Your Brain is a Virtual Reality Machine
On the most fundamental level, we are constantly experiencing the future and the past: the flow of time. This ability is essential to what we call purposeful behavior. We love to debate whether or not other animals have this ability and to what degree, but it's clear that we have it in spades. It is essential to who we are as humans.
I am fascinated by how the brain produces the virtual world that we call "consciousness". It turns out to be quite a trick.
- Sense information arrives at different times. For example, sound and smell arrive with very little processing, but virtual information goes through massive complex analysis. Yet we experience it all at the "same time".
- We experience the decision to move after the brain has sent signals to move.
- Our experience slightly precedes what is going on in the real world - it is a prediction of what is happening. In the words of the Great One: I skate not to where the puck is but where the puck will be.
Careful observation of the phenomenon we call "consciousness" provides endless examples of how we are constantly bombarded with stunningly immersive "virtual" experiences. The smell of apple pie. The voice of a loved one on the phone. A spider crawling on our leg. Our brains instantly and effortlessly supply "virtual" senses to "enhance" the smallest trickle of "real" data.
On top of this, we structure reality into stories and "explanations". We are the story-telling ape. The good stories are embellished and handed on over generations, eventually knitting themselves into systems called "mythology" and "religion". We are quite willing to believe that we live on after death or that there is an old man in the sky behind everything that happens. We love our stories so much that we forget they are "just" stories.
Our brains are made to be fooled. We don't need computers to be plunged into an alternate reality. We can open a book and read: "Call me Ishmael" and suddenly we are whalers. We read "In the beginning" and we walk in the garden with Adam and Eve. If I may be allowed to speculate a bit, it seems that hearing these words rather than reading them creates a more powerful image. In the words of Bishop Pike: "What is too silly to be said can be sung". This points out one essential feature of how we experience virtual worlds: sometimes simplicity is an asset. And worlds that provide auditory input (especially speech) are readily accepted as real. We experience merely visual "worlds" (like a photograph) as "representation" but we are not "immersed".
Finally, in passing, I should note that virtual worlds created by written text must depend on the skill of the reader. Evolution does not provide this skill. It is learned. People vary in their ability to acquire this skill. Similarly, people vary in their ability to be "immersed" in virtual worlds. To some, the computer-generated worlds of VR remain cartoons. To others, they are instantly "real".
Modern "Virtual Worlds", if they are interesting at all, involves a learning curve that can be almost as daunting as learning to read. This aspect of things is often overlooked by prophets of the "metaverse". People are too lazy, preoccupied, or busy to learn a VR application that is more complicated than, say, Zoom. Those who developed VR "superpowers" will always be a tiny minority.
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P.S. "A Thousand Brains" provides a deep and powerful framework for understanding how the brain creates the rich experience we call consciousness. In particular, it doesn't make a lot of difference where the sensations are coming from. Whatever we know about the real world (in a deeply recursive way) is applicable to another "world" where the sensations are coming from, say, a computer screen.
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