I recently gave the keynote at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, TX where I talked about the many different maps that I use to understand reality & virtual reality. Because virtual reality is simulating reality, then a lot of these maps can also be used to understand reality as well. Some of these maps serve as experiential design frameworks for VR while others serve as high-level metaphors that provide category schemas that help differentiate between different qualitative experiences. There are an infinite number of ways to categorize qualitative experience, and so every attempt to do so is going to be inherently imperfect and substandard. A guiding principle that I use is from Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski who said “the map is not the territory” meaning that these types of mental abstractions aren’t literally describing reality, but they are merely symbolic maps that help us understand our reality.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So I recently gave the keynote at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, Texas. And in that keynote, what I was trying to do is give an overview of all the different various maps that I use to understand virtual reality. as virtual reality progresses, it's going to become closer and closer to reality. So a lot of these maps that I use to understand virtual reality are actually maps that are trying to describe reality in general. So I had about a half hour to go through all the various different maps that I use, and it was a very visual presentation. And so there's actually some slides that you can either look at while you're listening to this, or there's a video on YouTube where you can watch the sounds and the visuals together. Or if you just want to take it in the high level concepts, then feel free to go ahead and listen to this podcast. So this talk was given on Monday, November 6 at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. All right. So my name is Kent Bye, and I do the Voices of VR podcast. And so for the last 3 and 1⁄2 years, since May of 2014, I've done over 800 interviews in the virtual reality community. And so today, I'm going to be peeling back, going behind the scenes a little bit, from some of my own internal maps that I use to understand this space as I'm both experiencing different experiences, but also as I'm talking and doing all these interviews with creators, how do I navigate what they're doing that's new and different? I want to emphasize that the map is not the territory. This is just the idea that in the real world you have reality and then you have some sort of mental abstraction to make sense of it. And so there's a tendency to think that that mental abstraction is isomorphic or identical to that area. And I just want to say that these maps are imperfect. We're talking about experiences and qualitative dimensions of reality that you could slice and dice any number of different ways. And so this is just the way that I've chosen to slice stuff up. So, and I've asked every one of my interviews, what is the ultimate potential of virtual reality? And I find that their answers tend to come into one of these different domains of human experience. kind of mapped on the left side is self and the right side is other and whether it's private or public. And, you know, most of the stuff is in entertainment. There's a lot of stuff in your career. Obviously, we're here at the Enterprise Virtual Reality Summit, so thinking a lot about those applications, medical applications, education, higher education training, travel. Identity those are the big ones the thing that I'm going to be People here are focusing on are these different ones in terms of what you're doing to use virtual reality in your career to do higher education to do Communications with each other as well as medicine and so you have architecture data visualization 3d design engineering manufacturing training virtual teleconferencing, and then medicine. So one other mental model that you can use is left brain, right brain. Is it objective things you can see and measure and observe and quantify, or is it more subjective and qualitative in a way that's a little bit more difficult to put numbers on? And if you go back into the history of communications, it started with visual communication with painting on the walls, and it was very much a right-brained activity. But at some point, they started to kind of do a little bit more of a blend and started to do hieroglyphs and symbolic representations of reality. until eventually they started to abstract it into individual letters, and then you combine those letters and create further abstractions. And so, as we've created these higher levels of abstractions, we've been kind of biased as a culture into more the left brain, objective and quantitative, and the right brain, subjective and qualitative, has kind of gone by the wayside. So with the printing press, this was really amplified. So once we have books, then it's really an amplification of all that ability to capture information and knowledge in a new way. And from that, you have both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and you have Descartes, who philosophically said there's actually this split between the mind and the body. What's happening inside your mind is that subjective is just kind of a different domain, and it's separate. And so you have this kind of split between objective mind and science, things you can actually measure, and then the subjective body and the spirit, that's like in the domain of religion that is separate. And we've kind of still, in a lot of ways, used this as a mental model for how we differentiate our nature of reality. Either you can