Chapter 4

THE VIRTUAL WORLD

Nothing is real

-- John Lennon

Some get strong, some get strange
Sooner or later, it all gets real

-- Neil Young

Reality is whatever doesn't go
away when you stop believing in it

-- Philip K. Dick

    Annamaya, physical reality, is the domain of "everyday life." It is what, in the modern Western mind-set, is commonly taken for absolute reality -- for the be-all and end-all of existence. It is also the domain of most physical science. Chemistry, classical physics, molecular biology, zoology, botany -- everything trapped between the quantum level and the human level -- all deal with the category I have called World.

    A great deal of classical philosophy, Western and Eastern, deals with the nature of annamaya. Classical philosophy asks questions like: "What is this world we see in front of us? Where does it come from? What is it doing to us? What are we doing to it?" In this chapter I will ask these same philosophical questions, but from the rather unorthodox perspectives of computer science and virtual reality.

    Computer science has led a number of modern thinkers to the view that the world, annamaya, is a computational entity.      Virtual reality is a newfangled technology, which barely even exists yet, but it has an important point to teach us. It brings this emerging computational view of the world to life. It provides a concrete model for thinking about the idea that the everyday world is not absolutely real, that it is an epiphenomenon, a collection of computational patterns. The world that we live in now is every bit as virtual as a world created inside a computer of the year 2112.

    I will argue here that the computational view of the world is, in fact, closely related the spiritual view of the world. This idea is one of the key points of the philosophical attitude I call hyperrealism. It is a link between technology and spirituality -- a link which is simple enough in itself, but does not seem to have been previously recognized.

    Based on the link between virtual reality and spiritual philosophy, I will make some radical futurological predictions, hinted at in the Prelude. I will argue that as virtual reality technology becomes more prevalent, recognition of the virtuality of everyday reality will increase, thus having an "enlightening" effect that I call electronic eschatology. In other words, the possibility is open for future generations to use VR as a short-cut to spiritual experience -- a short cut sure to be preferable in many ways to the psychedelic experience.

    Having established that the world is "virtual," it still remains to understand what makes the world "hold together," what makes it appear as real and solid as it does. This is where it is well worth asking what the science of complex systems has to teach us about the construction of that most complex system of all: the world itself. But this question will be put off until later chapters. For now, we will content ourselves with exploring the virtuality of it all.

     THE DUBIOUS REALITY OF THE WORLD

    Before entering into virtual reality and computational philosophy, I will discuss the question of the reality of the world on a purely philosophical level. Some of the ground for this discussion was laid in Chapter 2, with the discussion of spiritual reality. Here, however, I would like to keep the discussion more concrete and personal. Instead of Buddha or Nietzsche, I will begin with "Row, row row your boat."

    Every American child learns the song                            

        Row, row, row your boat

        Gently down the stream

        Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

        Life is but a dream ...

The melody is fairly plain, but sung as a round, it has a rather nice ring to it. Most children seem to pass it over without much notice. When I first learned the song, however, it threw my mind for a bit of a loop. I was unwilling to merely accept it as a nice little ditty. I puzzled over the lyrics again and again. My perplexity was rendered even greater when I heard the following alternate version on the TV show Mr. Roger's Neighborhood:

        Propel, propel, propel your craft

        Gently through liquid solution

        Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically

        Existence is but an illusion

    "Existence is but an illusion, eh?" I thought to myself, worldly-wise as only a precocious five-year old can be. "Maybe so, maybe so...."

    A few years later, when my mother was taking graduate courses in Oriental history, I poked around in her schoolbooks and found similar sentiments expressed much more impressively and extensively. I spent idle hour after idle hour pondering such gems as "The sound of one hand clapping," and "Am I a man who dreams he is a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man?"     I imagined an entire universe living inside my thumb, which would unfold itself to me if I simply concentrated hard enough....

    I noticed how, when listening to a completely repetitive sound, such as a ticking clock or a dripping water-faucet, my mind would spontaneously impose all sort of fancy melodies. I would actually hear the clock going tick-(pause)-tick-(pause)-(pause)-tick-tick-tick-tick, over and over again ... but then, when I forced myself to pay close attention, I would realize that the modulations of timing weren't really there. The next day it would be going tick-tickity-tick-(pause)-tick-tick-tick-(pause)-tick-tickity-tick instead.

    This humble observation struck me as a major scientific discovery. Perhaps, I mulled excitedly, all the patterns and structures in the world around me were just as illusory as these fanciful melodies. Yes, I saw and felt the world, but I also genuinely heard the melodies, even though they "weren't there"....

    Perhaps, I told myself, the world was only there when you were truly paying attention to it -- and all the rest of the time it was improvised, like my little tick-tick melodies....     This whimsical hypothesis led me, after a few years, to another interesting topic for investigation. How much of the time, I wondered, was I actually consciously aware of what was going on? I estimated one percent, but figured I might be off by a factor of ten in either direction.

    I set myself the improbable task of becoming consciously aware all the time -- aware of every time my feet hit the ground, every time I saw a word in a book, every time I took a breath of air. Aware, aware, aware!

    But what I found, very quickly, was that this made it quite difficult to do things. Walking was OK, but reading a book while being acutely aware of each word was mental torture. My speed-reading ability, on which I prided myself, could not survive this treatment. It seemed clear that our ability to do things efficiently was predicated on our not being conscious of our every action. So, in other words, if unconscious action was illusion, then illusion was necessary. There was no way out!

    Morality was also a cause of constant confusion. I found myself generally unable to hurt others, without understanding why. Some elderly relatives tell the story of how, when I was five years old, they saw my two year old sister walk up to me and ask for one of my candies. I only had one left, so I smiled weakly and gave it to her. I turned to them and said, "It feels good to give something to someone when you don't want to." I wasn't trying to be clever, but merely expressing, with childish directness, the paradox of morality that endlessly disturbed me. If I had wanted to give it to her, it wouldn't have felt good to do so, it would have felt like nothing. Somehow, I felt, morality was a pleasure taken from self-denial, and this was unhealthy. If the existence of others was a dubious proposition anyway -- life was just a dream! -- then why should it be enjoyable to deny myself something in favor of someone else? Could it be that somehow by extending my compassion to others I endowed the world with life? But this proposition was almost too strange to entertain.

    ***

    This fascination with the insubstantiality of the world never left me. In college, I would infuriate casual acquaintances by informing them, matter-of-factly, of their own nonexistence. "You're not conscious," I would say. "You're not real. You're just a product of my unconscious imagination. You're a spontaneous hallucination. When I recover my senses in a minute or two, you'll be gone...!"

    So far as I know I never convinced anyone of their own nonexistence. However, I did have the experience of having to convince a friend, whose incessant LSD use had finally taken its toll on his mind, that he did in fact exist. His nonexistence was very vivid and very upsetting to him, not a subject of doubt at all, extremely different from my musing, meditative skepticism. I told him that he was being ridiculous, that obviously he was just as real as anyone or anything else; but this did not assuage him in the least bit. Finally I put aside my inner doubts and reassured him, over and over again, that he was absolutely real and solid.

    My drug-infused friend, I realized, was wrong in his extreme denial of the world. The world was there in a a sense that he, in his delusion, did not acknowledge. But on the other hand, there was a grain of truth underlying his madness: the world was not there in a sense that the ordinary person's "realistic" view did not acknowledge. The world was neither a totally meaningless illusion nor a solid, given fact. It was something inbetween, something that I didn't know a word for....

    I recalled from my mother's schoolbooks the Buddhistic distinction between the "nirvanic" and "samsaric" views of the world. In the nirvanic view, the everyday world is insubstantial, it is just a kind of "dream." Since the world has no true reality, it is unable to cause strong emotions; it just floats past, an array of breaking, blending forms. In the samsaric view, on the other hand, the world is solid and real, and the mind is in its grip; the world controls the mind by the manipulation of emotions. This is a rigid distinction: the world as illusion versus the world as solid reality. But yet the highest level of spiritual development consists of the deep realization that "nirvana is samsara and samsara is nirvana." The distinction between real and not-real is a farce; only by overcoming this distinction does one arrive at true understanding. I had never fully understood this before, but now, as I mulled my friend's predicament, it was absolutely clear to me.

    Of course the insight didn't last. This is -- as I willemphasize later on -- one of the flaws of undisciplined spirituality. It tends to produce highly erratic "growth patterns" -- periods of exalted understanding followed by intervals of utter confusion. Other periods of deep insight were to come later, some much greater in length -- some via my own use of psychedelic drugs, some via meditation, and some just, or so it seemed, via random chance. The most important thing, however, was the vivid and definite realization that there was another way of looking at the world -- a way of looking at objects as being both there and not there, both substantial and insubstantial, both permanent and fleeting....

    ***

    The technical term for my drug-infused friend's attitude is nihilism. Most people have, at one time or another, experienced the feeling described in "Row, row, row your boat" -- felt the dreamlike nature of the world, doubted the substantiality, the very "reality" of everyday reality. But these feelings tend to fade with age, often peaking during the teenage years, when social alienation is at its greatest. And when they do spring up during adult life, they are usually rapidly dismissed. "Yes, I've had those doubts too," my father explained to me once when I came to him with my childish puzzles. "I didn't answer the questions, I just eventually put them aside and got on with other things."

    On the other hand, every now and then there comes along a human being who is unable to put aside these feelings of existential doubt -- a person who is, instead, dominated by these feelings, absolutely overtaken by the sense that it's all an illusion, nothing is really there. It is for these rare individuals that the labels of "solipsist" and "nihilist" were invented. Believing in nothing, not even the sentience of his fellow human beings, the nihilist is free to do whatever he wishes to his illusory surroundings. It's all a dream anyway!

    My friend, for the brief time span of his nonexistence-obsessed acid trip, was a true nihilist -- or at least, as close to being a true nihilist as any human being can come. He genuinely believed in nothing, not even himself, not even the floor beneath his feet. He was absolutely incapable of doing anything, so overtaken was he with the feeling that the world was just ephemeral dream-fragments floating past. At first he was unable to listen to my words, since they and their speaker were no more substantial than anything else. Personally, despite a lifelong fascination with the topic, I have never experienced a nihilism anywhere near this complete, at least not for more than a few odd moments.

    Nihilists are, it would seem, more common in literature than in reality. In Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut introduces the character Dwayne Hoover, a frustrated car dealer who reads a science fiction book informing him that he is the only conscious human being in a world of android robots. Having thus learned that his world is just a fiction, he proceeds to kill one "robot" after another. Eventually Vonnegut himself appears inthe narrative, explaining to the characters that he holds their fate in his hands. The previously solid reality of the story is now exploded: confronted with its own fundamental falsity, it reverts into an ontological chaos.

