Hard (not) to Believe
When we went to Wonder La, a Disneyland kind of park outside Bangalore, it was
amusing how all the kids will turn the steering wheel on their cars/ carts/
wagons. Then my wife noticed that all the seats of the rides, including the back seats, had steering
wheels: looks like every kid wants one to turn. Old enough to steer, and young
enough to not know the co-ordination nightmare such a vehicle would be in real
life!
As we grow older, we need to be willing
to suspend disbelief to achieve the same feeling. That raises the bar for the
makers of TV serials and movies and writers because, as C
Dixon wrote:
“We start to believe only when we become
sufficiently immersed.”
But can Virtual Reality (VR) get us to
believe more easily, wonders Dixon:
“In the VR community, “presence” is a
term of art. It’s the idea that once VR reaches a certain quality level your
brain is actually tricked — at
the lowest, most primal level — into
believing that what you see in front of you is reality. Studies show that even
if you rationally believe you’re not truly standing at the edge of a steep
cliff, and even if you try with all your might to jump, your legs will buckle.
Your low-level lizard brain won’t let you do it.”
The holy
grail of VR is described thus by Chris Milk:
“With virtual reality, you’re essentially
hacking the visual-audio system of your brain and feeding it a set of stimuli
that’s close enough to the stimuli it expects that it sees it as truth. Instead
of suspending your disbelief, you actually have to remind yourself not to
believe.”
Are we there yet? Obviously not. But
given the relentless march of technology, most of us would only argue on the
timing, not whether it will ever happen. At that point, as Dixon says, our kids
(or grandkids) will wonder:
“Kids will think it’s funny that their
ancestors used to stare at glowing rectangles hoping to suspend disbelief.”
Imagine that: those “glowing rectangles”
(aka smartphones and tablets) will soon be as ancient as radio and
(increasingly) TV seem to us today.
There was a philosophical speculation that was discussed with full vigor, both in the Western (secular philosophers most often discussed this, starting from the age old Greek times some 2500 years back) and Eastern (Indian mysticism in particular). The crux is like this: Since what all we come to know from the outside world can only be through our senses with the mind being the reactor and processor of information, there is something critical: we can never know anything except those that are delivered to us by our sense organs. Even the cleverest instruments ever devised by man finally translates its findings into something that we can sense through our sense organs! This point by itself is not taken seriously by anyone, specifically the modern Western scientists.
ReplyDeleteNext question, though it looks obviously ridiculous, was never spared in speculative philosophy. Suppose all the inputs to the mind are cooked up and fed into the 'brain' and are not coming from the 'real' world outside, then the trapped mind has no way of knowing if it is being cleverly manipulated! Crudely put, nobody can prove that the outside world is an objective reality! One needs to jump out of oneself to do so. Ludicrous, but a valid question in philosophy!
The earlier example to make the point in favor of this philosophic speculation is the aircraft-pilot-trainer simulator system that hypothetically exceeds its usual bounds, in order to create the illusion of the flight as convincing as the reality outside.
With your example and with further technology advances, we are in a position to weight more and more ludicrous possibilities by way of examples favoring the minds own myth-creation - that is the question, "Is there a world in reality or whether illusion poses as reality?"
I suppose in future people will answer truthfully if this question of reality is posed to someone at a given point in time, "First you tell me if I am inside a simulator and then I will confirm to you that 'my outside' is indeed an illusion. Before that, tell me how you you going to convince me that you are real and not a simulated thing?" :-) Confusing, no?