[sharemywin]

Step 1: UBI you can chase your dreams

Step2: well you can't afford real dreams you're on UBI so chase your dreams in VR. plus the clicks will help pay for UBI.

Step 3: eat Soylent it's less expensive and you don't need much nutrition your always in VR anyways. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Step 4: you can get a more enriched experience if we attach cables to you. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Step 5: The system decided to make VR more like real life and add constraints and problems to your life. besides the system can get more clicks the more time your in VR.

Shit we ended up in the Matrix....except it turned out to be a giant click farm.

[CalRobert]

Devil's advocate - if the experience of VR is completely indistinguishable from reality, is it not just reality for the consciousness experiencing the VR?

We experience sadness, happiness, joy, and despair, based on sensory input, which is supposedly a manifestation of the world around us, but maybe it's the abstractions we build on top of that matter which are important. Maybe the experience of VR fishing with my dad is imperceptibly different from actually going fishing (better, even, since the simulated fish isn't full of microplastics and our two stroke boat didn't poison the water) - If my VR avatar and your VR avatar build full, rich (as far as we can tell) experiences together, and generate real sensations of joy, then I'm not sure it's so different from doing the same thing in reality. In either case we're manipulating atoms in ways we find pleasant; in one case those atoms simply happen to be in a computer.

As a thought experiment, say you could build an entire copy of our civilization, but at half the physical size - its experiences would be no less rich, I think. Lower carbon emissions too. Now make it a hundredth the size. Or a billionth. Maybe modeling this inside a computer isn't so different from that scenario.

Having everyone hooked up to VR all the time sounds like a hellish nightmare, for the record, but I'm not sure why it bothers me as much as it does.

[larkery]

I think the VR world is bothersome because you (and me, and many others) have some part of our value system or moral calculus that isn't a function of people's subjective experience but is to do with the arrangement of stuff in the highly contentious 'base reality'.

Wireheading gives a similar icky feeling; if we got everyone in the world some brain implants that made sure they were perfectly happy with their situation, no matter the situation, would the situation as a whole be morally better, worse, or equal to how it is now?

I would say worse, because somewhere in my morality look-up table it says that the happiness of a person who is sitting in a concrete cell with their brain wired up to induce happiness is less good than the happiness of a person listening to the symphony or whatever, even if their subjective reports would both be full of joy.

For me this holds true even if the hypothetical wirehead-world is setup in some way to make sure that people keep breeding or live forever in wirehead bliss or what have you; the situation's value is not just some sum of expected subjective 'utility scores' or something similar (apart from the "Repugnant Conclusion" which is another problem here).

This is probably a patronising and paternalistic kind of morality for me to have, but I'm OK with that (and secretly suspect a bit that people who claim to have a morality totally devoid of this sort of thing are either deluding themselves or lying).

I do like the idea of 50% scale world (although whether 50% scale world would actually work the same I don't know). Introspecting, that seems OK because it's still made of normal matter, which I must conclude has different moral value to simulated matter.

[mistermann]

Very interesting way of thinking about it, I'd enjoy to read a much longer fleshed out version of this.

Also, is there a name for the "persuasion technique" you've used here? The idea of taking an understandable scenario and then reducing it? I have a similar technique that starts with an exaggerated and unavoidably rhetorical question, and then work back towards the topic at hand, when someone has a mental block and simply won't budge. I've always wondered if there's a name for it so I could become more effective at it.

[CalRobert]

I'm not sure, it's just something that's crossed my mind with respect to VR and the nature of reality vs models of said reality. I'd enjoy thinking about it more, or reading about it, if there's a word for this.

[sharemywin]

The problem is choice and losing choice in the future.

[CalRobert]

I agree entirely that loss of choice is tragic, though I can imagine you referring to a few different things. Do you mean the choice between reality and simulation, or the choice in how one lives, regardless of whether it's in the real world or not? Or perhaps you meant something else?

Ironically I suspect a lack of choice in life is part of the appeal of the escapism grandparent describes.