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The late great philosopher, Raymond Smullyan, believed in what I may reductively call the Video Game Conception of Reality. In his delightful book, 5,000 BC and Other Philosophical Fantasies, Smullyan argued that our fear of death was utterly unnecessary. It was our either/or approach to life and death that made dying such a chilling contemplation. Smullyan's preference was to consider reality as comprising several modulations and levels. Hallucination was one of these levels and so was dreaming. A substantial proportion of drug users makes a strong case for LSD. Perhaps, death was merely another level to this game we call life.
Dreams, to take this hypothesis further, are not exactly the same as wakefulness, although telling which is which is a question every toddler knows the answer to but which many philosophers continue to struggle with. Maybe there are questions that get harder the more intelligent you become. Or maybe, more plausibly, the more intelligent you become, the harder, often unnecessarily, you make the question.
The Metaverse is Facebook's attempt, unwitting or not, to verify Smullyan's hypothesis. As far as hypotheses go, it's been travelling for a while: Advanced Virtual Reality has been a plausible dream for at least thirty-six years, dating from Jaron Lanier's founding of Virtual Programming Languages Research in 1985. But ideas take a long time to grow bodies, and progress on Virtual Reality has stalled and sped up in periodic intervals. Indeed, when Oculus was purchased by Facebook in 2014, it was supposed to be the beginning of an exciting new future. That exciting new future did what all Annual General Meetings and important marital conversations do: it constantly postponed itself.
Now, VR is here, or at least, it is arriving with much thicker certainty in the very amusing name of the Metaverse. It's hard not to think of Marvel sequels and empty action blockbusters when that name comes to mind: the Metaverse 1, Saving The Metaverse 2, The return of the Metaverse 3. Less flippantly, I quite like Virtual Reality. On a personal level, what's there not to like: nobody can blame you for daydreaming when it's a billion dollar industry. For a long time, we have travelled into things or through things: that is, from London to New York or from the bath tub to the bedroom. Travelling had to be spatiotemporal. That may no longer be necessary with Virtual Reality. The internet made time irrelevant to communication, and VR will do the same to space.
All of this constitutes a credible threat to several industries. I confidently expect the better it gets, the less people will travel for work or leisure, creating significant ramifications for not just the transportation industry but additionally for tourism since there's no point in going to Kenya when you can be in a savannah and much else without leaving your bedroom. Virtual reality may turn out to be the final nail in the coffin of the office. And, most important, Virtual Reality may spawn new industries altogether.
SCIENCE FICTION AND OTHER FANTASIES
Despite this reservoir of promise, something else has caught my eye. Facebook's choice of name sounds like science fiction because it is science fiction. The Metaverse is the curiously ill- defined and hardly explored setting of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It's not just Zuckerberg who has been borrowing heavily from childhood fantasies. It's no secret that many tech billionaires grew up on heavy diets of science fiction, but perhaps the most telling influence is Isaac Asimov's The Foundations, a series of novels whose intergalactic civilization bear an acute resemblance to the mission statements of SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Space Exploration. Virtual Reality. Augmented Bodies. These are all exciting and important problems. But are they necessary problems? Or are they merely pursuits of deep internal fascinations with substantial opportunity costs for our society.
The real problem with these ventures is the readiness to subtract the real world out of the equation, to triumph over it by rendering it unnecessary, a mere launchpad into another universe. But the real world cannot go away. The real world is the only world we have. There's nowhere else human civilization can turn to, nowhere else to go.
Will there ever be? The chances are far slimmer than you'd think from reading Elon Musk's tweets. Still, I can't rule it out: intelligence plus megalomania has generally been behind much of human progress. However, the answer to the question is irrelevant. How good a job have we done with this world that gives us the confidence that we will not mess up other ones, both real and imagined. Perhaps, to be human is to constantly forget we are human. We need to remember that there is no guarantee of other options existing and there's less of a guarantee that we won't mess those other options up.
We must also be wary of the certainty that this is a step in a completely right direction. The invention of the internet has brought unprecedented improvements to the quality of our lives but it has also allowed communities to splinter into echo chambers and a constant stream of self-absorption. Space Exploration and Virtual Reality will similarly bring with their massive benefits their own peculiar and problematic contributions. I call it the law of advancement: We can only know the full extent of what will go wrong with a particular policy or invention until it's been implemented, by which time it's already too late. Discussions and committees can help but they cannot eliminate this uncertainty. Unknown unknowns don't reveal themselves by analysis.
WHAT'S THE REAL ISSUE HERE.
The real issue, however, is not with the pursuit of interplanetary colonization, which sounds suspiciously like Europe's mad scramble for Africa, or with the creation of a subscription service to live imaginary lives and buy virtual products.
The issue is what we lose as a species when we fritter so much capital and attention we could have devoted to some real and urgent problems: Climate Change, Economic Inequality, Disability, War, Ecological Collapse, Global Poverty, ... .
Around two hundred and sixty years ago, Voltaire wrote Candide, a poignant satire poking fun at Gottfried Leibniz's conviction that we lived in the best possible worlds. There is actually no way to refute Leibniz given that even with all the evil and suffering in the world, which I may denote as N, it's possible that all possible worlds have N+X amounts of evil and suffering. And so, Voltaire's decision to parade us through a tour of suffering doesn't actually prove his point. Of course, it doesn't prove Leibniz's point either.
At the end of Candide, Candide, who by this point is tired of the stupidly optimistic Pangloss, retorts to another harebrained suggestion by saying we must cultivate our garden. It's easy to interpret this as some call to self-improvement, a dose of realism, or even good old mind your damn business. And there are echoes of all this in the statement. But there's something fundamentally deeper about this call, because Voltaire realizes that this, at the end, is the real solution to the endless tour of suffering. If everyone took care of his or her garden to start with, there would be much less grief.
What’s interesting is Voltaire didn't enjoin us to cultivate ONLY our gardens. It was not about selfishness. It was about opening ourselves to the truth that taking care of our gardens leaves us in a better position to do all the other stuff.
What would this mean for tech billionaires? Facebook can decide to recognise that privacy is an actual word with an actual meaning and make meaningful commitments against extensive political manipulation. Amazon can take stronger steps to improve its labour conditions and disappointing customer service. Musk and Tesla can work on stopping its recurrent failures to meet customer demand for electric cars. Billionaires may not be specially responsible for problems they didn't do more than others to help create, but they are certainly responsible for the ones they did.
All of us can cultivate our own gardens as well. Part of this sometimes will involve calling out those in positions of power and wealth. And part of this will come from realizing that most of the time, we are better off improving the world rather than criticising it. And then we can pursue the other exciting stuff too, side by side. But the world is the only garden we have. It is, perhaps, the only garden we will ever have. It's time to start taking out the weeds.
HEY! OVER HERE
If you've read the About page, you will know that every Sunday, I will be reviewing works of fiction and non-fiction that were initially published before 2005. I also promised I would be leaving hints regarding the book to be reviewed on Sunday. The first five persons to guess the title correctly and text the answer to my email will be entitled to free access of this newsletter for an entire month. Since this newsletter is still fully free, and will be for a while, all rewards are currently intellectual bragging rights.
You can send the answers here to Tiwaonibonoje14@gmail.com
Friday's Hint (Author's First Name):
Haruki.
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.