quantify it and put a number, or if you can't, then it's sort of in a realm of not real or inner or subjective. Well, then, as you go through and progress through evolution, you have this explosion of communications technologies, including the camera and film and electricity, grids, and then that eventually leading to computers, and then gaming systems, and then the internet, and mobile gaming, and then mobile phones, and then virtual reality. All of these technologies are experiential technologies. And on the left you have all the information and knowledge, and on the right you have ways of starting to capture human experience and increasing levels of fidelity. And so we have this kind of blending of together now, this virtual reality is kind of the nexus point of combining the objective and the subjective, the mind and the body, and the science and the spirit, the things that you can see and measure and put numbers on and things that you can't. And it's a medium that is combining these things in a new way. So virtual reality is a holistic medium. It's a medium that's actually combining all these things that we weren't able to do before. And because of that, we're able to express things in a lot higher fidelity. That's actually a lot closer to how we, as humans, experience reality. So we have this tension still, though, because most of our mainstream paradigm is in reductionism. So we have this holism of looking at the whole picture versus kind of breaking things down into their individual component parts and thinking of things as machines. And there's tension that I still see playing out throughout our culture in many different ways. And so one of the maps that I use is Kim Wilber's integral theory, which tries to do a high level from on the left you have everything that's inside, that's the subjective interior, the right brain, the subjective qualitative, and on the right side you have the left brain, objective quantitative, and then from the top and the bottom you have the individual and then the collective. And so the interior individual is the psychological, the spiritual. The interior collective is the cultural things. And then the exterior of the individual is everything that you can measure. That's basically empirical science that we have today. Anything that you could basically do objective measurements. But that's within the context of a structural system, an economic system, different laws and political systems, all the larger things. So as I get into covering virtual reality, I'm just finding that at some point I start to look at like, well, how is the blockchain going to change how we do economics? It's almost like the operating system of our society, and is that going to change our laws? And what are the things that you can use virtual reality to start to teach culture, to be able to implement different things that exhibit a culture, maybe with non-player characters or artificial intelligence, so you get a sense of what emergent dynamics may happen, so that you get a sense of the culture before it actually happens. So again, these are all the different four quadrants of the interior of the individual, the interior of the collective, the exterior of the individual, and the exterior of the collective. And you have different lenses, so you have the experience perspective, you have the behavior perspective, you have the culture perspective, and then you have the systems perspective. Moving on with Ken Wilber, the next thing that he does is he starts to look at all the different multiplicities of all the different types of intelligences. And so he looks to Howard Garner to look to see how there's multiple intelligences. So how do you start to integrate all these different types of intelligences? And then he starts to say, well, people don't just, they're not static, they actually grow and change over time. And so you have these different models of moral development or evolution, these developmental models. And so this is just sort of a low-level representation of like a moral development, where your identity is, you're identifying with yourself, and then you, as you grow and develop morally, you start to then consider other people and empathize with your family, with your acquaintances, with strangers, until you, you know, keep expanding out to your community, the nation, the world, the cosmos. You can keep kind of going in that. And that's kind of what the spiral dynamics was just a model that was starting to then take that both as an individual and collective layer and start to say, okay, how do you start to map these different evolution cycles? And then Kim Wilber combined that with his integral theory. And then you start to see like this super complex and dense mental model and symbolic map of the psyche and the collective culture. And it's great, but at the same time, there's problems with it. One of the problems is that it starts to create a hierarchical mindset, such that if you start to look at everybody of like, well, where are they at on the evolutionary scale, you start to be like, oh, well, I'm better than them because I'm more evolved because of this or that. So that's a problem. And then it actually is still kind of replicating this Cartesian split, because it's saying that the interior and exterior are separate, but in reality, you talk to any neuroscientist, and they're like, well, this kind of construct between left brain and right brain, actually, there's a lot more communication than everything you do. It's kind of operating together, and it's kind of like a false construct to say that. The mind-body split, our mind, our consciousness, the placebo effect, our ability to have our beliefs impact our neurology and our immune systems. If