    Going back a little further in history, Dostoevsky's books teem with miserable nihilists: there is Kirilov in The Possessed, obsessed with suicide; Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, committing murder for aesthetic reasons; Ivan Karamazov, spinning intricate philosophical fables about the meaninglessness of the world; and of course, the Underground Man, so far consumed by his nihilism that he is barely able to keep his body alive. In Dostoevsky's world, when one abandoned belief in God and Mother Russia, there was nothing left; the only alternative was absolute mental and spiritual confusion. And, though this view seems absurd when promoted by modern figures such as Solzhenitsyn, it was fairly well justified in its historical context. The nihilistic attitude was particularly common among the Russian youth of Dostoevsky's day, and probably was associated with the fading popularity of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Tsarist government. Dostoevsky realized that, while there is no particular idea (God, country, whatever) that is necessary for the avoidance of nihilism, nevertheless the loss of any ruling, world-rationalizing idea will tend to foster nihilism. And what he saw around him was a whole generation of Russians losing the ruling, world-rationalizing ideas that had supported their fathers and grandfathers.

    Dostoevsky himself fluctuated between the extremes of nihilism and religious devotion; it was, no doubt, his own personal experience that gave him such keen insight into the subject. It seemed he was never completely satisfied with either end of the pendulum's swing. And, indeed, realism and nihilism are both, in their own way, untenable attitudes. Realism is frustrating and irrational. It requires you to ignore the obvious arguments for skepticism -- after all, how do you really know you're not a butterfly (or a space amoeba!) dreaming you're a human, who will awaken in five minutes? Realism requires you to consistently hush your "inner voices" preaching doubt and confusion and questing spiritual freedom. On the other hand, nihilism, though perhaps more rational, is even more frustrating: it gives you, literally, nothing to go on. Everything is divested of meaning. There is no reason to continue, and no reason to stop.

    Of all Dostoevsky's characters, only Alyosha Karamazov hints at having discovered a satisfactory world-view beyond these two alternatives. Prince Myshkin in The Idiot seems to have discovered such a thing, but then collapses into madness, his Christlike universal compassion too extreme to survive the manipulative bitterness of human society. And, of course, Alyosha's character is never fully described -- The Brothers Karamazov, which was Dostoevsky's last book, deals only with Alyosha's childhood. For all its thousand-page bulk, it was intended as the introductory segment of a longer work.

    ***

    I was introduced to nihilism through personal experience and through literature. The role of nihilism in philosophy was brought to my attention by my college philosophy teacher, a balding ex-monk named Ed Misch, who had once spent several years under a vow of silence. He always struck me as the embodiment of wisdom -- as much for the eternally placid and satisfied look on his face as for his exhaustive knowledge of history, philosophy and theology. I raised my philosophical doubts with him time and time again, both and out of class. We had many enjoyable discussions, but he never took a side, for or against reality; for him the point was in the process of weighing the issues.

    We debated pragmatism, the philosophy founded a century ago by the American Charles S. Peirce, which holds that the only things worthy of attention are the real, measurable properties of entities. I wrote a brief paper arguing that pragmatism was logically flawed, because it ignored the possibility that real, measureable properties don't exist -- but Ed was disappointingly unimpressed. He was more pleased with a paper I wrote on Benjamin Lee Whorf (to be discussed in a later chapter here), whose radical theory of mind and language I saw as forming a link between Peirce's philosophy and the concerns of contemporary philosophers of artificial intelligence.

    He introduced me to the older Sophists, Gorgias and Protagoras, who argued most adroitly for the nonexistence of the world. And, more importantly, he introduced me to Nietzsche and the existentialists, who embraced the feeling of "Existence is but an illusion," and hinted that it was somehow possible to move beyond this feeling, without moving back to simple realism. The existentialists find in the inner self a kind of power which lifts one out of nihilism, into a new and more vivid kind of existence. Kierkegaard, generally considered a proto-existentialist, spoke of the "leap of faith" -- the act of will by which one believes one's way out of the nothing, much as Dostoevsky believed his way out of his Underground-Man states of mind, by seeking out within himself a consciously irrational faith in the Russian Orthodox Church.

    Slowly, as I read more and more, I realized that Buddhism and existentialism, despite their very different vocabularies, were both getting at the same sort of thing: a state inbetween reality and unreality -- a state, to use Philip K. Dick's felicitous coinage, of "semireality." Nirvana is unreality, samsara is reality, and semireality is -- what? The paradox is that this semireality is not in every sense less real than ordinary, solid reality. It is in fact more vivid, more intriguing, more alive -- it is reality come to life. In this sense semireality is more real than "real" reality....

    These ideas intrigued me without end, because, more than any other philosophy I had studied, they resonated with my own experiences and observations. So these philosophers, too, had sensed the presence of a middle way -- a path between the utter nihilism of my friend's drug trip and the blinkered realism of the average human being.... Amazing, I said, tell me more! But on these topics my teacher was uncharacteristically uninformative, and I realized that my philosophical journey was sharply diverging from his. He was a deeply spiritual man, buthis fairly conventional Christianity had no obvious relation to the kind of understanding I was seeking. If I was going to search for the other side of nothing, I would have to rely on my own devices.

     HYPERREALISM

    One sure way to win people's hearts is to propose a dichotomy. The good way versus the bad way; false understanding versus true understanding. Taking the way labeled as "good" then makes people feel good. We enjoy communing with others taking the "good" way, and feeling superior to those poor fools who have taken the "bad" way.

    A time-worn variation on the same theme is the trichotomy. For instance, Buddhism labels itself the "middle way." On the one extreme, asceticism, on the other extreme, worldly indulgence, and in the middle, the moderate, reasonable path: Buddhism. The trichotomy archetype is epitomized by Hegelian philosophy, with its thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It is also highly visible in modern politics: nearly everyone wants to be thought of as a moderate, a centrist, repudiating the extremists on the right and the left ... a tendency which always makes me think of Benjamin Franklin's saying, "Moderation in all things, including moderation."

    These twofold and threefold divisions are oversimplifications, but they help us to understand. Along the same lines, what I am proposing here is a new simplification, a trichotomy. There are three ways, I am saying, of approaching the world. Two of them are well known: realism and nihilism. The third is less well understood, though it has been proposed under a variety of different names. Coming from the realistic side, one might call it hyperrealism; coming from the nihilistic side, transnihilism. In traditional trichotomous fashion, I contend that this third path is the best one, better than realism or nihilism in all respects.

    Realism poses a strict distinction between concrete objects in the physical world and inventions of the mind and spirit. On the one side are hard cold facts, on the other side opinions, feelings, intuitions. Realism is the consensus world-view of modern society; it is the philosophy underlying Newtonian physics. It has been very useful but has also had some unfortunate consequences: it has caused generations of Westerners to virtually deaden themselves to the inner, spiritual, "unreal" side of their lives.

    Nihilism, on the other hand, poses no distinctions whatsoever. Everything is equally unreal. Nihilism is based on a powerful insight: it recognizes that everything is relative. After all, if every thing is defined in terms of other things, then where do the circles of definition bottom out? The whole world must be meaningless. Nihilism goes hand in hand with solipsism, with the feeling that no one, with the possible exception of oneself, is actually alive and conscious.

    So what is hyperrealism, transnihilism, the third path? The third path involves acknowledgement of both the relativity ofbeing and the temporary vivid solidity of being. It recognizes that at the deepest level the universe -- mindspace -- is a system of processes, producing and supporting each other. Some of these process systems intersupport each other in a particularly stable way: examples are belief systems, or individual minds, or, at the utmost extreme of stability, physical objects. Hyperrealism sees the whole world as real, solid, vivid, alive -- the physical world as well as the mental and spiritual realms. But it recognizes the nonexistence of a "bottom line," the ultimate relativity of all divisions of the universe into categories such as individual objects or processes.

    Hyperrealism is transnihilism -- the "other side" of nihilism. It is what lies beyond the recognition that nothing is truly real. It is a philosophy, an attitude, a world-view of semi-reality. It is closely related with Oriental philosophy in various ways, as well as with Gnostic Christianity and the shamanic traditions of pre-civilized societies. However it casts the insights of these belief systems in a different form, a nonsecular form, a form more suited for modern Western culture. Like all ideas in philosophy, it is both new and old.

    A slightly different way of drawing the trichotomy also occurs to me. Nihilism is not quite the opposite of realism: the opposite of realism would be transcendentalism, which claims that facts of the physical domain are insubstantial, while spiritual insights are real and substantial. Just as hyperrealism lies between realism and nihilism, it also lies between realism and transcendentalism. It affirms the spiritual meaning of the everyday, physical world, rather than viewing the entire universe as spiritually dead, or viewing spiritual reality as lying in another plane, somewhere beyond mere physical reality.

    Hyperreality is a quality of being. It comes along with a certain attitude toward life -- an attitude which I call hyperrealism. To understand mindspace, neither realism nor nihilism is an appropriate attitude. One must adopt an attitude of transnihilistic hyperrealism: of acknowledging the virtuality and relativity of forms without denying their elemental aliveness and vivid reality.

    To put it another way, one may say that hyperrealism is harmony with the creative force. Hyperrealism accepts the tentative reality of creations while openly accepting that they are creations. It views everything as both object and process. As opposed to nihilism, which gives no value to tentative reality, and denies any intuitive feeling for creative process ... or realism, which distinguishes rigidly between unreal mind-creations and absolutely real physical entities.     

    Of course, realism, nihilism, transcendentalism and hyperrealism are not the end of the story. Human reality is endlessly diverse and complex. It can be divided up in many different ways. But the trichotomy of realism/nihilism/ hyperrealism is a conceptualization that seems particularly relevant to life in modern society. Many of us today are, in one way or another, steering ourselves through the narrow passage between the Scylla of realism and the Charbydis of nihilism. The merits of the hyperrealistic attitude are, in the end, subjective: they can only be discovered through the process of living.

    The Social Context of Hyperrealism

    Hyperrealism, as I intend it, is a purely philosophical doctrine; it does not tell one how to live one's life, merely what sort of attitude to strive for. However, philosophy and everyday life are certainly not unrelated. It is also interesting to look at these abstract ideas in a different way -- in terms of their social context. Upon close inspection, one invariably finds that philosophical trends can be related to sociological trends, in deep and intriguing ways.

