Thought Experiment
Would you like your reality curated or direct?
Here’s a little thought experiment.
Imagine you, as a human, are presented with two distinct and mutually exclusive choices for the remainder of your life, each offering unique fulfillments and challenges.
Alternative 1: The Mediated Mindscape
You live in a vast, luxurious palace (think penthouse apartment, or cruise ship), in the company of a small, like-minded community—but all your interactions are mediated through freely-available advanced technology, kind of like what we have now, but even more multi-modal and immersive.
Knowledge & Culture: You have instant, flawless access to all of humanity’s art, history, literature, music, and science via compellingly “real” VR/AR or neural interfaces. Do you want to walk the streets of ancient Rome or hear John Coltrane live? It’s all available.
Physical Experience: Your body is healthy, comfortable, well-fed—and there’s an excellent exercise room. Yet you’ll never feel real rain, touch soil, or swim in an actual ocean—only simulations.
Community: You’re not totally alone. You have a small group of family and friends, like a Pandemic pod. Thanks to the immersive technology, each of you feels like you live in a much wider world (or worlds), all accessible through your headset. You hardly intersect with your group in person. You can socialize with real people via remote link, or with synthetic digital avatars, historical recreations, and AI companions.
Artistic Creation: You can create animation, paintings, or games with powerful digital tools and share your works instantly with a vast audience. But, sorry, you can’t hold a paintbrush or play a cello, or walk through a real forest.
Alternative 2: Reality, Unfiltered
You live in the real world—raw, limited, and analog. There’s no digital mediation, no cultural archives, no museums. You and the other members of your community arrive to the bunkhouse with whatever poems you can recite and whatever songs you can remember.
Knowledge & Culture: There’s no access to books or recordings. But you get plenty of blank paper. You can keep a sketchbook, build a press, or set up a performance stage. If you want to hear a story or a song, someone has to perform it. Culture is handmade and passed person to person.
Physical Experience: You feel real textures, real weather. You can build a fire, swim in a cold lake, harvest potatoes, or hold someone’s hand.
Community: You live in a small human circle, probably 100-200 people. Relationships and interactions are face-to-face. You don’t share your little planet or island with anybody, so you don’t need to worry about warfare or invasion or outside attack.
Artistic Creation: You can sculpt, sing, write, or paint—with real tools, for a real, face-to-face audience.
Let’s discuss.
Here are some thoughts you might consider before you comment.
I tried to make both options as appealing as possible, while also as pure as possible. I didn’t want to force you to choose the lesser of two evils.
Suppose you picked Option #1, and you’re given one week to experience the world through your senses before you tap into the mediated world. How would you spend that week? What if the situation were reversed, and you had to stock your mind on Shakespeare, Miyazaki, Plato, and the Simpsons before moving to the boonies?
Is a synthesis between these two worlds possible? If you wanted to live with the best of both worlds, how would you navigate between them?
Beyond the individual choice, what might be the long-term societal implications of a world where a significant portion of humanity chose Alternative 1 versus Alternative 2? Consider areas like innovation, human evolution (both physical and cognitive), and the definition of "progress."
How might our understanding of concepts like "truth," "authenticity," or even "happiness" evolve or diverge between individuals living in Alternative 1 versus Alternative 2? Would there be a common ground, or would their fundamental realities be so different that they become incomprehensible to each other?
If you chose Alternative 1, would there be an ethical imperative to preserve the "unfiltered" reality (Alternative 2) for future generations, even if you never intended to experience it yourself? Conversely, if you chose Alternative 2, would you ever feel a pang of regret or curiosity about the vast, mediated knowledge lost to your community?
Both realities seem equally painful to me. But at least in the unfiltered one I live in a world of my own creation. Whereas the mediated reality I am at the mercy of the technology and the gatekeepers who created it.
Many people already live in the curated world. Their entire existence is managed for them. They live in one-bedroom flats, hospital beds, retirement facilities. They are crippled by age and infirmity, limited by poverty, stimulated by endless television shows, sports broadcasts, pay for view movies. They interact with nurses, doctors, caretakers, and occasionally a relative or old friend. They are too poor to buy a brush or paint, or even a pad of paper; and they are too crippled by arthritis to hold a pencil or play a guitar, and too asthmatic to play a harmonica. They never feel the rain, don’t have access to an internet account or even know how to use one. This is their unfiltered reality. They are our friends, our parents. Perhaps they are our future.