existing in the here and now**. It ultimately gave us the ability to better develop our memory, to learn and share knowledge from stories (and successes/failures), to speculate and plan on seeking resources and avoiding disasters, and to be creative. It was essentially the development of this "software" that allowed us to create ideas for an abstract "unreal" world which impacted motor behaviours and sensory experience in this one. Slapping that talent together with tool-making hands to make simulations and extensions of things essentially began and fueled our endeavors to create virtual realities. Then along came art and music, to give our senses a pleasant break from being constantly vigilant in a more hostile natural world. Those things were blended with dressing up in distinct costuming and decoration, using psychoactive botanicals, special rituals and ceremonies, and building special monuments, mostly for the purpose of trying to transcend into other places beyond this realm. Thus, the earliest vehicle thence used to search for these other "virtual realities" came when our early ancestors began formulating religion.
Taken in that context, there might be a valid reason to be suspicious of "virtual realities". Throughout thousands of years of inquisitions, witch trials, dogma and dictates of authoritative caste systems, and judgements from theocratic regimes, millions of people suffered when they were suspected of not playing along in the virtual reality of religion properly. They were either enslaved, ostracized, imprisoned, tortured, or executed as infidels, witches, blasphemers, and atheists; or else, for the sake of playing the game properly in some cultures, many were splayed out on some altar and offered as a blood sacrifice, given a bodily mutilation, or even obligated to commit ritual suicide*** to placate some mythological being or force of a "virtual reality". The virtual game of human development I play, Civilization V, is a hell of a lot tamer by comparison than real human development when religion becomes factored in.
It's ridiculous when I see the juxtaposition of those heavily immersed in religion and those over-enthralled with playing around in modern day virtual reality/gaming environments, and then see the sides actually actively arguing and clashing about who is more knowledgeable about reality, because one is no better grounded in actual reality than the other: they are both trying to find improvement by using escapist means to avoid the harsh, oppressive or "sinful" world they see today. It's a funny irony to see that many who are most reactionary and opposed to the development of game based virtual reality also make some claim to being religious. They believe in preaching to people to stop interacting with other in a false world of a game environment and use energy to gather together more often and talk to, and listen to stories related to the existence and will of a great big invisible man in the sky. At the same time, especially in the USA, those same people who associate themselves with a conservative right wing religious "moral majority" who want to further restrict or outright ban simulated game-based violence in MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games), most likely are the ones lobbying for the right to tote around real flippin' guns. Equally though, VR players who are spending most of their waking daily lives in front of a screen, are becoming more disengaged from actual real world interaction, are becoming increasing more socially maladroit nerds and thus have no ground to stand on for sanctimoniously judging others who are opting to bravely engage more with the real world. The VR people are likely to smugly brand the reality-based people as "Luddites", "low-techs", or with some other label that brand those apart from them as technically ignorant and primitive. This all just brings more chicken and egg questions to light that I have no time to explore and answer. All I know is that I don't want to side with, or get involved too deeply, with either camp.
The most deluded and pathetic of all people who are overly-engaged with their little realm of virtual reality don't even have to use computers, or a place of worship. They are the "super-fans" of sports. Jesus Christ, I hate these idiots! The ones who are constantly glued to the games and stats reports on the sports channel on TV, and would stay that way if they could, the one who makes paying for season tickets a priority over paying for food and shelter. I'm talking about the real intense ones. The assholes who are too much emotionally dependant on the success of whatever team they are following, like the entire world is dependant on it. If the team wins, they are on cloud nine, in a weirdly maniacal way; if their team loses, super-fan gives himself (and it's 99.9999% a guy thing) some special license to lash out and be dramatically and dangerously angry: to be a hooligan, to riot and loot, to drink himself stupid and to abuse others or beat his wife and kids****. It's a bloody insult to humanity to channel behaviour like this something that "comes out of passion". The negative outcome of a simple "virtual" game translates to real-life losses from their drastic and thoughtless violent and destructive behaviour in the real world. These are the guys who may jeer and laugh at the nerdy types who play role-playing board and computer games, but some of these same guys will turn around and drop everything at an instant to play fuckin' "fantasy football", or "fantasy draft picks": things which basically equate to being Dungeons and Dragons for dumb jocks. That's even going into whole new level of stupid when put into context of virtual worlds: a virtual reality based on a virtual reality*****.
I mentioned before in my last entry that the list of things in our lives not related to using virtual reality would be shorter than the ones that did. I challenged myself and made my list of things that I enjoy doing that I consider are completely apart from any virtual reality or media. Instead of escaping into the virtual worlds, I believe the brain needs to be pulled away from there and re-booted with good dose of reality. Basically, one has to think of things that don't involve computers, looking at screens or pictures, intoxication, listening to music/recordings, playing games, or creating abstract thoughts from reading, writing, doodling, and making calculations. It really is a short list. The items in it are:
- sleeping
- eating
- drinking various beverages
- cardio vascular exercise (without earphones, that gets me to an actual destination, no treadmills or stationary bikes)
- cooking
- talking face to face with friends and family (and the odd stranger . . . and believe me, I encounter a lot of "odd" strangers)
- scavenging and foraging (not shopping: using money is a grey area to classify, but let's say that for now that it's an abstraction: exchanging currency, or 0's and 1's through card transactions for goods actually counts as a form of virtual reality)
- sitting/meditating in a park, or by calm water
- cleaning and organizing my living space (this mood rarely strikes me, but it happens)
- fishing
- watching wildlife
- tending a garden space
- walking/petting/playing with my dog
*- Communication in higher animals is pretty much restricted to stuff happening in the present tense. Signals and gestures from fish to mammals are limited to being prompted by what is happening in the immediate environment they are currently in.
**-[a bit of a digression] This is not just a thing we should just assume happens naturally and automatically in the basic development of any human language. There are some languages that don't have clear cut sets of grammar or syntax for expressing exact conditional or future tenses. Even English itself technically has no concise "future tense", in the sense that the verbs in a future tense don't neatly conjugate into a precise single word, as compared to some other languages. There's "I walked to the store yesterday." but there is no, "I [single word to describe a future action of "to walk"] to the store tomorrow". It has clumsily jumbled in modal auxillary verbs with the infinitives to talk about future things. The modal "will" itself derives from the verb "to want," or "to wish", and the modal "shall" strangely is derived from "to owe". Even as our vocabulary advanced through the ages, the concept of tense and time is abstract enough that we often are limited to describing the dimension with the some of the same adjectives we would use to describe physical space. Even some modern languages don't even have separate words to further differentiate the next day after the current day, and the general early time of day: like Spanish and German, both use same word to mean "tomorrow", and "morning".
***- Rituals like: the Aztecs cutting hearts out of people, circumcision (male and female), scarification in rites of passage in Africa; the suicidal ones like suttee in India, suppuku/hari kiri in Japan; more historically recent, the Jonestown, and Heaven's Gate Cult massacres.
****- When working at another past vocation, being contracted through the provincial Ministry of Justice, I encountered a domestic violence case where woman had most of half of her face beat in by her husband in the presence of their kids. His reported excuse as to why he did it was: "Oh, it's nothing. I just got a little mad because the Flames lost."
*****- All contact and field sports are simulated forms of battling and warfare, therefore an artificial world; if you aren't actually involved with actually playing it, and only spectating it, that only makes it a virtual reality to you, one in which your degree of interactivity is just limited to cheering, screaming and yelling at the field or screen like a moron.
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