    Socially, the realism/nihilism dichotomy can take the form of a choice between conformism and anarchism -- between conforming to the roles and routines of established society, or living at the margins, as an alienated outsider. Conformism is the acceptance of given structures and facts as the only absolute reality, and the dismissal of alternatives as insubstantial fancy. Anarchism is the rejection of all structures and facts as essentially unreal; continual rootlessness with a conscious avoidance of strict social forms. Of course these are extremes -- no one can be truly conformist or truly anarchic -- but they are ideals to which people aspire.

    In the context of the modern US, these social/philosophical archetypes may be thought about in generational terms. My parents' generation, the "baby boom" generation, is generally characterized as having moved from counterculturism to conformism. Having thrown off established forms in the late 1960's and early 1970's, they have now returned to the establishment in a big way, changing from "hippies" into "yuppies." While statements like this are vast overgeneralizations, they do reflect underlying statistical trends, movements in collective mindspace. I have known many people who typify this pattern -- my uncle the hippie turned corporate headhunter comes to mind. I have also known many who do not fit the stereotype at all, for instance my mother, who was involved in the civil rights, anti-war and women's rights movements but refrained from taking drugs, rarely listened to rock music, and throughout the 60's and 70's retained a quite ordinary lifestyle. She continues to maintain her socialist politics, and has devoted her life to social service and radical feminism.

    Clearly, there was much more to the 60's-70's counterculture movement than mere anarchism: there were many important concrete issues at stake, such as the Vietnam war, civil rights, and women's rights. At the center of the whole movement, however, was a core feeling that "the establishment is bad" -- without, however, a clear articulation of what superior reality should be put in its place. This attitude, a mistrust of accepted reality combined with a fluctuating unease as to the alternatives, is an exact social analogue of the philosophical confusion felt by the nihilistic mind. Once the concrete issues were resolved -- the war was over, civil rights and women's rights were largely achieved -- all that was left, in many people's minds, was this vague dissatisfaction and confusion, this struggling for something different. The movement lost its critical mass andgradually fragmented.

    On the other hand, my own generation, labeled "Generation X," is accused of having lost its way entirely. We are, so the pop wisdom goes, neither anti-establishment activists nor pro-establishment conformists. We are aimless, alienated, confused. We make few concerted efforts in any direction. We do not know what we are doing. Again, this is a drastic overgeneralization, but it is something that everyone feels.

    Personally, I have been more traditional than aimless in my journey through life. I proceeded straight through school all the way to my Ph.D., and became a university professor, which I still am. I married young and have two children. All along the way, however, I have felt the constant call of the anarchist path. I have avoided entirely conforming to social norms, been as much of an "underachiever" as possible given my overall goals. I always tried to get B's rather than A's in school; I still dress more like a student than a professor -- and I write books like this, which are of dubious value toward advancing my research career. All these are ways of rebelling within the context of the basically conformist routines of my life.

    Many of my friends fit the "Generation X" stereotype more closely. For years I envied one of my college friends, who spent his time wandering from one city to another with a loose band of punk rockers, high most of the time, squatting in abandoned houses and working occasional odd jobs for food money. At the same time, I pitied my closest friend from high school -- an extremely intelligent college dropout who, having failed to take a fundamental interest in anything whatsoever, has proceeded from one mind-numbing job to another ... parking lot attendant, clerk in a car dealership, 7-11 clerk. And I have watched my wife Gwen float from one life path to another, continually dropping in and out of school, perpetually unsure whether to be an oil painter, a math teacher, a linguistics or sociology professor, a computer artist ... continually returning to the same dilemmas of money versus personal fulfillment, social acceptance versus personal independence.

    Now my punk rocker friend has settled in Berkeley, where he is working in a co-op bakery, finishing up his B.S. in math, and thinking about working as a computer programmer or going to graduate school. My high school friend is a limo driver in Vegas; he says he has learned how to be happy even in unstimulating jobs, by "living in the moment." My wife is trying to do everything at once: painting, teaching math part-time, working on her Ph.D. in computer art, and raising two young sons. With luck she will end up as a professor of computer art, and will thus be able to earn a living by doing what she loves.

    Hyperrealism suggests that it may be possible to take a more positive view of the confusion and struggles of my generation. What is going on is, perhaps, not pure confusion, but a muddled quest to go beyond the old dichotomy of conformist versus nonconformist. The challenge of my generation, it seems, is to become comfortable working within existing institutions and social forms, while at the same time continually recognizing their relativity and insubstantiality. This challenge may be met by different people in different ways. For me, it means working in academia to support my family, while keeping my mind free ofthe at-times stultifying restrictions of academic disciplines and academic publications. For my ex-punk rocker friend, it means surrounding himself with alternative culture while going off now and then to study mathematics. For my limo driver friend, it means going through the motions of blue collar work, while keeping his mind relatively detached, focused on the humor in the situations confronting him. For my wife, it means keeping her inner artistic vision alive while searching for a creative solution to the problem of earning money.

    As yet this is still an erratic, difficult kind of "social transnihilism." However, if my analysis is correct, then one might expect the next generation -- my children's generation -- to embody this kind of dichotomy-busting even more thoroughly. The key is the acceptance of semi-reality -- looking at the world as if one were a humanoid space alien, committed to live on earth, following the customs and routines of humanity but never taking them altogether seriously. The difficult thing is to maintain this detached perspective even while becoming, as inevitably happens, emotionally attached.

    This is, as I see it, the social context underlying the philosophical ideas which I put forth in this book. My ideas are certainly not determined by their social context -- the are influenced at least as much by trends in the history of science and philosophy, and by the quirks of my own individual mental, spiritual and physical history. But social context is important and should not be forgotten. Too often, in academia and broader intellectual circles, we ignore the deep and subtle connections between conceptual and the social -- between the abstract issues that concern us and the collective mindspace of the surrounding human world. Individual mindspace reflects collective mindspace, in all sorts of obvious and obscure ways.

     IS THE WORLD A MACHINE?

    Now, in preparation for our excursion into virtual reality, let us take a ninety-degree turn -- away from philosophy, and into computer science.

    Virtual reality technology suggests that the world we are living in might as well be a computer simulation -- that we might actually be, to make the metaphor complete, patterns of data on some cosmic optical disk drive! But the notion of a computational world is actually a fairly subtle one, going beyond virtual reality technology, and having a deep background in theoretical computer science. In theoretical computer science, the notion that the world is a computational entity -- a giant computer -- is called the Church-Turing Thesis.

    The Church-Turing Thesis is not a mathematical or scientific statement; it is rather a philosophical axiom. In its simplest form, it is simply the statement that every process can be executed by some computer. In other words, you, I, and everything else in the world we live in, are just sophisticated machines.

    In the Church-Turing view, everything reduces to the annamaya level in a very specific way: everything is basicallya machine. Of course, this conclusion resonates wonderfully with the idea of virtual reality. If everything is essentially computational, then a "virtual" world is just as real as a "real" one. All minds and worlds are at bottom virtual; they are just specific manifestations of computational structure.

    Three alternative statements of the Church-Turing Thesis are as follows:

     Physics Version:

    According to Turing-Church, all physically realizable dynamics are equivalent to computation...

                    -- M. Conrad

     Psychology Version:

    Mental processes of any sort can be simulated by a computer program...

                    -- Douglas Hofstadter

     Biology Version:

    Living organisms are nothing more than complex biochemical machines.

                    -- Francis Crick

These are all variations on the same idea: It's all a computer, a machine!

    The Church-Turing Thesis is important for virtual reality, as mentioned above. It is also crucial for artificial intelligence. For, a consequence of the Church-Turing Thesis is that if someone

1. found a way to build a computer as complex as the human brain, and

2. programmed this computer with a detailed simulation of the physical equations governing the human brain

then the result would be a thinking machine. In this view, artificial intelligence is a serious psychological and engineering challenge, but not a problem from the standpoint of logic. Mind, like reality, is just a particular set of computer instructions, a certain digital dynamic.

    ***

    The modern form of the Church-Turing Thesis, as the name suggests, is due to Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, two of the earliest computer scientists. But the basic concept can be traced back about three hundred years further, to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the great German philosopher and mathematician. More so than Church and Turing, it would seem, Leibniz understood the full philosophical importance of the idea.

    Leibniz is best known for his fundamental contributions to differential and integral calculus: independently from Isaac Newton, he discovered the basic rules for differentiation,integration and summation that are taught in first-year college calculus courses today. But Leibniz's work on computational mathematics and philosophy, although much lesser known, is very nearly as impressive. Leibniz was not so far-sighted as to envision the modern computer -- but he did invent the binary numeration system on which modern computer hardware is based, as well as the simple symbolic logic which lies at the foundation of high-level programming languages. And he argued for the possibility of a Universal Calculus -- a language, based on discrete computational operations, in which all statements about physical, mental or spiritual reality could be formulated precisely.

    Leibniz envisioned computational thinking as a sort of meta-science, guiding human investigation in every realm. This prediction may someday be validated, but as of today, the influence of the Church-Turing Thesis is mainly restricted to psychology, philosophy and computer science. In these three fields, however, the Church-Turing thesis has been nothing less than revolutionary. In the forties and fifties, the relationship between thinking and computation was a fringe topic. But today, theoretical psychology has been taken over by "cognitive psychology" -- a fancy term for analyzing human mental processes as computational processes.

    ***

    The Church-Turing Thesis has been the subject of a great deal of debate in the artificial intelligence and cognitive science communities, and my own attitude toward it has been somewhat fluctuating and ambiguous. When I first read about the Church-Turing Thesis, I rejected it out of hand. "Yes," I thought to myself, "of course the brain is a machine, but what about the mind? After all, the brain and the mind are two different things! My mind holds depths that merely computational concepts cannot touch!"

    This is a common reaction, shared perhaps by a majority of those individuals who have encountered the Church-Turing Thesis or other forms of computational reductionism. It is the same feeling that Roger Penrose communicates in his books The Emperor's New Mind and Shadows of the Mind. He simply does not believe that what he does when he proves mathematical theorems can be done by a computer. Phenomenologically speaking, it does not feel like a computational process. It feels like he is pulling mathematical forms from some abstract space, some realm outside himself.

    I held this anti-computationalist view for years, and then gradually changed my mind. What converted me to an avid computationalist was realizing the deep connection between the Church-Turing thesis and metaphysical philosophy. I read the pragmatic philosophers, Peirce and James. I read Gregory Bateson's book Mind and Nature, and thought about what he called the "Metapattern" -- the idea that the world is made of pattern. I read the radical linguist Benjamin Whorf, with his visions of the universe as an abstract space of linguistic pattern. Whorf and Bateson, it seemed to me, were simply spinning out modern variants of Peirce's and James's pragmatist philosophy.