consciousness is emergent, then why is there downward causation with our belief systems being able to impact our body? Like meditation is a perfect example of an anomaly of some of these ideas. So I think that there's some of that Cartesian mindset, even though it could be a good experience, like a design framework, again, the map is not the territory and it starts to break down when it comes to some of these nuanced points. And then you can also start to then label people. And I think this is what we're finding a lot in our culture right now is like, you're black, you're white, you're male, you're female, you're Republican, you're Democrat, you know, all these labels that we put on the people. And then once we put that label on people, then we can stop thinking about them because we know who they are. And I think that, again, is a false construct that I think we're trying to get around. So one of the mental models that I've been starting to think about a little bit more is kind of just thinking about flavors and every individual is a combination of flavors and we all have a unique taste and then you know but you don't want to eat everything every day and so you change and you know as a person you're growing and evolving so you may have like your different expressions of yourself and your being and the different contexts that you have that are coming out in all different ways and it's like a panoply of different things that you like to eat. And each person has that, both those things they like to eat, but also things that they are uniquely able to do that no one else in the world can do. And that everybody has something that they can teach you. And so to me, I think this is a little bit more of a holistic and robust model to start to think about that. And the Institute of Novic Sciences also has an evolution model, but I think it's just kind of boiled down to the essence. And there's a point at the very top where it says you go from I to we. So if any work that you're doing, you're going to originally be focused on yourself. But if you keep growing on that evolutionary scale, eventually you're going to start thinking about other people. Like how can my work start to make the most impact to the community, to the world, to the entire cosmos? And I think this model is a little just kind of boiled down. You don't need to get into the nuances, but I find my own experience that this is true. And there's also these different memory palaces and mental models for, you know, the ancients that they used in order to kind of like map out all these different ways of kind of looking at things holistically. And so I kind of found that like, if you go back and look at some of those mental models, in some ways, I've personally found a lot of inspiration in terms of like, you know, they were thinking about things holistically, so how can we start to think about that holistically? And I found that the most productive framework that I found was just the elements. And I have kind of gone through the different virtual reality experiences and after talking to the academics and as well as going through a lot of experiences, I just kind of naturally found that these are the different flavors of the quality of being when it comes to different VR experiences. So if you're in a VR experience, you're either feeling some combination of all these things, of mental and social presence, active presence, being able to express your agency, and embodied presence, the degree to which you feel like your body is in another place and that you're in another world. And then the emotional presence, just the degree to which your emotions are being engaged in any experience at any given time. And so again, all of these things are happening all at once, all at the same time, and that every experience you have in life as well as in VR is in some combination of these. And so it's the air element, the fire element, the earth element, and the water element. And Aristotle actually had a way of organizing these. That's what those glyphs are that kind of represent that. And the most dense earth is at the bottom and then water is on top of the earth. And then that symbolically represents that the earth and water are more receptive. You're actually more taking in and receiving. And then as you have more active energy, it becomes more hot and rising energy. Then you start to have the fire and the air on top of that. We'll see how that plays out with symbolically using this to look at some of the other communications mediums. But you can look at this from the cone of experience is something that at the highest level, you have text and abstractions. And if you're just talking and telling somebody about something, then They're going to be able to get it to a certain degree, but once they start to express their agency and interact with it, then they start to learn it at another level. If you start to engage their emotions in some way, say that you're able to tell a story or engage them in some sort of narrative, then that can actually have, you know, that dramatized experiences starts to take remembering to the next level. And then finally, you have the senses. You have all of your sensory motor contingencies. if you have all your senses, and your smell, and your taste, and you're able to actually engage in things, then that is the most intense experience, and that's what creates memories. And so when you're thinking about training, this is what you're trying to do, is try to give people the most holistic experience of all that. And the other thing, you have these insights from the depth psychologists like Freud and Jung, who said, hey, you know, actually about 90% of what goes on is completely unconscious. We're not aware of