virtual reality

[obliguhl]

Hmmmm... I don't buy the virtual reality fad. Why? We already have a world in front of our eyes...

Still we have fiction literature, television, theater and other forms of play. All are immensly successful.

and we have psychedelics

A tiny minority uses these highly stigmatized drugs called "psychedelics" on a regular basis.

A high-dose psilocybin journey, though I haven't yet ventured that far, would be FAR more interesting than virtual reality.

It also comes with a lot of problems. Furthermore, it can't be compared, so the argument is void.

The contents of a future virtual reality environment? I don't see it being too much different than today's television culture

Virtual Reality is interactive not passive like television.

It's going to turn into another form of mind control and distraction from the real world our physical forms inhabit - enhanced, at that.

There are plenty of people who want to escape normal modes of consciousness from time to time - yourself included.

Virtual reality, though, might just become a sort of herion

What makes you think heroin is bad per se?

Make of this post what you will

I did, sorry

PS: Can a moderator please merge this thread with the original VR thread ? Or is this one substantially different ?

 

[Ufostrahlen]

Is it still their fault when they are born into this VR infomercial?

If you believe the Monroe books, it was your choice from the beginning. I mean why not end it, if it doesn't pleases you? Either thru acquiring the tools necessary to change the VR or thru an "exit strategy".

Yes because all the last "new applications" have done just that haven't they?

Yes, the weird internet for example. Only porn and hippies. Disgusting.

Or take electricity, a rather recent development. Now people are able to preserve food in the summer and tropical zones. Or kids in Africa are able to read books even though it's dark. This needs to stop. The people had it better when they were eating food infested with microbes and the kids in Africa better stay uneducated. Not that they are suddenly overthrowing white paternalism. Just chant the illnesses away! It worked before!

Sorry for my sarcasm, but I guess you get my point. No smartphone or VR goggle will take your spirituality away. Quite the contrary, you aren't depended on your local woo woo dealers anymore.

 

[entheogenic-gnosis]

TMK rant

In a nutshell: language = code. Code is visible language for the consciousness. The brain/heart is basically a wlan antenna for the larger code database (aka akashic records) .

Except in VR world the code will be controlled by the corporations, as they are the only ones with enough money to develop the hardware and software needed to produce a VR world.

Perhaps one day VR will be advanced enough that any Joe Blow will be able to create a replica of their imagined world, but hopefully it happens before the youth allget sucked into living out their lives in a giant VR infomercial.

(I actually had a very good idea on where I was going with this post, but got distracted and went off coarse many many times, it was difficult to stay on point and maintain relevance in content to topic, in other words this post turned into an absolute wreck, though there actually are some decent ideas generally relating to the topic, and I wasted 15 minutes compiling this mess, so I figured I'd post it with this disclaimer)

I can see VR technology very soon becoming available to every individual, the head sets are expensive now, but give it some time, and if they are worth having, they will eventually become affordable...and, yes, as of now corporations control the content, but these corporations hire artists to generate these things, even if it's under the corporate yolk, the generation of these virtual realities is in the artists hands.

As of now your "average Joe" lacks the ability to program their own virtual similacrums, hallucinations and dreams, but it's only a matter of time...I can see some pretty amazing potentials that this technology allows, and will evolve into.

I think VR technology, 3-d technology, hologram technology, Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), brainwave entrainment through binaural beats and isochronic tones as well as other means, Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and other emerging means of "reality manipulation technology" or I suppose "consciousness manipulation" is a better term, are all making the below quote by terence mckenna all the more obvious

Drugs are becoming more like computers, while computers are becoming more like drugs."-mckenna



I understand the concern that these virtual domains will become the property of capitalist fascists and corporations (i want to add that with psychedelics this is never an issue, the compounds allow access to the content, as to who or what generated it...I can't say, but it wasn't a corporation...) , though the very nature of their design coupled with those who are generally the ones doing the designing lends me hope to the realization of mckenna's notion of who the designers of the future will be:

The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. -terence mckenna

Both computers and drugs are what I would call “function-specific arrangements of matter,” and as we develop nanotechnological abilities as we move into the next century, it will be more and more clear that the difference between drugs and machines is simply that one is too large to swallow. And our best people are working on that -terence mckenna

Misc. Mckenna on the topic below...

.
The dematerializing of our lives is I think another area where we could make a significant conscious contribution to at least pumping the brakes on the approach toward a, uh, the passing of a fail safe point. Uh, and that means, exploring such admittedly odious possibilities as virtual reality, where light replaces matter and code replaces, uh, computer codes and this sort of thing replace the manipulation of matter by the kinds of crude technologies that we have grown accustomed to. I can imagine a world where we commit ourselves not to uh, uh, something like Star Wars but if the technical mentality must have a bone to chew on, then let's set a global or national technical goal of producing by the year 2005 say, uh, a technology which results in something which looks like black contact lenses. Contact lenses which are installed in the eyelid such that when you close your eyes menus hang in space. The entire culture could be dematerialized and downloaded into an electronic virtual culture that would nowhere come tangential to the Earth and would require very limited resource extraction.

------

so now, in our nuts and bolts technological progress, we have somehow created technologies which are very friendly to our social values in that these technologies can be bought, sold, licensed, upgraded - all things which we understand. But these technologies are acting on us in the same way that psychedelic drugs do, but more profoundly, more generally and more insidiously, because their effect is not understood, or if it is understood, it's not discussed.

So in a way we have come into a kind of post-cultural phase. All culture is dissolving in the face of the drug-like nature of the future. Its music, its design, indeed the very people who will inhabit it appear to be the most switched-on, the most chance-taking, the most alive of the entire tribe. People who feel the beat, people who are not afraid to take chances, people for whom these technologies have always been very natural.

Machines are central to the new capitalism, the information transforming technologies. In fact, one of the strange things that is happening is: Every move we now make in relationship to the new technologies redefines them at the very boundaries where their own developmental impetus would lead them toward a kind of independence. In other words, we talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about the possibility of an AI coming into existence, but we do not really understand to what degree this is already true of our circumstance. In other words, how much of society is already homeostaticly regulated by machines that are ultimately under human control, but practically speaking, are almost never meddled with? -terence mckenna

-eg

 

[Ufostrahlen]

In reply to the statement, that code is in the hand of corporations:

Not true. You can learn to code today without investing any money (yet time tho):

Free courses: https://www.codecademy.com/
Free SDK for Android apps: Download Android Studio & App Tools - Android Developers
Free OS: Linux (Debian-based distros are said to be programmer-friendly)