    Pragmatism was born when Charles S. Peirce came up with the idea that the only things we can know about an an entity are its measurable properties. If there is no way to measure something, it isn't there. And he deduced an important consequence of this pragmatic maxim: the only things which we can know are regularities, patterns. A measurable property of a thing is just the outcome of some repeatable experiment involving that thing; thus it corresponds to a regularity, a pattern in that thing as it exists over time.

    And finally, my head filled with pragmatism, I discovered the branch of mathematics called algorithmic information theory, developed independently by Kolmogorov, Chaitin and Solomonoff. Algorithmic information theory allows you to represent any pattern whatsoever, any regularity you might observe in the world, in computational form. A pattern in some collection of data is simply some program, some algorithm, for computing this data (exactly or approximately). A measurable property of the world is simply a program that computes aspects of the world, given appropriate input.

    The world is pattern -- this made sense to me. The only things you can see in the world are observable patterns, regularities. But if all patterns can be expressed as computer programs, then I saw no course but to accept the Church-Turing Thesis as true.

    ***

    Having convinced myself in this way, I was an avid computationalist for a few years' time. But the old doubts began to return, and I eventually realized I would have to look deeper.

    One runs into severe philosophical problems if one assumes that the mind and universe are solely dominated by processes of deterministic computation. One arrives at the idea that there is no true creativity -- that everything which appears to be creativity is just the unfolding of computational processes. One arrives at the Laplacian idea that there is no free will; that everything happening is preordained.

    Exploring further, I found that the idea of a deterministic universe had deep philosophical foundations. Nietzsche, among other philosophers, preached the notion of a finite universe, absent of free will. Cleverly, he even realized that a truly finite, computable universe would be an eventually repeating universe. A finite universe would have a finite number of possible states, so in infinite time, it would have to eventually hit some state more than once. And, having hit a state for the second time, it would have to proceed through the same course of events it proceeded through when it hit it for the first time. Thus, the universe would repeat itself. Thus arose Nietzsche's famous philosophy of the eternal recurrence, which I will have more to say about later.

    As much as I liked the vision of the universe as a collection of computational patterns, I was unable to accept total determinism. Again I was confused. But I found a way out, in the form of a paper by the physicist David Deutsch on "quantumcomputation." A quantum computer is like an ordinary computer, but it contains truly random elements, as well as certain other unusual features, such as nonlocality. Deutsch also discussed "stochastic computers" -- ordinary computers with truly random elements added on. He showed that quantum computers were more powerful than stochastic computers, as well as ordinary Turing-style computers.

     These kinds of computer, it seemed to me, were not nearly so restrictive as the ordinary kind. They had some room in them, some leeway. I was intrigued.

    Deutsch, in his article, proposed a "Quantum Church-Turing Thesis," which states that every process in the universe can be computed by a quantum computer, rather than an ordinary computer. And, what is more, he actually proved this revised Church-Turing Thesis, beginning from the assumption that the universe works by quantum physics. This is not the same as a general philosophical proof of the Church-Turing Thesis -- which is supposed to hold in any universe, regardless of the particular physical laws. But it is certainly an interesting result.

    All this is wonderful. The catch to this seemingly radical bit of theory, however, is the fact that quantum computers can't actually do any particular thing that ordinary computers can't do too. They can generate random numbers, but over any finite period of time, ordinary computers can generate numbers that are indistinguishable from random numbers. Using nonlocality, quantum computers can do some things more efficiently than ordinary computers, according to certain measures of efficiency. But they cannot do magic: they do not lead to any kind of mysterious "intuitive function," as is suspected by most individuals who doubt the Church-Turing Thesis.

    Roger Penrose has suggested that when we finally get a good theory of quantum gravity, it will come along with a new model of computation that is even more radical than the Church-Turing model. A "quantum gravity computer," Penrose believes, will be able to carry out magical intuitive functions, fundamentally noncomputational activities far beyond the realm of ordinary computers. But I don't believe it, and neither does anyone else whom I know, except for Penrose.

    ***

    My current view on the computational universe is as follows. I believe that stochastic or quantum computers, I have come to believe, are reasonable models of the mind. But they are incomplete in an important way -- a way which highlights the complementary relationship between spirituality and science. These generalized computational models allow a "doorway" through which some kind of nondeterministic force can enter the mind -- the doorway of randomness. This may seem like too small of a doorway: are we really supposed to believe that things like "free will" and "inspiration," which feel so non-computational, so non-deterministic, are actually just random?

    The catch here is the definition of "random." What is randomness, actually? It turns out that there is no mathematical test for randomness, except for infinitely large structures (likeinfinitely long sequences of numbers). In practice, all that "X is random" means is "X has virtually no patterns that I can detect." One can never guarantee that another observer, with a different set of biases and pattern-recognition tools, might deem X not to be random. There is no fixed meaning to randomness.

    So, what is a stochastic computer, really, then? A stochastic computer is nothing more or less than a computer which now and then receives mysterious input. It receives input which, from the point of view of its own or some observing entity's pattern-recognition routines, has no significant structure. In a less scientific language, one might say: stochastic computation = computation + mystery.

    From a scientific point of view, the assumption of randomness allows one to use certain mathematical and statistical tools. From a more intuitive, spiritual point of view, however, there is no reason to assume that things that appear random to the thinking mind, the memory-store, are actually entirely meaningless. The Vedantic point of view would be that these "random" inputs to the computational mind are actually inputs from a higher level of being -- forms filtering down from the realm of vignanamaya or Bliss, and presenting themselves to the mind as inspirations or "higher intuitions."

    We see, then, that in this context, the scientific and spiritual views of the world are in fact complementary. We can accept the modified Church-Turing thesis, which states that mind/universe can be modelled in terms of quantum computation. But we can also accept that what appears as randomness from the scientific view might actually have hidden structures.

    From the scientific point of view, it is useful to look at the world as determinism plus randomness. From the spiritual point of view, it is useful to look at the world as determinism plus mystery. In the end, these are just different languages for talking about the same thing. The first perspective allows one to unravel in detail the temporal unfolding of real-world system, and the structures that emerge from this unfolding. The second perspective leads one to ask about the structure of this "mystery" -- which turns out to have an hierarchical structure, and many other subtle properties.

    THE VIRTUAL WORLD

    So, let us suppose the world is computational, in some sense -- that it is, for many purposes, reasonably viewed as a quantum computer. What does this mean?

    One way of exploring the notion of the computational world is through virtual reality. A virtual reality is a simulated world that exists "inside a computer." If the "real world" itself is computational, then it follows that real worlds and virtual worlds are not at bottom any different. Reality is virtual reality.

    I will get started by describing my experience with some very primitive (even by 1990's standards) virtual reality technology -- and then move to the future.

    ***

    When I received my Ph.D. in mathematics, in 1989, I accepted a job offer from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. I stayed there for four years, long enough to get to know Vegas rather well. Not being much of a gambler, the casino scene had only a very limited appeal for me. But I liked all the swimming pools, jacuzzis, tennis courts and buffets. The jazz scene was surprisingly active too. Carl Fontana, a world-class trombonist, would surface periodically for gigs in local bars. One local pub had a big band every Thursday night: the band members invariably outnumbered the customers, but it was a treat anyhow.

    Downtown you could play penny slots and drink free drinks under the garish neon forms of Vegas Vic, Sassy Sally and the Golden Goose. The town's population seemed to double on weekends and holidays: tourists would bubble from one casino to the next, keeping entirely irregular hours, often sleeping all day and eating, drinking and gambling all night -- living in a simulated realm, entirely oblivious to the existence of a city of eight hundred thousand people sprawling out around them. All the grocery stores were open twenty-four hours and one would see the strangest characters wandering into the Lucky Supermarket at 3AM in search of a cheap case of beer.

    I remember sitting outside by the pool, rereading Jean Baudrillard's philosophical treatise Simulations, which was my introduction to the concept of the "hyperreal." Vegas, I thought to myself, was about as hyperreal as anything I'd every seen.

    One of the many peculiar things about Las Vegas, I observed, was the abundance of 7-11's. There was one on nearly every street corner. Some corners even had two! I soon discovered the reason for this statistical aberration: each 7-11 made three quarters of its profits from the one-armed bandits and video poker machines lined up against the wall at the side of the store. Even in the middle of the night one or two of the machines was usually occupied. But to me, the most striking thing about these gambling machines was their sheer uninventiveness. The slot machines were just digital versions of the machines of fifty or a hundred years ago. And the poker machines were just digital versions of old-fashioned five-card draw poker. Clearly, the movers and shakers of gaming technology were of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought.

    What a contrast to the machines that sat next to the gaming machines in the 7-11 on my corner -- the video games. I played the video games only very occasionally, even less than I played the poker machines, but I often stopped to watch the automatic "demo" games dancing across the screen. And it didn't take Sherlock-Holmesian powers of observation to notice that, year after year, the action kept getting better and better and better. The Asteroids and Space Invaders games of my youth are long since perished -- not to mention the infamous Pong, with its lonely square "ball" zipping slowly across the screen between two rectangular "paddles," the only sound effect a high-pitched blip when paddle hit ball. We now have games which talk, games which project 3-D images, digital bodies which move gracefully rather than mechanically, and so forth.

    Every year the 7-11 on the corner got brand new video games-- while the gambling machines stayed exactly the same. But even with this constant devotion to new technology, the 7-11's were never quite on the cutting edge. In late 1993, right before I moved away from Las Vegas, the Circus Circus Corporation opened a new casino, the Luxor, at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Bucking the Nevada tradition of conservative architecture, they made it a beautiful building the size and shape of an Egyptian pyramid, with a concrete Sphinx out in front. One of the most advertised features of this new casino was a fancy new video arcade called "SEGA VirtuaLand." To my disappointment, the arcade contained no actual virtual reality games; presumably some will be provided in the future! But the games that were there greatly outclassed the selection at the 7-11. Most impressive was a 3-D flight simulator: a sphere with a seat in the middle of it, suspended in the air on a complex gyroscope-like apparatus. You sit on the seat and look at a video screen showing pictures of outer space; as you steer your simulated spaceship through three dimensions, the picture on the screen moves accordingly -- and so does the sphere you're sitting in. You can flip upside down, backwards, left, right -- all three degrees of freedom are fully available. The illusion is completely convincing, in the sense that it really feels like you're flying a spaceship up, down, left, right....