what's actually happening. And so that 10% of the conscious mind is that air element, the thinking, and then everything below that, you have habits and behaviors and your emotions and your senses that you may not even be aware of. And there's so many processes of me just speaking the words and you translating what I'm saying in the sound into words, into meaning, that you're not thinking about. That's also just happening. And so there's so much of our trauma, our wounds, and things that we don't even recognize, that that's just at that subconscious mind level. And some people look at this and they look at the data and they say, hey, actually, maybe we don't have free will at all because we're just forming these habits and we're kind of reacting. And so what is the degree to which we can actually make a choice? A lot of what happens is that all these things are happening in the senses and feelings and behavior. And then your mind comes up with a story for what it did. And people think that that story is why they did it when actually they had already done the action before. the signal had even reached their mind. So I think right now we tend to think that everything starts with the mind, but I think in this current environment, I think we're learning many different lessons as to why people may not always be thinking first and they may be driven by emotions and behavior. But the challenge is, well, how do you create new habits and behaviors in people? And how do you create a holistic experience? And I think this is where VR comes in, because they have this idea of embodied cognition, which is that you actually have to be embedded in the environment and having decisions that you're making. So you're making choices, and then you're taking actions within the context of that environment. And then having all those things happen all at once is why VR works, and why VR is not going to go away, and why VR is going to be the most powerful training platform that we've ever seen because of these concepts and the integration of all these different things. And so Carl Jung actually was very inspired by a lot of the elements and he based his psychological personality typographies on these elements. So the air element being thinking, the fire element being intuition, the earth element being sensing and then the water element being feeling. And then Myers-Briggs took that and then sort of created that as a Myers-Briggs type indicator. But there's a lot of these elements that are actually embedded within a lot of our mainstream existing personality systems that we have that we may not recognize the history of that. But again, I will say that, like, The map is not the territory, and this is like an imperfect thing to say, okay, this is your personality. And anybody who's taken a Myers-Briggs knows that, yes, there's things that are accurate, but, you know, it's not gonna be predictive. It's not gonna say, okay, you're going to do this action because this is your personality. And temperament is also something that a lot of different schools use temperament to see like, okay, what is the learning style of this person? Given that everybody has a different personality type, they're going to have different ways that they're going to be learning. And I think that's important because right now our culture is basically like if you have good cognitive capabilities, and you can think well, and you can sit in a classroom and be lectured at, and that's how you learn, then you do great, but it leaves everybody else behind. And I think that there's all these other types of learning and modalities that I think that as virtual reality grows, it's going to create new opportunities for those people who are experiential learners. They have to have the experience. Or maybe there are learners who have to actually play with it before they really understand it. They have to manipulate it and see how it interacts with their agency. Or there's a certain element of being really emotionally engaged and sort of feeling into it in a certain way. And again, going back to Howard Gardner and the multiple intelligences, these different intelligences kind of get mapped down into the different elements as well if you wanted to kind of take it to that level. I've done about 90 interviews about artificial intelligence for the Voices of AI, which I'll be launching here hopefully within the next couple of weeks. But in my first interview, the big question is how do you define intelligence? Because if you just take an IQ test, then that's one thing. And my first interview, Rao Kamapade, he was like, oh, well, there's cognitive and social intelligence and manipulative intelligence and perceptual intelligence and emotional intelligence. So this elemental framework actually maps over into what artificial intelligence is also happening to do. And it is a way of thinking about how intelligent you are. Now I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, we're moving from the information age to the experiential age. So what's that mean? Well, in the book by Pine and Gilmore, they say that we're moving from delivering intangible and customized services on demand to staging memorable and personal experiences that are revealed over a period of time. And you're immersed into an experience that has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. It's kind of like analogous to reading a book. When you sit down and read a book, you sit down and you commit yourself to reading a chapter. In virtual reality, the experiential age is kind of like that. People commit to having the experience, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it's revealed over time. So, welcome to the experiential age. So with the printing press, that