What if virtual reality was a mental process instead of computer-generated graphics?
Instead of relying on CGI and headsets, the metaverse could one day be rendered through our dreams and catalysed by machines
This is exactly the question posed by Joakim Vindenes, PhD candidate in virtual reality (VR) at the University of Bergen, in Norway.
In an essay published in 2021, the researcher suggested that lucid dreams (that is, the ability to consciously control what happens in your dream) were better than VR as they are even more intense and immersive than the technology, besides not depending on devices and computational power. In his words:
Lucid dreaming requires no physical playspace, you can’t bump into your TV, or ever get to the end of your guardian. Consequently, you need no teleportation to navigate, nor do you need a supercomputer or expensive VR gear. There is no head-mounted display pressing on your face, and neither do you need controllers: fingers are precisely tracked, and any kind of tool can be synthesised at will. The field of view is extremely wide, there is no screen door effect, the sweet spot is huge, the resolution is super sharp, the refresh rate is great, the haptics is incredible and it’s got full-body tracking out of the box. As a final nail in the coffin, it features a brain-computer interface where you can manipulate the virtual environment with your mind, the most advanced AI characters you’ve ever seen, and an infinite library of virtual environments to immerse yourself in.
This is the premise behind science fiction movies such as Paprika, Inception and The Cell. Similarly to Vindenes, these films also pose the existence of a technology capable of entering one’s mind and/or dreams for therapeutic or investigative ends. But how possible or feasible is this today?
For didactic ends, let’s concentrate on the ability to access dreams, since this is a mental stage that can be achieved during sleep (or more specifically during the REM stage). With that in mind, we are better situated than if we decided to explore where consciousness is located, or when it starts and ends — also because consciousness doesn’t even have a universal definition anyways.
However, when studying the human mind, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud opted to divide it in three parts: the Ego, the Superego and the Id, which are constantly moving between the preconscious and the unconscious, these “areas” of consciousness. In contribution to this investigation, Carl Jung suggested that there might even exist a “collective unconsciousness”, that is, a “web” of shared symbols, archetypes, narratives that are integrative to the formation of our species and begins.
This idea is also connected to the concept of noosphere proposed in 1922 by the philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Etymologically, the word noosphere merges the Greek terms “noos” (reason) and “phere” (space, as seen in atmosphere or biosphere, for example). But it was the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky who popularized the term with a more geological connotation by understanding that the noosphere is some kind of third iteration of the Earth’s development. That is, after the formation of the geosphere (inanimate matter) and biosphere (biological life), the noosphere would emerge alongside cognition.
Soon this theory was adopted by ecologists such as James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia Theory in which the planet Earth is understood as a living organism. The advent of computational technologies, or more specifically the internet, was thus interpreted as the emergence of Earth’s neural system and, consequently, the development of the noosphere. This was a suggestion also made in science fiction, or more precisely in the Japanese animation Serial Experiments Lain (1998), which was the topic of my first academic research.
The 1990s and beginning of the 2000s were very rich in the sense of making connections between the recent technological discoveries and the attempts to philosophically understand what are the paths humanity is pursuing. It was during that time that Ray Kurzweil published The era of the spiritual machines and Singularity is near, as well as Douglas Rushkoff published Cyberia and Margaret Wertheim wrote The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.
The movies I mentioned before, Paprika (2006) and The Cell (2000) were also released at that same period and, alongside Matrix (1999), they are a manifesto of this new understanding of an ambiguity between the virtual and the real. More specifically, Paprika has a dialogue which became famous because the protagonist suggests that the internet and dreams are similar since they are both spaces in which people can express their “repressed conscious mind” (that is, the unconscious):
At that period, the internet or the virtual were seen in a geographic way, especially with the adoption of the term cyberspace. We would “surf on the internet” as much as Neo did in the Matrix. Today, the internet or the virtual are not understood in a localized sense anymore, since connection doesn’t need to be established but it’s already default. If yesterday we went online, today we are online and maybe tomorrow we will be online.
The notion of connecting to the internet as well you can achieve a mental state was also investigated by the American psychologist Timothy Leary, in the 1980s, after dedicating himself to the study of psychedelic drugs. With the development of the internet and immersive technologies such as virtual reality, Leary began to be interested in cyberspace and see it as a new way to unlock mental states. Such questions are also posed in Serial Experiments Lain, as the protagonist “surfs on” different levels of cyberspace. However, if today we no longer go online, but are online, could this same change be happening on a psychical level?
Until then, this displacement felt like it was related to a new locus, a new dimension that, today, we more commonly refer as the metaverse. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the impossibility to move around the physical world made us create new hopes that we could be doing this online. However, as much as blockchain, the metaverse is also experiencing a “winter” as Zuckerberg loses US$13.7 billions in 2022 after changing Facebook to Meta and betting on VR.
Currently, generative artificial intelligence such as Dall-e and GPT-3 (now GPT-4) are surprising us for its innovative abilities, especially in the field of computer generated images. Similarly to Google’s AI dreaming of electric dogs (to the point that its name Deep Dream sounds like a pun), today Dall-e dreams of hands full of fingers and mouths full of mouths created through the iterative mechanics of diffusion models (a machine learning technique). More than a bug, it has turned into a feature adopted by artists in music videos and short films.
With melting clocks, raining suited men and self-portraits in the body of animals, last century surrealists offered us an access portal to the unconscious and the dream world. Similarly, psychedelic art used fractals and colorful forms to pursue and communicate altered mental states through images. The inaccuracy of the current generative AIs though, we are also watching weird images which might prompt us the question whether that is real or generated. With that in mind, what if these same AIs could be used as a shortcut or catalyst of our dreams?
About a decade ago, the neuroscientist Jack Gallant from the University of Berkeley published an experiment in which they used MRI to print images that were being processed through the brains of people watching specific videos. The technique, explored in the field of neuroimaging, aims to identify patterns in neural activity in order to translate them into images of what that person might be “seeing” in their mind.
Last year, two scientists took a further step by including generative AIs in the reconstruction of these neural images captured through MRI. In 2019, another paper also mapped the state of the art of neuroimaging with a focus on sleep and dreams.
In other words, we could believe that we are indeed getting closer to what Joakim Vindenes proposed, when he says that lucid dreams can be better than virtual reality. To me, these innovations and pathways pursued by researchers make me think of a quote by the philosopher Dietmar Kamper: God dreams man, man dreams the machine, the machine dreams God.
Here, God appears not as a specific religious entity, but as a knowledge or achievement that seems to be way beyond our human abilities — and maybe they really are, thus the hope that machines could be our catalysts.
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