    And across the hall from VirtuaLand was an even more impressive approximation of virtual reality: Las Vegas's first motion simulator ride (the second one was installed two months later in the new MGM Grand -- that's Las Vegas!). After a ride down several thousand simulated feet on a very convincing runaway elevator simulator, you're escorted into an ordinary-looking theatre, where you are shown a cheesy science-fiction movie. The movie itself consists of little more than some chatter about time travel and a number of spaceship chase scenes. But the catch is, as the heroes race about in their spaceships, the camera is placed to give you the illusion of moving with them -- and the theatre moves too, expertly synchronized to give the illusion of motion. It gave me motion sickness for the first time in years ... but it also gave my mind quite a shock. The illusion was crude -- if I just turned my head and looked to the side, I could see the theatre rocking around like an amusement park ride, and the motion sickness subsided. But then, when I looked back at the screen, that didn't even matter: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't help but feel that I was racing around in the air in a spaceship, tumbling helter-skelter up and down and backwards. My mind of course knew it was an illusion, but my body couldn't be convinced by any amount of argument. What disturbed me was to realize how little it takes to create an effective simulation of reality. The technology was simply not that great -- certainly not the cutting edge of research. But my body, which is after all my direct connection with the real world ... my body was convinced.

     What Does the Future Bring?

    Every year brings greater and greater and greater sophistication. Returning for a visit to Vegas in 1995, I foundno end of genuine virtual reality arcade games, complete with special gloves and goggles. As the wearer turns her head, the simulated scene shown through the goggles rotates. The gloves translate the wearer's hand motions into actions, within this same simulated scene. The combination of simulated sound and vision with simulated action yields a sense of physical presence -- a sense of "thereness," a visceral, intuitive feeling that one is really "physically grounded" inside the computer-generated world. With this technology, instead of the pseudo-VR of 1993, one can now experience a convincing simulation of racing around inside a futuristic world, carrying out various uninventive acts such as, say, shooting a gun at evil robots. It is still bit awkward, not as smooth or natural as it should be, but it is a vast advance over two years previously. Eventually, it seems inevitable, the simulations will become so good that they are indistinguishable from reality.

    It's not so farfetched as you might think. Remember, fifty years ago we were a long way off from having any video games at all. It took the computers of 1943 all day to do what a modern pocket calculator does in ten minutes. And 100 years ago, the concept of a video game would have seemed just about as unlikely as the concept of a convincing reality simulation. A mere 150 years ago, airplanes, reality simulation and time travel were all approximately equally preposterous.

    Many computer scientists believe that, within the next century or two at the outside, we will indeed achieve the ability to create virtual realities -- computer simulations which feed data into our senses so artfully that we are convinced we are experiencing something real. The technology for virtual reality is not yet here today. But every year we get closer and closer.... Howard Rheingold, in his book Virtual Reality, has summarized the state of the art as of 1991 in a masterfully entertaining way.

    There are no fundamental technological obstacles to pushing this approach even further -- to creating whole-body suits which are able to translate real body-motions into simulated body-motions, and are able to deliver tactile sensations corresponding to the surroundings in the virtual world. And of course, artificial synthesis of smells is easy. This means that four of the five senses are well within reach. And the fifth sense, taste, is largely composed of smell. There are even designs for incorporating sexual stimulation into the glove-and-goggles set-up, to allow for "teledildonics" or sex at a distance.

    And, looking a little further into the future, it is easy to imagine doing away with the physical paraphanelia altogether. Contemporary virtual reality research centers around gloves and goggles, and this is a perfectly plausible programme. Even if a certain virtual world lacks a few qualities of the ordinary world, such as taste, that's no argument against its fundamental reality. However, once we understand a little more about the brain, it may well become possible to attach the simulated reality directly to the sensori-motor centers. This is how cyberspace generally works in science fiction stories; and although this is a good bit beyond current technology, there is certainly no fundamental paradox involved. It is worth remembering that, over the past few decades, neuroscience hasbeen developing nearly as fast as computer science.

    Perhaps, when true virtual realities are created, they will be the exclusive province of scientists and rich eccentrics. But on the other hand, it seems much more likely that they will be on every street corner -- just as silicon chips are today. In every 7-11, next to the newspaper rack, where "Super Mario Bros." used to be.

    And this possibility leads us to another question. What will this do to our minds? How will it change us, to know that reality is no more stable than a pencil balancing on its eraser -- that it can be knocked down, totally altered, just by dropping a couple quarters in a machine.

    You may say: "People can adjust to anything." But, while this is true within certain limits, it doesn't obviate the question of how adjustment takes place. Which aspects change, and which ones stay the same?

    ***

    As you have doubtless already guessed, I believe that virtual reality will come to every 7-11 -- and, absurd as it may sound, I maintain that this will mark a watershed for humanity. It will entail a fundamental shift in our perception of the world -- a shift far more profound than anything which has occurred since the break from tribal, nature-oriented life to organized civilization. This shift will affect every aspect of our lives -- sex and love, work and recreation, art and literature, manufacturing and engineering; science, mathematics, and philosophy. And the reason is this: with the advent of virtual reality, we will finally come to understand the nature of physical reality.

    This gets back to the reason why I have begun this chapter on the World with a discussion of virtual worlds. Thinking about virtual worlds is a way of coming to grips with the virtuality of the everyday world in which we live.

    Of course the emergence of a "virtual future" is not guaranteed -- lots of other things could happen. Some crazed Third-World dictator could let loose enough nuclear bombs to send us back to the Dark Ages, or back to the Pleistocene for that matter. The world could be swept by an anti-science religion such as Islam, permanently halting virtual reality technology at its present primitive stage. As Niels Bohr wisely said, "It is difficult to predict -- especially the future." But I am convinced that a virtuality-infused future is by far the most likely scenario -- and certainly the most interesting....

    Supposing virtuality does take over: then we will no longer understand physical reality as a solid, objective thing -- for this understanding will be contradicted by direct experience. And, as a consequence, we will not understand the world of dream, hallucination, lunacy the same way either -- for no longer will this nether world be the opposite of the ordinary order of things. The world will enter a new category -- simultaneously real and surreal; and hence beyond both real and surreal. This new category of being is what some modern commentators on thevirtual scene have come to call hyperreal.

    The hyperreal, however, is not some newfangled invention. It is precisely the realm of being hinted at throughout history by various spiritual traditions. The essence of spiritual wisdom is the recognition that the apparent everyday world is not fundamentally real, but is yet somehow there anyway. This point will be made in more detail in the following chapter when we discuss Zen Buddhism. In Zen, one is supposed to realize that, although men are not men and mountains are not mountains, yet men are men and mountains are mountains. In other words, all forms are insubstantial; nothing is really there. But yet forms are there as forms: they are present without a fundamental solidity.

    The spiritually accomplished person, it is said, is supposed to live in the world, but not of it -- but this is exactly the way one would live in a virtual reality. One would be in the virtual world, but one would not be constrained in one's behaviors in the same manner as in the ordinary world. Though thoroughly engaged with one's reality, one would still, in a sense, exist at one remove from it.

    ***

    For a further understanding of hyperreality, listen to Randel Walser, director of "cyberspace" operations at Autodesk, Inc. (a rapidly growing computer company best known for its AutoCad 3-D computer-aided design software):

            Cyberspace will not merely provide new experiences, like new rides at a carnival. More than any mechanism yet invented, it will change what humans perceive themselves to be, at a very fundamental and personal level. In cyberspace, there is no need to move about in a body like the one you possess in physical reality. You may feel more comfortable, at first, with a body like your "own" but as you conduct more of your life and affairs in cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of "body" as something quite disposable and, generally, limiting. You will find that some bodies work best in some situations while others work best in others. The ability to radically and compellingly change one's body-image is bound to have a deep psychological effect, calling into question just what you consider yourself to be.

            Imagine a costume party at which you adopt not merely a new set of clothes, but a new body, a new voice, and -- in a very fundamental and literal sense -- a new identity. Now imagine that you do this not only at a party, but every day, as an integral part of your life. Who, then, are you? It may seem, from your present view in physical reality, that you will be centered as you are now, in your physical body. It always comes back to that, right? But does it, even when you spend nearly all your waking life incyberspace, with any body or personality you care to adopt? Does it, when the consequences of your actions and decisions in your alternative personalities have physical, social, economic, artistic, technical and ethical consequences every bit as significant as those in your "original" personality? Does an alternative personality, active only in cyberspace, legally constitute a person?

    This is a thrilling, frightening vision. But perhaps even Walser's argument does not convince you -- perhaps you feel that, even if you spent 99% of your time in virtual reality, you would still be fundamentally "centered" in your physical body back here on solid old earth.... Your skepticism is understandable: body-centeredness is a hard thing to abandon, even speculatively. But I ask you to consider this thought-experiment.... Suppose that, in cyberspace, in the virtual reality computer, your cyber-self lives in a nation called Cyberia. And suppose that Cyberia has a very strange state religion, called Cyberianism. The main principle of Cyberianism is that one must never assume reality is objectively real. And, to ensure continued faith in this non-objectivist principle, each citizen of Cyberia is required to place herself into a virtual reality machine every four weeks. The virtual reality machine then forces her to experience the false reality of being a citizen of the U.S., who has to attach herself to a virtual reality machine that transports her to Cyberia....

    Living in Cyberia, except for a few hours every four weeks, it would take a pathological mind to believe that the U.S. and not Cyberia was the real place. The point is that, as Walser correctly observed, virtual reality destroys our objectivist sense of self. It projects us, in some fundamental sense, beyond the concept of reality. But it does not lead us to total nihilism -- any reasonable person will still try to make sense of their surroundings, be they virtual or "real." Virtual reality leads us to a point of view that is neither nihilism nor realism -- to a cyberspace philosophy, a philosophy of hyperreality.

     ELECTRONIC ESCHATOLOGY

    Now we have reached the point where we can discuss what I have called the digital dharma dream -- the Extropian notion of a future golden age of virtual reality.

    If your response to this notion is utter skepticism, you are well justified. After all, ever since the start of recorded history, self-styled visionaries have been predicting the advent of a "golden age" -- an utopian future world, filled with love, harmony and creativity. Humanity will rise to a higher plane of being; the concerns of modern society will be revealed as the basest of illusions. Dreams of future paradise are remarkably pervasive in human culture.

    There is even a word for these dreams: eschatology. Eschatology, within Christianity, refers to the study of death,Judgement Day and last things; however, I will take the word more generally, to refer to any notion of a different and better human condition, posited to occur after our present human condition is over and done with. I am championing virtual reality as a kind of electronic eschatology.

    Eschatology, in one form or another, is essential to most of the world's religions. Buddhism has its nirvana -- the indescribable paradise at the end of the karmic road. Christianity has its Heaven, which, incidentally, began as a very concrete place, not the "airy land in the clouds" of modern folklore. Most early Christians agreed with Tertullian, who wrote in the second century A.D.: "The body will rise again, all of the body, the identical body, the entire body." Even Marxism, which proclaims that "religion is the opium of the people," is at bottom paradisiacal. Marx's "perfect communism" is nothing more than a secularized version of Heaven: it is a land full of people so phenomenally well-adjusted that they are able to work hard and share equally without ever becoming jealous or lazy.