was able to capture information knowledge in a new way. And computers and computing technology is able to capture human experience in a new way. And it's democratizing human experience. And so again, these are the different experiential age technologies that I see, everything from computers to video games to the internet to mobile gaming, iPhone, and virtual reality. So if you map that over to the elements, you have the social presence of the phone, communicating with your friends, learning from computers, expressing your agencies, a lot of video games. Film is kind of like the quintessential medium to be able to capture an emotional experience so that you could have your feelings really engaged in the narrative and the story. And then virtual reality is bringing the body into the computing for the first time. And so we have our body that's engaging with the immersive computing platforms. So I just wanted to kind of walk through how I've been using the experience, the elemental theory of presence for an experiential design framework. So you have all the different levels of presence, and so here's some questions that you can ask. For the mental and social presence, what are the rules? How can you connect with other people? What are you going to learn? In terms of design and experience, how are you going to be able to participate, and what actions can you take, and what can you explore? For embodied presence, you have how are you immersed, who do you become, and where do you go? And then for the emotional presence, you have what emotions are invoked, what's the story, and what's the vibe? So let's look at active presence. Superhot is a great example. It's a shooter, but at the same time, it's integrated so that it's an embodied gameplay. So your body actually becomes a controller. As you move, you move the time. And that is an example of a shooter that is using some of the unique affordances of virtual reality that goes beyond just pointing and shooting, because you're actually kind of like really moving, and the entire world is changing as you're moving. Soundboxing is a game that I, it's similar to AudioShield, but you can record your embodiment and then you can start to kind of train yourself to get into these different flow states. And flow states, I think, is probably one of the most powerful potentials of virtual reality that we're going to see evolve more. And that's when you have a high skill and high challenge. So if you're challenged and you have high skill, that's when you get into a flow state. If you have a high challenge but low skill, you're going to be overwhelmed and filled with anxiety. And if you have super high skills but low challenge, you're just going to get bored, be apathetic, or it could also be relaxing. So what does it mean to have a society that is in flow state all the time? Sitting in front of a computer and typing on email is probably the antithesis of what it means to be in a flow state, unless that's your thing. But I think that as we engage the body in computing and start to use conversational interfaces and move around, we're going to be able to leverage flow states while we're being productive in the context of the workplace. And for me, that's one of the things I'm most excited about. Twitch is an example of, you're watching people play video games, and the reason why is because they're getting into flow states. As they get into a flow state, then you see somebody at their peak performance, but it's taking a picture of them so that you have their embodiment, what they look like while they're playing, so you can see their facial expressions and reactions. And then you're seeing them emote and engage into a narrative or a story of like, oh, maybe they're playing player unknown battlegrounds and they're, are they going to win? And that becomes the story. Each round and each session, you get immersed into the narrative and the story that's emerging. And sometimes they're either engaging their audience directly in dialogue or they're playing with other people and you're overhearing two people kind of chat. It's kind of using all these different dimensions of presence and that's why I point to it as a harbinger of the experiential age is because it's live and it's in the moment. For social and mental presence, VRChat's interesting because it's actually focused on world building and creating custom avatars and identity. A lot of experiences that are out there, they kind of create the worlds for you, but in VRChat, you're creating the worlds, and you're able to do whatever avatar you want, and you have this level of expression of your identity. So it's a social VR that's actually focused mostly on the embodied presence and environmental presence. Rec Room, on the other hand, is one that is completely on the games that you're doing. It's all about the agency and the different ways that you can play and have fun together. And I Expect You to Die is another example of the mental presence where you're solving puzzles and it's like an escape room. So you have to solve something in order to get out. And WebVR is another example, I think, of integrating the web and tying in information in a new way. And if you look at the Metcalfe's Law, as you have different interconnections, it's those interconnections that make it so much more valuable. So the value of the network becomes equivalent to the square of the nodes that are connected to that network, meaning that Right now we have an app ecosystem where all those apps that are out there are isolated walled gardens, but the value is going to come when you're going to be able to go to a virtual world and be connected to other ones and you're able to have the sense of discovery of being able to