h+ Magazine

Every month at h+ magazine we are going to have a new theme. This month we are going with the theme of virtual reality. While VR was once just a provocative idea for sci-fi visionaries, it is now apparent that we live in an era in which it has become technologically feasible.

It’s interesting to consider virtual communities as social groups of great potential. The way they are formed is shaped by many things: technological infrastructure, platform or program design, but also by the actions of the members themselves.

Schwann Cybershaman, an h+ magazine writer and filmmaker, has been compiling a video series of lectures by the late Terence McKenna, the psychedelic philosopher and proto-transhumanist. Whether or not you agree with McKenna’s specific views, his breadth of knowledge and the boldness of theorizing will have you thinking about life, the universe, and everything in novel ways.

More than 80 transhumanist avatars stormed the virtual world of Second Life for a community event organized by Humanity+ on September 15. This has been by far the largest virtual transhumanist event that I have seen, and I believe I have seen them all. Two or three years ago the Second Life system would have been slowed down to a halt by 80 participants, but now everything worked without a glitch: virtual reality technology has evolved, and transhumanists want to bring the same fast evolution to RL (Second Life slang for “Real Life.”)

“Mathematicians, likewise, have decided that the smooth, geometric model of reality they have used since Euclid first drew a triangle on papyrus is obsolete. Instead, using computers, they churn out psychedelic paisley patterns which they claim more accurately reflect the nature of existence. And who appears to be taking all this in first? The kids dancing to electronic music at underground clubs. And the conclusion they have all seemed to reach is that reality itself is up for grabs. It can be dreamt up.”

At a recent TED Conference, a dinner was organized by the Edge Foundation, a think tank and nonprofit that celebrates big ideas. The theme of the evening was the “New Age of Wonder,” and the discussion drew comparisons to the Romantic Age, the period between 1770 and 1830 when science and art were friends. It was a time when astronomers and poets were in some ways indistinguishable, as artists were inspired by science’s intoxicating sense of awe and wonder. Somewhere down the line, however, these two worlds became disjointed.

I met Tish Shute several years ago through our mutual interest in virtual worlds – and then found, to my delight, that our common interests go far beyond that domain. Describing herself as a “digital strategist, writer, and cyborg anthropologist,” Tish is the the co-founder and co-chair of the Augmented Reality Event, and the founder of Ugotrade, a leading blog focused on augmented reality as well as virtual reality, mobile communication and other topics. On top of all that, she is also deeply knowledgeable about Buddhism and other wisdom traditions and spiritual practices.

Ray Kurzweil has commented that we’ll be spending quite a bit of our time in virtual reality environments in the coming decades. They’ll be full immersion, and, as in Second Life, you can be someone else if you choose. Or several someones.

“Re-creating Yourself” is but one of the chapters in the new book, Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution, by psychologists Jim Blascovich (UCSB) and Jeremy Bailenson (Stanford). In this chapter, they discuss a series of studies on virtual doppelgangers — and explore the notion of avatar clones of you that can behave independently of your own intentions and actions in virtual space.

You’re the director in an ultra-low-budget movie set around an alien encounter. You select scenes, summon special effects, and play the supporting cast members: G-Man, Scientist, Alien, and Little Girl. Your lead actor Ted is a struggling reporter who wakes up tied-up on an alien spaceship. What do you do? You improvise.

On a personal level, I most look forward to becoming a person in a real rather than an imaginary sense. To that end, I am keenly interested in artificial intelligence going beyond the level where it can ace the Turing test (and is accepted as a mind with a level of general intelligence at least as broad as a human mind) and reaching a stage where it is possible to create a specific mind. Kind of a Turing test where the goal is to convince the judges it is my ‘self’ they are interacting with.

Ben Goertzel converses with Hugo de Garis on his transhumanist argument for the reality of a Creator.