    Eschatology pervades nearly every system of human belief. One could quote any of the great poets to illustrate the point, but I prefer to go with Kermit the Frog. Who could forget his plaintive froggy voice singing out in The Muppet Movie...

        A rainbow's a vision,

        it's just an illusion,

        but it's got nothing to hide...

        Someday we'll find it, the Rainbow Connection --

        the lovers, the dreamers, and me...

And speaking of rainbows, what about that other childrens' song...

        Somewhere, over the rainbow,

        way up high

        There's a land that I heard of once

        in a lullaby

        Somewhere, over the rainbow,

        skies are blue

        And the dreams that you dare to dream

        really do come true...

The imagery of the promised land invades all our artistic creations, children's books, moview and songs to Paradise Lost and Henry Miller (whose promised land of the mind -- the "Land of Fuck" -- was to be achieved through means that probably would not have met with Milton's approval).

    These are all beautiful ideas ... but the sad fact is that, in the past at any rate, visions of paradise have always rested on extremely weak ground. Rather than a reaction to trends in human evolution, it has been more closely a reaction against them. As far back as Homo Erectus and perhaps even farther, nearly all social and psychological change in the human species has been in the direction of increased technology and suppression of drives. There has been no significant movement towardheightened consciousness, toward harmonious and creative life. While religions, philosophies and other belief systems have popped erratically in and out of history, technology has steadily and inexorably altered our lives, minds and environment. Eschatology has, in the past, represented a noble attempt to deny the course of history.

    This anti-empirical bias is most explicit in the case of those who promote an anti-technology paradise, who call for an abandonment of material progress, a return to a "simpler" life. Only when living a life of intense daily interaction with Nature, it is argued, can the mystical oneness with the world be truly experienced. In this view, the rapid development of technology is a trip down the wrong road -- the "golden age of spirituality" lies not in the future but in the past. And, as I have already mentioned in the Prelude, there is some truth in this proposal -- perhaps, as study of surviving Stone Age cultures suggests, pre-technological homo sapiens really did have a higher level of mental health and spiritual insight. But even so, very few of us would want to give up our TV's, cars, medication and computers to live in the forest -- for the very same reason that each generation of pygmies spends less and less time in the forest. The question of desirability aside, there is no practical possibility of returning to the ways of the Mbuti pygmies, or any approximation thereof.

    Every now and then one reads in the newspaper that a fanatical religious sect, convinced that the new age will start on this or that particular date, has sold all its possessions and run into the hills to wait. I have always wondered what the leader tells his flock the next day. "I'm sorry, I made a mistake in my calculations; I forgot to carry a two...." There was a great deal of this sort of thing at the end of the first millenium A.D.; and as the year 2000 approaches, I would suppose we will see some more. This sort of thing goes a long way toward making the concept of a paradisiacal future seem ridiculous.

    So, all in all, if one wishes to view the utopian future as a refuge for weary minds, it is not difficult to concoct psychological explanations for the expectation of transcendence. Perhaps, as some theorists would have it, the craving for utopia is a transformed version of the desire to return to the womb. Or perhaps it is sublimated sexuality. Whatever the underlying dynamics, one thing is clear: in the case of a mind driven to despair by the tedium of daily life, the glowing vision of a brighter future is exactly what the doctor ordered. Transcendent eschatology is well explained as a sort of mass daydream, a collective fantasy.

    But yet -- and here is the interesting part -- I suggest that the "golden age" is rather likely to come about anyway. Just because something is expected for a bad reason, does not imply that it won't occur. We are in the position of someone who believes it will rain tomorrow because the date will be December 17, and it always rains on the seventeenth. The reason is wrong; not only wrong but ridiculous. But it might just rain anyway, for a completely different reason.

    Vague, unfulfillable unconscious cravings have gnawed at our minds for millenia, prodding us to paint, write, compose, theorize, experiment, and dream utopian dreams. And at the sametime, technology has advanced at its own pace, without reference to any "eschatological agenda." It is truly amazing, therefore, to think that technology itself may be the agent for spiritual revolution -- for the very quantum leap in the human condition which our unconscious cravings impel us to desire and expect.

    Today, Sega and Nintendo are designing video games based on helmets and gloves which feed the wearer's eyes, ears and hands a comprehensive and responsive simulated world ... which give the vivid multisensory feeling of driving a racecar, or piloting a spaceship, or leading a street gang in a bloody fight. But, in the long run, virtual reality is no more of a game than life itself. Television, telephones, cars and airplanes may have changed our world -- but virtual reality technology will change our "world"; our private, internal model of ourselves and our surroundings.

    ***

    And how, exactly, will the advent of virtual reality change our mental models of the world?

    I have said that it will bring on a shift from the real to the hyperreal. Now I will make the same statement in a different way: Virtual reality can be spiritual reality. Or, in other words: the advent of virtual reality technology has the potential to bring on the "revolution in the human condition" which our visionary thinkers have sought for so long. What I call "hyperreality," the transcendence of the distinction between objectivity and hallucination, is nothing more than the elusive state of grace which mystics of all stripes have struggled to experience and articulate. This claim is what I call electronic eschatology: the validation of the obviously irrational dreams of eschatological visionaries, through cold, hard technological advance.

    One thing must be made clear right from the start. The idea of electronic eschatology is not to use computers to simulate the effect of a "perfect drug" -- to make everyone high, happy and useless forever, in a digitized world full of meadows and bluebirds, where the sun always shines and childrens' laughter eternally echoes through the simulated air. This could be done, of course, but only in a very dark mood would any healthy person find it desirable. The idea of electronic eschatology is something quite different. It is that, by the continuous presence of the option to creatively change reality, the mind can be liberated from its present dependence on selfishness and routine, and opened up to a new level of inventiveness, intelligence and love.

    But the key word in the statement "Virtual reality can be spiritual reality" is, obviously, "can". Virtual reality technology has the potential to bring the wildest dreams of our mystical visionaries to their final fruition. But it also brings an unprecedented potential for abuse. Imagine, as a worst-case scenario, a Nazi Germany in which Hitler had the power to mold physical reality. We, collectively, have control over the direction VR technology takes. It is up to us whether or not to exercise this control. The price for ignorant inaction may beextraordinarily severe.

    ***

    Christian eschatology is an eschatology of transcendence: it prophesies a future "promised land." But there are also eschatologies of immanence -- eschatologies which lack the factor of time. For instance, in the Gnostic gospels, Jesus boldly proclaims that "The Kingdom of God has come!" Unlike the Christ of conventional Christianity, the Gnostic Jesus believes Heaven is here already ... all we have to do is train our minds to recognize it. The painful, sin-permeated world that we see around us is a product of our faulty perceptions. The same idea can be found in many Eastern religions: in Zen Buddhism, for example, it is taught that nirvana is always and everywhere, that "samsara is nirvana, nirvana is samsara," that the world is both solid and insubstantial at the same time. The enlightened mind sees through appearances and understands the underlying perfection of the present world. As will be discussed a little later, there are reasons to consider the eschatology of immanence to be the earlier and healthier type, and view the eschatology of transcendence as a degradation, a perversion.

    Typically, eschatologies of immanence are intimately bound up with more traditional visions of transcendence. The doctrine of an inevitable future utopia seems to grab the imagination in a very special way. The idea of utopia being achieved right now, through a difficult routine of mental perfection, is not nearly so attractive. Even Nietzsche, whose theory of the will to power is the best modern example of an eschatology of immanence, clothed his ideas in the image of the Superman. "Man is a bridge between animal and superman," he wrote, meaning that the greatest among humans might someday be able to achieve a state of total mental self-control, and in this way justify the existence of the rest of the human race. But in order to make his ideas vivid, he used the language of Darwinian evolution, of the temporal sequence "animal, man, superman."

    Electronic eschatology, as I have defined it above, is an eschatology of transcendence: it predicts a transition to a higher plane of human existence, at some point in the definite, physical future. But it is also, less obviously but just as interestingly, an eschatology of immanence. For, after all, the unique thing about virtual reality is merely that it is explicitly virtual. There is no particular property which, as a matter of principle, distinguishes a virtual reality from a "real" one -- for all we know, we may be living in a well-engineered virtual reality right now. In theory, by perceiving reality as if it were virtual, we can leapfrog ahead to the virtuality-infused world of the future. If we understand the world as it is, we will see that there is no difference between virtual reality and real reality. Virtual reality is a different kind of world, but in a more fundamental sense it is the same kind of world: it is a collection of floating, interlinking patterns, which is just what our physical world is, despite our persistent inability to see it this way.

    In practice, however it is tremendously difficult to maintain an hyperrealistic perception of the world, day and and day out ... just as it is difficult to continually follow the edicts of the Zen masters, or the doctrines of the Gnostic Christ. When virtual reality technology reaches the stage automobile and TV technology are at today, the perception of the world as virtual will be continually forced on us. And that will make all the difference. We will no longer be able to persist in our delusions about the world: we will be forced to recognize that physical reality is nothing but our greatest work of art, that our individual minds are not really individual but part of a multilayered continuum extending from particles up to molecules, subpersonalities, human society, and the whole physical universe.

    ***

    There is a close relation between electronic eschatology and the claim that psychedelic drugs offer a path to mental exaltation. Psychedelic drugs offer many of the most exciting aspects of mystical experience -- brilliant hallucinations, loss of the ordinary sense of space, time and self, etc. They have the potential to be very powerful tools for exploration of tge universe. But for the typical drug user, this potential is not actualized. The drug experience happens; it is not used for any purpose, and it is not directed toward the service of any mental or spiritual ambition. The object is thrills rather than mind expansion.

    The shamans of primitive cultures use psychedelic drugs in a very controlled, intelligent and adaptive way. They realize that is not enough merely to see that reality is a mental construction -- one must thoroughly internalize this vision, by using it, by working with it continuously. This shamanic tradition has been carried into modern times by the LSD psychotherapists, such as Stanislav Grof, whose work will be discussed in detail a little later. These examples show that, used properly, psychedelics can be a profound tool for psychological exploration. But I would argue that VR has even greater possibilities. Psychedelics open up the mind; they free up "frozen" thought systems, revealing the hidden structures and dynamics of the world. But they are erratic in their effects; they also flood us with bizarre perceptual phenomena, and with persistent, not necessarily productive hallucinations. VR has the potential to open up ossified thought systems, not by chemically overactivating the neural circuits that maintain them, but by placing the mind in situations in which the systems are no longer meaningful. It has the potential to place the mind in situations of fluctuating reality, situations in which the only survival strategy is continual awareness of the nature of thought systems, recognition of the world for what it is.

