RAR: Real Life or Simulated Reality?

[salm]

Well, what I am in turn getting at is that often, the most useful modes for displaying the information we really want about a physical area or system bear little resemblance to what we would see if we were standing there. I might be more interested in the moisture content of the rock combined with the topography, and find anything more detailed than a false-color mapping overlaid on a topo map to be a distraction rather than a help.

So it's a two-way street; the VR technology is more useful as a generalized interfacing device that can project arbitrary images and data processing and do simulations of arbitrary systems. This is basically just a logical extension of what scientists already use computers for (crunching huge data sets, modeling complex systems, and creating graphics to efficiently display information). The ability to put on VR headsets and so on and 'walk into' the graphic interface will sometimes be desirable, and sometimes irrelevant, but it really represents an incremental advance over the existing art in most fields.

I agree.

[Mr. G]

One philosophical point that people here apparently missed is that a perfectly realistic virtual reality, including perfectly realistic simulations of human beings, would involve reproducing the full complexity of human minds, among other things. It wouldn't be a "virtual reality" but just another universe, which just happens to exist inside a computer in our universe. It wouldn't be "less real" than our universe. Also, this forum is a virtual reality to some degree but stuff that happens here is, well, real.

[Simon_Jester]

That isn't so much a philosophical point to be "missed" as a matter for serious debate. Is simulating a thing the same as making that thing actually exist?

You can make a case for a simulated mind being morally equivalent to a real mind, and for the suffering of that simulated mind being real. So creating a simulated concentration camp and putting simulated self-aware minds into it is just as bad as creating a real one and putting real people into it.

However, you cannot necessarily make a case for non-intelligent simulated things being 'real' in the same sense that physically extant things are. A simulated rock in SimEarth is not necessarily as 'real' as the rocks we see around us on Earth, even if SimEarth has sufficient computing power to fully simulate that rock.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Our perception of an object in a perfect VR world will be identical to our perception of that object in "real" life, by definition. That perception is simply a product of specific patterns of neuronal activity. A VR isn't physically creating a rock or anything even remotely resembling a rock; it is (either directly or indirectly, depending on how advanced a technology we are talking) manipulating the patterns of electrical activity in the brain to mimic (or, perhaps more accurately, RECREATE) sensory stimuli. If we are going to compare it to anything, we would compare it to just a really detailed and controllable dream. A computer game is a stimulation, but it is approaching the task of simulation differently: it uses code to create graphical renderings that correspond to a real object's physical qualities in close enough a manner that our brain is able to process it as a rock, or whatever.