be connected to all these worlds. And so that principle of Metcalfe's law is why AOL and CompuServe sort of went by the wayside and why the World Wide Web had become so important. So I think this is going to be an important part for people who are doing stuff in enterprise because they want to have something that they can assure that is going to be around and have an archive and ability to be able to see 10 years from now. And Unity at this point is kind of iffy even within the context of creating something over two years ago. Is it still going to run? Is it still going to work? And so that's the promise of web standards is that it moves slower, but you're going to have more archivability over time. In terms of embodied presence, I think Google Earth VR is probably one of the best examples of being able to invoke the feeling of embodied cognition. You put it into different environments and you're able to then recall all these memories of nostalgia and awe and wonder. Just having a symbolic architecture of a place that you're familiar with is enough to trigger those memories. And if anybody who's done Go Earth VR knows, you go to a place where you grew up and it has a 3D geometry, and then all these memories start to flood back in. And that's just the principle of embodied cognition at work. And so what does it mean to create environments and architectures for you that's going to really hone in that principle of embodied cognition? So if you want people to remember something, then you have to either replicate what is there, or you create these magical memory palaces that are able to allow you to store a ton of information. And Pokemon Go is an embodied experience in the sense that it's augmented reality, and you're creating a window into another world. And it's a location-based game. And so you have this spectrum of real environment to the virtual environment, and so that sense of embodied presence is on this spectrum here. And I think that we're seeing stuff that is phone-based AR, and then you have the ability to be completely in virtual reality and bring in mixed reality elements. into a virtual world, and then finally into the virtual world. And so this is something that this sense of embodied and environmental presence is why VR arcades are going to be so important. That ability to be able to have that augmented virtual reality, to be able to be in a physical space that's big enough to have all these things to play laser tag and stuff that you get the passive haptic feedback of actually touching things, and that is going to be something that you can never do at home. And so that level of environmental embodied presence is only going to be limited for how much you can do in the home, and then it's going to have to go into these very expensive systems in the arcade until all that technology is out there enough and gets cheap enough. But even if it does get cheap enough, you're not always necessarily going to have the space to be able to do all those experiences that you're going to be able to do in a virtual arcade. And then finally, the emotional presence. That's where a lot of the 360 video comes in. And you have the ability to be able to cultivate empathy for people. So as you dial down the ability for you to take action and reduce your agency, you actually amplify the ability for empathy, which is why a lot of the big empathy pieces have been 360 videos. Also, you're able to capture human facial expressions and emotion in a way that you can't do when you try to do a CG. So a lot of people will say, oh, if it's not CG and interactive and it's not VR, I'm going to say no. Actually, there's things that you can do in terms of emotion that you can never do when you start to do that level of abstraction. So it's great for storytelling, great for empathy. Virtual reality, if people haven't played it yet, it's probably one of the best experiences in terms of being able to have this combination of interactivity and storytelling and using 3DOF controller. It's kind of an exploration, but they do a great balance, and I haven't seen a lot of great examples. That's probably the biggest challenge for any video game, is how do you express agency, how do you interact and engage, as well as tell a good story. And I think that the future of storytelling is going to be immersive and interactive. And so a lot of the film metaphors that we have for narrative, I think we're going to be moving more into video games. And the video games are actually going to be blending more of these elements of storytelling. And it's like where that meets and what that looks like, I think, is a big question. you can kind of think on a spectrum of authored narrative all the way to generative narrative. And on the left side is where you have the authored experience, and then the right side is just completely emergent. And so you have these fully traditional stories on the left side to then interactive traditional stories and multiple ending stories, and then you get to the middle where you start to get branching path stories, and then open-ended stories, and then fully player-driven stories. And so this is kind of like the spectrum of storytelling that I see. It's like a good map. of what's possible. And you see the traditional three-act structure here in the authored narrative and then you start to go into simple branches where you can see it's kind of a linear where there's one outcome and maybe you're able to flavor your experience a little bit but at the end you kind of come back and you converge. And then you start to have, like, choose your own adventure that has many complex possibilities, which then, as an author, you have to write all those. And so you have to write all the different possibilities