    The virtual reality path to mystical understanding may seem too easy, it may seem like cheating. But the airplane and the television seem like cheating too, until you get used to them. Western science has provided plenty of apparent "miracles" already. It is time, I suggest, to get ready for the grand finale....

    APPROACHES TO HYPERREALIST PHILOSOPHY

    In conclusion, let us retreat from computer science and futurology, back to the domain of philosophy.

    First of all, these considerations of virtual reality and hyperrealism bring us back to 19'th century pragmatism, in a very satisfying way. For one is led to ask: in what sense is a virtual world any less substantive than the "real" world? If it has the same measurable properties, the same observable patterns, as the "real world," then it is just the same. After all, how do we know that the world we're living in right now isn't "virtual"? All we can do is measure patterns! And even if some virtual world should have different observable patterns than the world we choose to call real -- so what? What makes one collection of patterns better than any other?

    Virtual reality technology compels us to think in terms of pattern. Cyberspace philosophy is pragmatist philosophy. But this is not the only interesting equivalence here. I will argue extensively, in later chapters, than in fact cyberspace philosophy is also spiritual philosophy. Spiritual visionaries have been saying for a very long time that the essence of mystical vision is seeing what is there. The "hidden structure of the world" is precisely that there is no hidden structure of the world, that the only reality of an object is the patterns we see involving that object. Constantly looking for more, for some solid reality beyond the virtual world of interconnecting patterns, obstructs us from seeing what is really there.

    Pragmatist philosophy may be humble, but it is the first step toward a truly hyperrealist philosophy of the mind and world. It confronts the fact that the world does not have any solid, substantial being; it is just a collection of observed properties. And it confronts this fact in a wonderfully scientific way. Science, which holds as a methodological axiom that only observable regularities are real, turns out to be in a certain sense opposed to the notion of a definite, solid reality.

    ***

    More flashy than pragmatism, but with many of the same themes, is the recent trend in Continental philosophy called postmodernism. My first introduction to the word "hyperreal" was in the writings of the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. It is worth briefly digressing, I think, to ask why Baudrillard found it necessary to speak about the hyperreal. He was not concerned with virtual reality, nor with mysticism, but rather with the strangeness of modern culture. Thus his work points out an interesting connection between the implications of modern technology and the emerging patterns of twenty-first-century society.

    In his provocative essay Simulations, Baudrillard argues that, as we move towardy the twenty-first century, the nature of our cultural representations is shifting in a fundamental way. "These," he writes, "would be the successive phases of the image:

            -- it is the reflection of a basic reality

            -- it masks and perverts a basic reality

            -- it masks the absence of a basic reality

            -- it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever:

        it is its own pure simulacrum ... it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.

In Baudrillard's terminology, a "hyperreality" is a toy reality, a model reality, but one which no longer can be considered as corresponding to any actual reality. It is a "reality" which transcends the category real/not-real.

    For a concrete example of the kind of cultural hyperrealism Baudrillard is referring to, let us turn to modern American culture. Of course, modern culture is an international phenomenon, as I have become acutely aware over the past two years, during which I have been living outside the United States for the first time since infancy. But American culture is the closest thing to a universal culture that we have today.

    So, let's think about professional wrestling, as presented by the World Wrestling Federation. This is not "real" wrestling, it is elaborated staged wrestling; the wrestlers are also actors, with names like Hulk Hogan and Sergeant Slaughter. Or think about MTV, and its kaleidoscopic array of surreal music videos.     These are false in some sense -- wrestling matches are, it seems clear, fixed in advance; videos are produced so as to make the musicians appear impossibly attractive, and so forth. So WWF and MTV are clearly not "reflections of a basic reality" -- they are not documentary footage of events that exist independently of TV; they record events that occurred precisely in order to be be put on TV.

    But do they "mask and pervert" a basic reality? To some extent, they do: the wrestlers aren't really as tough as they look; the musicians don't really have that many beautiful, scantily clad women following them around. But, on the other hand, what is the basic reality of wrestling, of pop music? It's not as though there's some realer professional wrestling going on, which the camera isn't catching. It's not as though the MTV pop bands are obscuring their true nature in order to appear on MTV. Most of the bands are MTV bands -- they wouldn't exist if not for the MTV culture. Most of the wrestlers would not be in sports if the WWF or some analogous organization did not exist.

    It could be argued that these programs "mask the absence of a basic reality" -- after all, WWF gives the impression that there really are wrestling matches when there are only theatrical shows. MTV gives the impression that there really are bands that play together, when in many cases there are only tapes produced by anonymous musicians and spliced by clever producers.

    So MTV and WWF overlap with Baudrillard's second and third categories. But they fit every bit as nicely into his final class: the hyperreal. In a very deep sense, MTV and WWF exist in and of themselves. They form their own reality; they exist because they exist, they are self-perpetuating. No one cares whether the wrestling matches are staged or not; no one cares if the bands really play together as they seem to in the video. Thequestion of an underlying "reality" is absolutely irrelevant. This is what it means to say that MTV and WWF are pure simulations.

    A less frivolous example is given by the U.S. Federal court system. Consider, for example, the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that any powers not specifically allotted to the federal government, automatically revert to the states. This has been openly ignored by at least four or five generations of Supreme Court Justices. Or consider modern drug forfeiture laws -- in which a person who is found innocent of drug charges in a jury trial still doesn't get his property returned to him unless he can prove it wasn't bought with drug money. Is this not "guilty until proven innocent," superimposed on the "innocent until proven guilty" precept of the U.S. court system?

    In general, it takes an expert constitutional lawyer to understand the relations between court decisions and written laws. Decisions are made on the basis of "judicial precedent," and on the judges' inherent sense of "justice" -- on a very liberal interpretation of the "spirit" of the law, rather than on what the law actually says. In effect, and in direct opposition to the intentions of the Founding Fathers, judges legislate. Their method of procedure can only be called a simulation of constitutional law. Court decisions mask and pervert the basic reality of the Constitution; they also mask the absence of a solid underlying legal basis. But above all they create a pure simulacrum of justice. The modern system of justice exists not in order to reflect, pervert or mask anything, but in order to maintain itself. Like any other organism, its primary purpose is self-preservation.

    If virtual reality technology becomes commonplace, then Baudrillard's post-modernist flights of fancy will become valid in a very fundamental way. Consider: the early virtual reality machines will either represent reality, or mask and distort reality. They will either be "documentary" or "escapist" in nature -- and one suspects predominantly the latter.

    But then, as people spend more and more of their time in virtual realities, life in our real reality will lose some of its excitement. After a while, virtual reality will come to mask the absence of a basic reality.... This has already happened, to some extent, with television: there are fewer things happening in the real world, because people spend so much time observing what is happening in the TV world.

    And then, one things reach this point, the final stage will not be long in coming. The real reality, the reality that we consider real, will be nothing more than one among many "virtualities." Cyberspace, the world inside the computer, will take over real space. We will have neither real realities nor simulated realities, but pure simulacra.

    ***

    So, to summarize, we have moved from realism and nihilism to a new view of the world, harmonious with the Church-Turing Thesis and virtual reality: hyperrealism.

    The realist philosophy -- the theory that the world isobjectively real -- has plenty of logical flaws. But it does stand the test of everyday life (at least if "everyday life" is construed to exclude those occasional mystical flights of fancy that our consciousness dutifully blots out). In a world invaded by virtual reality, however, this will no longer be the case. Every 7-11 will contain a solid, objective disproof of objectivism. Every time an objectivist looks at a virtual-reality video game, she will have to think: "How do I know that I'm not actually hooked up to one of those games right now?" 1990's reality does not present the objectivist mind with this kind of pressure -- but the future will.

    A world in which virtual reality was commonplace would not be a chaos, a structureless mess. It would merely be a plural world, rather than a singular one. It would be a world in which the word "reality" could never be uttered without some qualifier: " this reality," " his reality," "Super Mario Bros. reality." It would be, not a universe, but a multiverse. So what will be needed, in order to live in this world, will be a multiversal philosophy. A cyberspace philosophy. Or, in Baudrillard's language, a hyperreal philosophy -- a philosophy for a world that transcends the twentieth-century dichotomy real-versus-not-real.

    In terms of the hierarchy of being, virtual reality shows us the transparancy of annamaya. It shows us that what appears so definite and solid is, in fact, a supremely diaphanous, relative, shifting thing -- just a web of interlinked patterns. At its most extreme, it shows us annamaya as anandamaya -- reality as the Realm of Bliss, as the domain of shifting, barely perceptible and comprehensible patterns, flitting in and out of existence, and transcending the scope of the individual mind.

     VIRTUAL ETHICS

                        There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.

                                -- Albert Camus

    We have considered the metaphysics of virtual reality; now it is time to consider virtuality from an ethical point of view.

    At first glance, virtual reality might seem to destroy the whole concept of ethics. If the world isn't real, after all, then what's the use of obeying moral laws? If reality itself isn't solid, then how can any authority defined within reality hold any weight?

    This type of reasoning is presented with great beauty and force in the novels of Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's anti-heroescommit crimes because they see no ultimate meaning in the universe. If there is no foundation for existence, if everything is just patterns floating in the void, then why not murder, why not steal, why not suicide? In Dostoevsky, the only antidote to nihilism is the Russian Orthodox Church -- or, more generally, for non-Russians, traditional God and traditional culture.

    The ethical problems associated with virtual reality also arise in various spiritual traditions, for example Buddhism. On the one hand, in Buddhist doctrine, we have the notion that the Samsaric world does not exist; it's just empty forms floating in nothingness. On the other hand, we're supposed to display compassion for certain of these forms -- humans and animals. Why bother, if they don't exist anyway?

    It seems clear that the lifting of ethical and cultural restrictions will be one of the main attractions of virtual reality technology. One will have the ability to do whatever one wants, within a virtual, disposable universe that nonetheless holds the same satisfactions as the "real" one. Rape, pillage, plunder, mutilate.... Steal loaves of bread if that's what you want to do. Make love with your father, or your cat.

    There is not necessarily anything wrong with virtual reality as wish fulfillment -- assuming that only simplistic simulated entities are involved, which do not "care" how one treats them. But I do think there is something inherently wrong with the idea of living this way in the long term -- for, say, weeks, month or years. For, as so many have realized throughout the ages, there is a certain resonance between the way one acts in the world and one's own inner balance. This resonance that is purely psychological and holds in virtual worlds as well as the "real" world.

