Virtual Reality As Like Living in a City

Academic Robin Hanson was recently interviewed on Lex Fridman’s podcast. They were discussing the possibility of future brain emulations, basically having your mind uploaded to a computer and living in a virtual world, when this came up:

FRIDMAN: What do you think about like the metaverse and operating in virtual reality? So, we can conjure up, emulate, not just your own brain and body but the entirety of the environment?

HANSON: Well most brain emulations will in fact spend most of their time in virtual reality. But they wouldn’t think of it as virtual reality, they would just think of it as their usual reality. The think to notice I think, in our world, most of us spend most time indoors. And indoors we are surrounded by walls covered with paint and floors covered with tile or rugs. Most of our environment is artificial. It’s constructed to be convenient for us, it’s not the natural world that was there before. Virtual reality is basically just like that. It is the environment that’s comfortable and convenient for you. But when it’s that environment for you it’s real for you. Just like the room you’re in right now likely is very real for you. You’re not focused on the fact that the paint is hiding the actual studs behind the wall, the actual wires and pipes and everything else. The fact that we’re hiding that from you doesn’t make it fake or unreal.

I had never thought about this like this before! When we imagine future people living in virtual reality, that virtual environment can seem disconnected from the real outside world and so thus fake and meaningless, unlike our current lives. But I wonder whether previous humans, say nomadic people who spent the vast majority of their time “outside”, would see our built environment as disconnected from the real outside world and so thus fake and meaningless in the same way. And this doesn’t even just apply to be inside a building like Robin describes, even outdoors in a city pretty much everything around you has been constructed by humans, is artificial in some way. Even parks are very much constructed by humans to suit us, they’re completely different from how natural environments look in the deep wilderness. I guess some people would say to this “Yes! Virtual realities and cities are both artificial and fake and this is bad, we need to stop spending most of our time in cities”. But to me my life in a city still seems ‘real’ in some sense, and still meaningful despite being a pretty much completely artificial and human-made environment, the fact that it’s artificial doesn’t seem necessarily seem like a problem or like it makes my life fake or invalid.If I’m cracking up with some friends at my kitchen table, the fact that the table and chairs are artificial constructions, likewise the room itself and almost everything we can see out the windows, doesn’t make my laughing with friends seem fake or invalid to me. Though I guess one could say that in that laughing with friends example the friends themselves, as human beings, are ‘natural’ in some sense… Wow I really have a visceral negative reaction to the idea of ‘natural’ meaning good. Anyway so all this prompts me to think about how living in virtual reality one day seem as real and valid as my life in the artificial reality of a city seems to me today.