that then every choice you make exponentially starts to increase. And then you start to have, like, an open world sandbox, which is more starting to create a probability space. But by the time you get on this side, then the narrative starts to go away, which is why, like, something like Grand Theft Auto may have something that it's a great sandbox, but then the narrative components become not as strong. And then eventually, you start to get into drama managers, where you're able to express agency and then have a drama manager be able to feed you different parts of the interaction. And then eventually, you get to the place where you're starting to just think about it more of a probability space of having a conversation with an individual. And at this point, you're generating a personality for an artificial, intelligent, non-player character where you're able to have a conversation with. And it's more about what is the personality of that character and what are the things that you can do. then the script becomes much more non-linear. So that's at that far extreme. So, again, just this framework of mental and social presence, active presence and body presence and emotional presence to me has been probably one of the richest ways to start to understand the field of virtual reality. I want to close things up by a little bit some of the more philosophical questions that I've been getting into, which is what is reality? And this is a mental model that we all have that we may not fully always look at, but dualism and materialism has this sort of split already where there's objective-subjective body, mind, and science, and spirit. And idealism and panpsychism are two of the philosophies that start to bring those back together in a way, as well as holism. And there's tons of different philosophies that are out there. But David Chalmers is a philosopher that poses these different questions. Are virtual objects and experiences, are they real or are they fictional? Do virtual events really happen or not? Are virtual reality experiences non-illusionary or illusionary? And are experiences in VR as valuable or not as valuable as experiences outside of it? What I would argue is that depending on your metaphysical assumptions, you have different answers to that question. So if you're thinking about materialism, then at the bottom you have physics, and then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, and then consciousness is emergent out of our neurology. And that's sort of like the current view of materialism. And given that, if you're just saying, well, it's emergent, and then you're just tricking your mind, then it's not real. It's just kind of you're getting tricked. So virtual objects are fictional. They don't really happen. Virtual experiences are illusionary. And experiences in VR are not as valuable as experiences outside of it. But if you start to see something like transcendental idealism, that actually puts consciousness below physics, where you have that consciousness and then you have the physics emergent out of that, then the chemistry, then biology, then psychology. That is something that is a little bit more of a philosophy from the East, where this starts to say your direct experience is primary, so whatever happens in your experience, that's the thing that's the most important. So from this, then, because you're having the experience of it, then it's just as real as any other object. Virtual events do happen, the experiences are non-illusionary, and they're just as valuable as anything else. And I think that virtual reality is this thing that makes people start to think about these things a little bit more. To me, it also starts to get back to what is reality? Are we living in a computer simulation? Max Tegmark has a book called Our Mathematical Universe, where he hypothesized that maybe base reality is a mathematical, symbolic reality. That's what the Pythagoreans said, that at the base level is math and a layer of symbolic reality. And the Neoplatonists say, yeah, one believes these archetypal ideal forms that are there as well, which then brings up the question that when you go to sleep at night and you dream, then where do you go? Is that an actual other physical imaginal realm, a shamanic realm, a psychedelic realm? Is that realm real or is it something that is emergent from your neurology just firing? And I think that is an open question. It's a metaphysical question that We may never really be able to answer some of these questions. We may not just know, but the idea of panpsychism is interesting to me because it starts to say that consciousness is not only primary, but it's actually universal. It's in every single photon that has an ability to have spin, and that spin is information, and anything that can process information is a degree of consciousness and awareness. And that goes to like the ideas of the Neoplatonists and Anima Mundi that goes back to the ancients, where the primal worldview was that the whole world was conscious in the Anima Mundi, the world soul. And at the modern worldview, our current way of looking at things is that the self is the only thing that's conscious and the world is not conscious. So again, these are some of the more metaphysical questions, but I think that virtual reality can actually start to be a little bit of a reality-turning test. Can we start to figure out what the nature of consciousness is? What is consciousness is a little bit of an intractable problem, and maybe, as we look at these different things, we'll be able to figure that out a little bit. And I'll go back to the title of this talk, which is the map is not the territory. It could be that virtual reality is an archetypal level of reality that