    Maybe Monica has always wanted to be a call girl, but would feel too ashamed of herself to take up this profession in reality. Virtuality gives her the opportunity to pursue the fantasy risk-free. Or, on the other hand, perhaps Jason thinks stealing cars is just as much fun in reality as in virtuality, but prefers doing it in virtuality because there are no criminal penalties. There are all sorts of possibilities for escapist fantasy.

    Psychologically, however, it is easy to predict the consequences of this kind of virtual reality experience. Acting out fantasies will be great fun -- for a while. But eventually, the experience will become dull, and the person will begin to wonder why they ever got such a kick out of a thing that now seems so boring. Whatever psychological structures were propped up by the need for the fantasy will crumble.

    In the end, these escapist fantasies are based on a shallow understanding of the nature of virtual reality. The virtual call girl is interpreting virtuality as illusion; the car thief is interpreting it as another, equally solid and valuable reality. Neither one is truly understanding it as transnihilistic, hyperreal.

    One might argue that, for some people, this understanding will never come. But my conjecture -- the most important idea of this book -- is that a thorough and rich experience of virtual reality will tend to induce an hyperrealistic attitude. And that an hyperrealistic attitude will, in turn, tend to mitigateagainst "negative virtuality," against the use of VR to act out obsessive fantasies.

    We have no experience with virtual ethics. But we do have experience with other reality-suspending altered states of consciousness. It is an empirical observation that "enlightened minds" from various religious traditions do often display an unusual compassion. They emanate a love and respect for the surrounding world -- not despite, but because of, their sense of its insubstantiality. We do not find a lot of monks saying "The world does not exist, so I might as well rape and pillage!" Similarly, I predict that virtual reality will not fill up with dangerous maniacs. Metaphysics and ethics match together more naturally than that.

    This is an admittedly optimistic perspective, and I am not 100% certain that I am right on this issue. We will have to be very careful, as virtual reality technology is developed, to safeguard against various forms of virtual sadism. But we cannot allow pessimism to rule the day. All new technologies carry possibility of misuse, along with possibilities for great positive value. We must work to promote positive outcomes, while keeping our eyes out for the negative possibilities.

    I am not trying to promote any new ethical insights here. So far as I have been able to determine, virtual reality does not lead to any profound new codes for human conduct. Whatever prognosticating insight I may have does not extend in this direction. The point I want to make is merely that virtual reality does not necessarily contradict ethics. One can quite plausibly argue that acknowledgement of virtuality promotes a compassionate attitude.

    ***

    In thinking about the psychology of ethics, it is useful to introduce an evolutionary perspective. Tellingly, evolutionary logic seems to be much more useful here than deductive logic.

    Philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza have tried to put ethics on a deductive, axiomatic framework; but such efforts have always been ridiculously alienated from human nature. Compassion does not follow logically from hyperrealism in any simple sense. If one is to account for the results of observation and intuition, one must figure the self-organizing, evolutionary dynamics of the mind into the equation.

    One may say that a mind, due to its living flexibility as an evolving system, tends to adopt an ethics which fits in with its metaphysics. This "fitting in" is aesthetic, practical and emotional; it is not based on rational calculations. It is based on the generation of emergent pattern. The mind chooses an ethics and metaphysics which, when considered together, lead to a large amount of emergent pattern.

    In this case, hyperrealism and universal compassion fit together because of their shared focus on the aliveness and awareness of the entire world. This is really very simple. Acting compassionately affirms faith in the aliveness and interconnectedness of the world; on the other hand, insight into the aliveness and interconnectedness of a certain part of the world naturally leads one to behave compassionately to that partof the world.

    It is, in this view, creative force which leads to hyperrealist compassion. Compassion and hyperrealist metaphysics match together; they combine to form intense and manifold emergent pattern; and thus they are favored by the creative force of the universe, by the fundamental dynamic of hyperreality. They are not necessarily connected: hyperreal logic never provides 100% certainty. We may yet come across a virtuality-infused serial killer. Hyperreality is a very diverse place. But this sort of thing will never be the rule: in general, a deep appreciation of virtuality will lead to a deep respect for life and complex pattern.

    By adopting evolutionary rather than deductive logic, we have come to a simple, almost obvious conclusion. Living in a dead world is damn unfulfilling. To lead a rich and creative existence one has to actively endow the world with life. The hyperrealist attitude demands that one accept the world's groundedness in virtual being, accept that everything is a process acting on and emerging from other processes, everything is part of the flow. But accepting this means accepting everything's fundamental aliveness -- means accepting that people, and even inanimate objects, are as alive and aware as oneself.

    This gives a basis for virtual ethics. It gives a basis for compassion. It does not solve detailed questions regarding what to do in various situations. One might well ask -- why, then, if everything is conscious, why should anyone value humans over, say, fleas or tiny fragments of rock? The most devout Buddhists don't eat meat, but they still eat plants, and from the animist point of view, plants and inanimate objects as well as animals still possess an essential aliveness. According to some primitive tribes, it's OK to eat meat, so long as you thank the gods first. Where do you draw the line?

    The only honest answer here is that, while we each have to draw the lines for ourselves, based on personality, situation and culture, there are certain principles that we tend to adhere to. And one of these principles is that we tend to have more respect for structures similar to ourselves. These are the structures that we appreciate more, relate to more, understand better. These are the structures in which we, inherently, see and feel more life. Our intuition that the universe is alive becomes more vivid when considering those parts of the universe similar to us.

Thus, since we humans are complex organic life forms, the hyperrealistic attitude tends to instill in us a certain respect for organic complex lifeforms. Using evolutionary logic, we may say that this kind of respect fits in best with hyperrealism. It is not a logical consequence of hyperrealism in any simple way. The hyperrealist mind will have an easier time flowing, living and creating if it takes an attitude of respecting the wholeness of other beings similar to itself.

    George Orwell, in 1984, presents a point of view almost diametrically opposed to the one I am taking here. His hero, Winston, is a champion of realism. Realism is identified with personal freedom. Freedom is defined as the freedom to say that two plus two is four, to stand firm for the facts even when the government says two plus two is five. The government attemptsto control reality, to oppress people by reaching into their minds and forcing them to feel that reality is whatever the government says it is. One year the war is with Eastasia, the next year it is with Oceania -- and once the enemy is changed to Oceania, the people are expected to believe that the war has always been with Oceania. Anyone who persisted in factual memory, who held out against the utter subjectivity of reality, was brutally tortured until their memory and reason crumbled.

    I am not at all certain that the kind of mind control described in 1984 is possible. It may that Orwell has the psychology all wrong. Once people are convinced that reality is relative, that there are no absolute facts, will they not intuitively feel free to construct their own realities? Or is it really possible for the government to convince people that reality is malleable, but only in the hands of the government?

    In any case, Orwell's story serves as a cautionary tale, not only for politics as he intended it, but also for virtual reality. The world of his novel is a world in which the attitude of tyranny "fits" naturally with the metaphysics of hyperrealism. The future world I am envisioning is one in which the attitude of compassion fits naturall with the metaphysics of hyperrealism. Let us constantly be on the lookout to be sure that my argument is correct and Orwell's vision is not possible -- and, in case my argument is wrong, to be sure that his vision does not occur.

    ***

    There is also a somewhat different way of thinking about hyperrrealist ethics, which has seemed very attractive to me at times. I have said that hyperrealist ethics consists of identification with the creative force, the fundamental flow of hyperreality. If one takes this very literally, one finds that what one has is an ethic of pattern. For it is pattern, regularity, that is created.

    The basic idea is very simple: pattern is good. More specifically, by this I mean that more pattern is better than less pattern. This implies the following maxim: "One should act in a way so as to maximize the amount of meaningful pattern the universe." This is just a more formalistic way of saying that one should try to act in harmony with the Creative Force.

    There is a relativity inherent in this ethical maxim: pattern as perceived by one person may differ from pattern as perceived by another. This is unavoidable. Each of us must act to maximize creativity as measured in our own subjective reality. But this relativity need not prevent us from deducing some simple conclusions of pattern ethics, as relative to the consensus human reality of the late twentieth century:

     -- Art is intrinsically good. Writing a novel is better than stringing random words together. Ulysses and The Brothers Karamazov are better than your average Harlequin Romance. Painting a portrait is intrinsically better than splashing paint on the canvas at random -- however, in certain social contexts, it is possible that the latter may turn out be superior. For instance, a lousy painting, a painting with little intrinsic pattern, may nonetheless be extremely inspiring to other artists, and in this way lead to a great deal of pattern.

     -- Science is intrinsically good. Technology is intrinsically good. Relativity theory is better than phlogiston theory. Computer technology is better than toaster technology.

     -- Preserving life is intrinsically good. A living organism has very high structural complexity; it is the cause of many patterns. However, some lives may be more valuable than others. For instance, a person is worth more than a bug, which is worth more than a bacterium. And some people may be worth more than others, as well.

     -- Stealing is not necessarily bad. Taking drugs, cheating on one's spouse, envy, pride, gluttony, murder, etc. are not necessarily bad. These are particular cultural taboos rather than violations of a universal ethical imperative.

     -- Pain is bad -- in the short term at any rate. Pleasure is good -- again, in the short term. For pleasure correlates with the feeling of increasing order; pain correlates with decreasing order. Of course, short-term order may contradict long term order and pattern, in which case what seems good over the short run may be bad over the long run. Pattern ethics does not solve the problem of deferred gratification.

    In the end, maxims like this are nothing more then heuristics. They are averages which cannot be unthinkingly applied to particular situations. Specific ethical decisions are made by specific minds, with all sorts of different motivations. No abstract theory will resolve the puzzles of everyday life. But the point I want to make very clearly is that a virtual universe is not a universe without goal or meaning.

    Metaphysics and ethics are relatively separate logically, but not psychologically. Each metaphysics matches some ethics better than others; the combinations which match better are more likely to be selected, according to the evolutionary logic of mind. Virtual reality metaphysics matches up with an ethics of universal compassion. And compassion is the ultimate basis of moral behavior: all the rest, or nearly all, is cultural convention.

    If everything is made of pattern, of structure, then structure itself may be taken as a goal. The increase of structure may be taken as a creative force, and various actions may be understood to abet or to hinder this force. Acting ethically is not only "going with the creative flow," -- but actively pushing along with it....

    As I said in the beginning of this brief chapter, there is nothing original about the approach to ethics outlined here. Virtual reality does not seem to lead to any dramatic new ethical advances. Neither, however, does it necessarily lead to utter nihilism, to the complete dissolution