Unplugged

Continuing on what the Matrix film proposed two decades ago, and also with the recent comments about "Living in a Simulation" by Elon Musk, I want to say that now I have no clue on how to define "reality" and explain its deep link to existence. This made me imagine an interesting future for life. So, does something need to exist to be real? Or at least to be part of a reality?

Right now we have been trying to simulate different realities with different technologies, most of them sitting outside of our brains. A book is one of them. You can understand the meaning of the text you are reading and then use your brain to imagine, trying to experience the proposed written reality. Does it feels exactly as if you were there? No, but it is an approximation. Movies are similar, they tell a story visually without texts, and so do games.

Why do we want to have different realities? Well, I think that at least a huge portion of the meaning of life is to experience and feel "realities". We are not a soldier of some distant galaxy far far away a long time ago, and we may never be, but it is in our nature to look for exciting experiences, and therefore, we have been using whatever technology we have to start flying accross galaxies. And let's be super clear, experiences are everything. You even work hard to earn money which it is only used to have the experiences you want. A car, a ticket, a trip, a friend, a meal, all are experiences processed by the brain. The consciousness philosophical topic has been with us for a long time.

I also think that humanity will pursue the perfection when building technologies that will be flawless to make us feel experiences. What if we are able to achieve something similar as shown in the Matrix? What if companies like Neuralink successfully connect a computer to our brains? If that turns out to be the case, we may be able to produce the exact same signals as our perception organs. The same signals of our eyes, ears, touch, smell, everything. In theory you would be able to connect to any world or any experience that we can program. Sounds surreal, and it is.

Would that mean that all our organs and body will make no sense to us anymore? If we are able to produce the experience that we want, why struggle to work hard to get them? We can pick any great moment that we want, and maybe, even bad moments. We always avoid them, of course. But will you choose to do the same if you are able to trial them? Humans would try every type of experience, regardless how good or bad they are, just to feel. If you can end it anytime, wouldn’t you try fighting a war against evil? What do you think? Our consciousness would evolve mixing feelings and blurring the end result of those experiences.

It may happen shortly after that humans would be connected to VR machines for the longest of years, with evolution slowly removing our needed sensors, muscles and other organs, reducing ourselves to brains and energy generation entities of some sort. A small ball of flesh and fluids that cannot move, cannot talk, cannot feel in the real world, and only does in an unexisting universe.