is deeper than this reality that we have right now. Because we're able to have these archetypal experiences with those ideal forms, maybe we're able to just get in tune to ourselves in a way that we can be more centered in our lives. And I think that's a little bit of an open question, that people are going to have these direct experiences and see if that's true for them or not. At a minimum, though, we're going to be able to use VR to be able to create these archetypal experiences that are close enough to reality so that we can start to train people to have these different experiences. And from my perspective, the more I do VR, the more I have cultivated my training wheels for what it means to be present in my emotional, social presence, my active presence, embodied presence, and emotional presence. And that is being translated into my life today. So that's what I wanted to leave with you. There's still a lot of open questions with that, but hopefully I was able to provide a little bit of maps that will help you understand virtual reality. So thank you. So that was the keynote that I gave at the Immersive Technology Conference in Houston, Texas on Monday, November 6th, 2017. So I have a number of different takeaways, I guess, or addendums that I have about this talk that I gave. First of all, there's this concept of a holon, which means that you as an individual are part of a larger structure of a culture, a society. But you can also go down, and you are an organism that has organs and tissues and cells and molecules and atoms. And at any level, you can pick and see something that is a whole entity, but it's simultaneously a whole and a part. There's a moment in this keynote that I gave where I said that we shouldn't just be labeling people, being able to take that high-level label and to be able to extract that down to an individual. But at the same time, I think it's important to recognize the fact that there are people who are a part of these marginalized groups, whether it be women or people of color, and that they do face a number of either institutionalized racism and sexism within their day-to-day lives. and to just only focus on the individual denies the fact that they live in a context, in a culture, in a society that has institutionalized ways of oppressing people. It's a bit of a paradox of being able to say that, yes, we're not going to come to any specific conclusions based upon these high-level labels that we're putting onto you, But at the same time, if they are a part of some of these groups, they may very much have this shared experience of what it means to be a minority or woman in technology and that they're going to have a specific experience that you can pretty much assume that they're going to have. But yet at the same time, holding forth in your mind that they have their own unique experience and that it's difficult to extrapolate from the individual to collective and the collective to the individual with anybody. So given that, it's just best to kind of have this idea of the holon to be able to differentiate those two things. So this was just an overview of all the different maps that I have been using. And again, the map is not the territory. These are imperfect maps. I think any map is going to have its downfalls. But for me, this provides a high level category schema in my mind to be able to categorize and make sense of different information. And that in some ways, these different maps and mental models start to perform a functional role of creating a memory palace for me. as I'm having life experiences, as I'm having these different VR experiences, as I'm doing these different interviews with VR creators, then I'm able to categorize all these different experiences and information in my mind and be able to recount it in different ways. And so if nothing else, functionally, these maps and these mental abstractions are just a great way for me to be able to make sense of my experiences. And hopefully, you'll be able to find some use out of this. And as we continue to move on and try to understand the fundamental structure of reality, excited to continually update these models, to throw them out, to allow my brain to be mutable enough. And I think I'll just leave you with this thought from Marilyn Schlitz, which she said, there's two fundamental capabilities that we need to be able to learn in the 21st century. Number one is that we need to be able to deal with paradox. And it's a paradox that you're going to find information that doesn't fit into your mental models. And so you're going to have to either create new models or figure out how to switch between different worldviews in order to find a bucket for that information to go into. And that's the other skill that she said that you need to be able to have, is to be able to seamlessly slip in between these different worldviews and these different paradigms. Because materialism is great for describing our reality and I don't think that we have to throw everything out I think there's going to be new ways of trying to incorporate our Phenomenological experiences and maybe as we discover more about the nature of consciousness whether or not consciousness turns out to be fundamental or universal and Maybe that'll just be new ways for us to add on to our existing models and maps as to the nature of reality. And that maybe it'll just give us a much more holistic ways of thinking about how all these things fit together. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider becoming a donor. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference and allows me to continue to bring you this type of coverage. So, you can become a member today by donating at patreon.com. Thanks for listening.
