The term “virtual reality” coined in the 1980’s usually has meant the use of a headset to achieve an immersive and realistic audio-visual illusion. Both NASA and the military have used the virtual reality technology to create flight and combat simulations. Unfortunately, both the government and commercial applications have been troubled by simulation or “sim” sickness.
So far developers have not overcome the motion sickness problem nor the very high cost of trying to get an acceptable product to market. “Recreational virtual reality flamed out in the 1990s with a handful of unfun, overhyped and physically sickening arcade games by a company called Virtuality. Developers like eMagin, Vuzix and Nintendo still quietly plugged along, but the persistent nausea problem turned V.R. development into a grim, frustrating, even embarrassing business.” Until today, that is and now we have what might sound like an over hyped breakthrough called the Oculus Rift
“Indeed, fans of the Oculus Rift discover a pleasure so deep that John Carmack, Oculus’s chief technology officer, invokes it with a particular solemnity. It’s called “presence.” To achieve presence with an Oculus headset means to be suffused with the conviction—a cellular conviction, both unimpeachable and too deep for words—that you are in another world.” Before we get too excited, those of us who are more conversant with the concepts of “reality” can recognize the language of Madison Avenue. But let’s continue; there is much we can learn from this search for “presence” because, after all, that’s what the Simple Reality Project is all about.
The word simulacrum often appears in the discussion of virtual reality. Among the many definitions of that word the one most applicable for our purposes in this essay is “an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.” The human condition can involve more than a little desperate distraction with endless pseudo-pleasures. Thoreaus’ “Most men go to the grave living lives of quiet desperation with their song still in them” is apropos in explaining our current relationship with many of our high-tech “devices.”
What if the experience of simulated reality as described above by John Carmack has the effect of “feeling” like we are “singing our song”? Norman Chan explained on tested.com that a virtual world does not feel like the old P-B reality. “But with presence … you do get a profound sensation of space, causing you to forget you’re staring at a screen. Presence is fragile, but when achieved, it’s so joyful and sustaining that those who touch it tend to fall silent.”
If this reminds us of Timothy Leary’s and Stan Grof’s research with LSD or the effects of certain types of mushrooms or DMT, a powerful psychedelic compound, then we are well-advised to be skeptical. Virginia Heffernan, reporting on the virtual-reality phenomenon, asked one of the developers of V.R. about the relationship between hallucinogens and V.R. produced “presence.” “‘Oh I like Oculus and drugs’ one virtual-reality curator told me, as if in reassurance. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. This is a crowd that likes to hallucinate.” Alas, this “crowd” that likes to hallucinate is some 7 billion self-medicating souls.
The conflict inherent in differentiating P-A from P-B may be showing up in the human body as it entertains the escape into V.R. “Under the spell of V.R., the eyes and ears tell the brain one story, while deeper systems—including the endocrine system, which registers stress; the vestibular, which governs balance; and other proprioceptors, which make spatial sense of the body’s position and exertions—contradict it. The sensory cacophony is so uncanny and extraterrestrial to suggest to the organism a deadly threat.” This is, of course, precisely why identification with the body must be transcended.
“If nausea is the body’s dysphoric response to the uncanny, presence is the euphoric one.” When John Carmack uses “feeling” and Virginia Heffernan in the previous sentence uses “presence” in describing sensations associated with the experience of V.R. they have not achieved the “feeling” of the “present moment” experienced by those in P-A. In fact, our pursuit of V.R. sensations betrays our desperation to escape the illusion of our suffering; we seek a future illusion in trying to escape the current illusion (P-B).
It is fitting that the phrase “virtual reality” first makes its appearance in a play “The Theater and Its Double” (1938) by Antonin Artaud who sought to make his audience feel powerless and paranoid as he engulfed them in his “theater of cruelty.” We can see that P-B has the same effect on the people of the global village today as most of us play our roles in what may be termed the “theater of the absurd.”
It is ironic that the heart of distinguishing illusion (the fundamental cause of human suffering) from reality (the insights that will emancipate humanity from all of its problems) also requires experiencing the difference between response (presence or feeling) and reaction (resistance or fear of our experience.) Developers of V.R. reveal their ignorance of this distinction in their descriptions of the sensations of Oculus Rift. “In our gentler commercial idiom, used for movies and games, in which escape from reality is considered a given good, this comfort is known magisterially as presence [italics mine].” Humanity has for many millennia become almost infinitely creative in escaping reality but few of us would believe that this has resulted in a “given good.”
Expanding the context of this V.R. technology to include the human condition we can see an analogy that has a global population searching for the vivid experience of the present moment but instead choosing the nauseating experience of the P-B delusion. We all long for what seems to be desirable and for exciting sensations that promise to intensify our experience of something pleasurable but lead us inevitably to the conclusion many Buddhists came to long ago, namely that pleasure is suffering. (Which is a good “lead-in” to our next essay.)
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality books:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community
